Chapter 20
Charley Ruby’s Hour
One theory of leadership holds that events make history and that specific people, no matter how famous, are merely bit players in a larger drama. The converse of this theory, sometimes labeled the “great man” thesis, holds that at a certain point in history, an individual emerges whose personality is so vibrant that he dominates the times and molds events. Napoleon, according to the first point of view, would have remained an obscure Corsican soldier had it not been for the French Revolution. The French Revolution, according to the second point of view, might have remained an obscure footnote to history had it not been for Napoleon.
Of course, these theories
seek to explain the complexity of history by simplifying it, but the truth lies
somewhere in between. In 1962, ALPA was entering what can be called its “midlife
crisis,” and Charles Ruby seemed to most members to be the best choice for those
particular times. In a sense Clancy Sayen had been a Napoleonic personality, and
53-year-old Charley Ruby was attractive at least partly because he seemed unlike
Sayen. To use another analogy, Ruby would play Lyndon B. Johnson to Sayen’s John
F. Kennedy—a calmer man of an older generation succeeding a more exciting man of
a younger generation.
If conciliation, tact, and the ability to reconcile conflicting opinions and factions are prerequisites of leadership, then Charley Ruby was doomed to failure. Blunt as a bullet, plainspoken to the point of embarrassment, and unwavering in his course of action once convinced of its correctness, Ruby was no diplomat. Perhaps these personality traits sprang naturally from his Quaker background, along with his abstinence from strong drink, strong language, and tobacco. But as even his detractors admit, Charley Ruby possessed a granitelike integrity and a bulldog tenacity. He wasn’t showy or apt to overwhelm people with his verbal brilliance, but Ruby had native shrewdness and toughness. Of course, anybody who had grown up in the airline business dealing with Ted Baker on National Airlines (NAL) was likely to be tough, but Charley Ruby was exceptionally so.
Why did ALPA turn to this man in 1962? Scruggs Colvin, a career ALPA employee who worked for every president from Dave Behncke to J.J. O’Donnell, has some ideas about that:
Charley Ruby was a man for the times; he was a calming influence, wasn’t pushing for any big programs. Sayen was like General Patton, always pushing, making tremendous strides in work rules and retirement. Those were times when you could reach way out and accomplish things. Ruby was completely different. He was a caretaker, cleaning up all the details that Sayen didn’t have time for. Sayen wasn’t much of a detail man, you know. Ruby was really mandated to come in and straighten things out. Sayen had rushed out and planted the flag. Charley Ruby was the logistics man, the one who had to bring up the blankets and toilet paper and get everything in the right spot.
Colvin pauses in his analysis, a smile flickering across his face because of the unintended humor of his metaphor. “All ALPA presidents have been different, but I can certainly say that Behncke was the most different. And he was right, the appropriate man for the time. I honestly think that’s been true with each president.”
Was Charley Ruby supposed to
be a mere caretaker, marking time until ALPA sorted itself out? His initial
mandate was to strengthen the precarious financial situation. Beyond that, Ruby
was pretty much on his own, free to either push forward or hold the line. ALPA
was still in the midst of a period of severe internal discord, despite Sayen’s
departure. The anti-Sayen faction that had backed John Carroll of Trans World
Airlines (TWA) against Ruby was still poised to make trouble, so Ruby
necessarily went slowly in certain areas. The Southern Airways (SOU) strike was
still dragging on, draining ALPA’s leaders emotionally and demanding nearly all
their time. The crew complement issue was hanging fire as usual, this time with
respect to the Douglas DC-9 and the BAC-111. ALPA’s treasury was hemorrhaging
so severely that any president who saw himself as merely a caretaker would soon
have nothing to take care of.
Charley Ruby was not constitutionally suited to preside over a period of drift. Although he didn’t know his own mind as to the shape and direction of ALPA’s long-haul policy, neither did the average ALPA member. The short-haul problems were enough to occupy Ruby completely at first. One thing he had to do without delay was to restore to ALPA’s internal affairs something like harmony, or at least civility. Both qualities had been lacking during the latter part of Sayen’s tenure. The minutes of the Executive Committee during those days make harsh reading. The smoldering resentments of the American Airlines (AAL) group toward Sayen often flared into the open. Sayen, stung and angry, often replied in kind, giving as good as he got.
In such a time of crisis, the transparent goodwill and easy manner of a man like Ruby promised to defuse mounting tensions. As it turned out, he proved unequal to the task of keeping the AAL group within ALPA (as we shall see in the next two chapters), but it was not for lack of trying.
If Sayen’s personality was at
least partly to blame for the AAL pilots’ dissatisfaction, it made sense that
his successor be as unlike Sayen as possible. But those who thought deeply about
such things knew that the new ALPA president must also be a battler, someone who
could hold the center when the flanks were giving way. No one doubted that
Charley Ruby was a fighter, certainly not NAL boss Ted Baker, who had spent so
many years with Ruby gnawing at his ankles. The questions about Ruby’s capacity
to lead ALPA arose not because he lacked the will to battle, but rather because
the area in which the fight was likely to occur, the purely political sphere,
was not his strong suit.
“Ruby was a man who essentially disdained the whole arena of politics,” says ALPA attorney Henry Weiss. “He had no taste for politics and basically was indifferent to it—to the point where he almost got recalled.”
That recall effort against Ruby at the 1968 Board of Directors meeting was something several old-timers on NAL half expected when Ruby emerged as the consensus candidate in opposition to TWA’s John Carroll in 1962. One NAL pilot (who prefers to remain anonymous) put it this way: “Most of us admired and respected Charley because he had done a lot more than his share for ALPA. When the going got tough, there was nobody better than Charley at digging in. You just couldn’t move him, like an old hickory stump. But some of us worried about his rough edges.”
When Charley Ruby flew his last DC-8 trip for NAL on July 4,
1962, he ended an airline piloting career that spanned nearly the whole history
of commercial aviation in
These days, Charley Ruby spends a lot of time with the prized
pair of white Studebaker Avantis he and his wife drive. They are exquisite,
mechanically perfect cars, the kind that stop auto aficionados in their tracks.
When one Avanti is completely overhauled, Ruby begins work on the other. He has
prudently stocked spare parts in his garage, from axle springs to engine
components. This behavior comes naturally, because he was a mechanic before he
was a pilot. In the early 1930s, Charley owned one of
But auto mechanics wasn’t Ruby’s destiny. Fresh out of high
school in 1928, he went to the school run by the Robertson Aircraft Corporation
in
In 1929, I went down to
That’s when Charley Ruby went into the auto repair business. As a
sideline, he also ran a little aviation repair shop and bought and sold a bit on
the used airplane market. In the process, Ruby learned about the flying game the
hard way and met the man who would later become his boss, George T. “Ted” Baker,
the founder of NAL. Baker was dabbling in aviation in the late 1920s before
moving from
When the Post Office Department opened up the airmail routes for bidding after the cancellation crisis of 1934, Ted Baker jumped in. Charley Ruby’s great mistake was that he was too practical.
A wealthy friend offered to
stake Ruby’s bid on the route that Baker later developed into NAL. John Thompson
was a Midwestern businessman who wintered in
Ruby went to work for Ted Baker at the beginning, leaving the employ of John Thompson (although he continued to maintain Thompson’s airplane). While flying for Thompson, Ruby had met Dave Behncke, but the idea of joining ALPA held no attraction for Ruby at first. As essentially a corporate pilot, Ruby had nothing to gain from ALPA. Nor was ALPA particularly active among NAL’s first group of pilots—there were only four of them. But the early NAL pilots knew about ALPA, and as their employment conditions failed to improve along with NAL’s fortunes, they became eager converts.
“Ted Baker probably did more to ensure the solidarity of the
airline pilots behind ALPA than anybody else after 1934,” says Jerry Wood of
Eastern Air Lines (EAL), who had known Baker in
Charley Ruby’s long involvement with ALPA reached a climax during the 1948 NAL strike. As master executive council (MEC) chairman, Ruby was in almost daily contact with Behncke. The heavy press coverage of that bitter dispute made his name well known throughout ALPA. In fact, Behncke offered the newly created post of executive vice-president (which Sayen eventually accepted) to Ruby.
“In his later days,” says Ruby, “Behncke was a little off mentally. He wouldn’t trust people because he didn’t think there were many to tell him the truth. He hung onto me pretty tight after 1948, and the difference between me and Sayen was that he [Sayen] wanted the job pretty badly and I didn’t.”
When the dust finally settled after the protracted 1948 NAL strike, Ruby became Baker’s chief pilot. From October 1954 until July 1961, Ruby was in management. That he could hold such a position and not fatally damage his standing with NAL pilots is a tribute to Charley Ruby’s essential fairness. That he could also work with Ted Baker indicated hidden wellsprings of tact and diplomacy beneath Ruby’s blunt exterior. That Ruby and Baker were both frugal probably had something to do with their seven years of harmony.
In 1962, when the delegates to the ALPA convention of
As we have seen, Ruby’s election was accepted by the Carroll forces because they thought it was temporary. There was a wide assumption that Ruby was merely an interim candidate who would be content to serve a single term, leaving office in 1966. But another factor in Ruby’s election to the ALPA presidency requires elaboration. Today, everybody knows that the airline a pilot works for is largely a matter of accident. But in the old days, there were real differences among the pilots of each airline. W. A. “Pat” Patterson of United Airlines (UAL) and Juan Trippe of PAA both ran relatively “aristocratic” operations. That is, they liked their pilots to be ex-military, preferably with college degrees. EAL’s Eddie Rickenbacker, considering his own limited formal education, never made much of an issue over his pilots’ nonflying background, and the AAL and TWA managements were even less interested in their pilots’ extraneous qualifications. Down the scale from there, the backgrounds of each airline’s pilots became more mixed. For example, Capital Airlines, before its merger with UAL, had the reputation for hiring pilots from hardscrabble backgrounds, the kind who had learned the trade by hanging around airports as kids, trading odd jobs for occasional hops. The same could be said of NAL, Braniff, and other airlines that had sneaked into business after the airmail crisis of 1934.
Petty jealousies, often based on intangible factors, were a source of disunity in ALPA’s early history, moving Dave Behncke to preach his “band of brothers” sermon frequently. After World War II, these differences between pilot groups began to evaporate, since airlines like Trans Texas and SOU were as likely to have a 40-mission bomber pilot with a Harvard degree as were Continental and Delta. But ALPA’s political structure meant that internal division between pilot groups would be a long-term problem. Put simply, a pilot representing a large airline carried more weight and authority at an ALPA convention than did the pilot of a small airline.
So the divisions between the various pilot groups lingered, as antique prejudices tend to do, exacerbated by the lower pay and lower prestige that the pilots of smaller airlines suffered because of the equipment they flew.
But, in a curious way, the sheer voting strength of the large airlines worked against them in 1962 and helps to explain Charley Ruby’s election. The pilot groups of major airlines have tended toward a certain parochial distrust of the pilots of other majors, fearing them as competition. This distrust opened the way for the pilots of small airlines to play balance-of-power politics. In 1962, this factor worked to Charley Ruby’s advantage. The AAL pilots, long accustomed to being either the largest or next to largest group in ALPA, sank a rung after the merger of UAL and Capital in 1961. The merged UAL pilot group now far outstripped the AAL pilots, and the mutual antagonisms of these groups made it unlikely that the leader of any other major group, such as TWA’s John Carroll, would be able to command the votes of either one. Suppose the TWA and AAL group united to freeze out the UAL group, denying them a fair share of power in ALPA? It was a worrisome prospect.
So, the pilots of the
regional airlines would be able to broker the convention, provided they could
unite at least one major airline behind a candidate from one of the smaller
“trunks.” When the EAL group moved to Ruby under the prodding of Jerry Wood and
Slim Babbitt, the PAA pilots fell into line also, partly because of the strong
support of the influential Grant LeRoux and partly because of the PAA group’s
distrust of both UAL and AAL (their distrust of TWA went without saying). The
votes of EAL and PAA, both large airlines, along with those of the small
airlines, were nearly enough to put Charley Ruby over the top. NAL threatened
nobody because, although technically a major, it wasn’t much larger than some of
the regional airlines. A smattering of support for Ruby on TWA and UAL was all
it took to seal his victory.
Many challenges confronted Ruby when he took office in 1962. He handled some better than others. The bitter SOU strike was in the course of being settled owing to Sayen’s spadework, but Ruby closed it adeptly, as we have seen in a previous chapter. In the matter of ALPA’s finances, Ruby was well suited to clean things up. Put simply, he was a notorious penny-pincher, so frugal that he irritated some pilots. “Charley never spent a nickel that didn’t have to be accounted for,” says EAL’s Jerry Wood.
Charley Ruby’s first duty upon taking office was to order a
thorough audit. What he heard was good news—ALPA’s financial situation was
tight, but not desperate. There was a cash flow problem owing to the heavy
expenses of the SOU strike and the flight pay loss associated with the
protracted UAL–Capital merger. But both these episodes were winding down, and as
Ruby discovered to his delight, the value of ALPA’s real estate holdings in
Why, then, did he only narrowly survive recall in 1968 and lead a badly divided ALPA through the end of his presidency in 1970? Nobody blamed Charley Ruby for the defection of the AAL pilots in 1963, so that played little part in the growing dissatisfaction with his leadership. The major source of contention by 1965 was that Charley Ruby seemed incapable of dealing effectively with the ever more restrictive environment in which modern airline pilots worked. The modern airline pilot’s fate depended on a complex web of relationships between the public at large, his employers, and government. Let us consider the noise abatement problem.
For the public at large, the overriding concern about the new
jets was that they were noisy and that a modern jetport was a bad neighbor. The
solution to this problem was complex, but at least one component of it was good
public relations, something Ruby’s critics said he was incapable of providing. A
crisis occurred when the
Working with government and management, Ruby led the fight that
beat back
Defeating
What were the major issues, who were the leaders of the anti-Ruby faction, and why did they come within a single vote of forcing Ruby’s resignation in 1968?
A number of external issues arose in the mid-1960s to trouble Charley Ruby. Among them were relations with FAA, problems with air traffic control (ATC), and the perennial problem of aircraft and airport certification. But topping the list of external problems was skyjacking (which we’ll explore more fully in a subsequent chapter). As an old-fashioned law-and-order conservative, Charley Ruby was outraged to the point of incoherence by the epidemic of skyjacking, and although most airline pilots fully shared his outrage, they worried because it made his public statements seem irresponsible. Like Dave Behncke’s, Charley Ruby’s English was nonstandard, couched in southern cadences. Although Ruby could use language subtly and with extraordinary metaphorical power, to the kind of pilot who was college educated and accustomed to Sayen’s flawless academic delivery, Ruby’s appearances before congressional committees left a sour aftertaste.
Even Ruby’s defenders admitted that in the heat of debate he often sounded like a bumpkin, and they understood that the impression he made, particularly when dealing with management, was not nearly so favorable as Sayen’s. “The first reaction to Charley was always ‘Where did you come up with this hayseed?’” recalls Jerry Wood. “But after a while, you’d find these same people, in management and government, coming back to him for advice and usually acting on it.”
Nevertheless, by January 1966, discontent with Ruby’s leadership had reached such proportions that his supporters moved to defuse it. It was an election year, and skirmishing over the presidency had already begun. Many ALPA members thought Ruby would voluntarily vacate the office to return to flying. His supporters, aware of the widespread feeling that his caretaker presidency was ending, decided to move boldly to keep him in office by putting the critics on the defensive and answering previous charges against Ruby’s stewardship. The device they chose was a special committee of 15 pilots, all of whom had long experience in ALPA affairs, who would investigate Ruby’s performance and evaluate his fitness for a second term. They forced a resolution through the Executive Committee creating the “Committee of Fifteen” (as it was informally called), allowing Ruby to choose the pilots who would serve. This controversial move was bound to draw fire, partly because it was premised on the notion that no matter who is president, “unanimity of purpose is difficult to achieve.” The idea that any ALPA president would likely have trouble wasn’t what the anti-Ruby forces wanted to hear, but for the moment the Committee of Fifteen outflanked them. Also, the anti-Ruby forces were about to discover one of the oldest truths about politics—you can’t beat somebody with nobody. Nobody emerged as a strong challenger to Ruby in 1966; the Committee of Fifteen gave Ruby a clean bill of health, aside from criticizing his laxness in educating the membership about ALPA’s “history and need,” and the “bad lack of communications between the President’s Department and the staff.”
In one sense, the Committee
of Fifteen was a great success because it drew opposition fire from Ruby to
itself. Since Bobby Rohan of NAL, Ruby’s old airline, chaired the committee, and
since several of the members (like J. P. Talton of EAL) were nearing retirement
and hadn’t been active in ALPA affairs recently, the critics leveled charges
that it was composed of “has-beens.” Several MECs passed resolutions denouncing
the Committee of Fifteen as “illegal” and “a self-serving political body.” The
committee replied in its final report: “We accept none of these allegations, and
we also respectfully urge those who have submitted resolutions aimed at
destroying this study group to review their bylaws and try to at least learn
the basic structure of the Association.”
Although Ruby’s critics
eventually forced a resolution through the Board of Directors dissolving the
Committee of Fifteen by a vote of 84 to 63, there were 87 abstentions. As the
large number of abstentions emphasized, Ruby’s opponents built their case not on
another individual but rather only on opposition to Ruby. That approach wouldn’t
work, and since no viable alternative candidate emerged at the November
convention, he was reelected to a second four-year term without opposition. The
anti-Ruby forces, led by Gus Muirheid of EAL and Rich Flournoy of TWA, were
flabbergasted at the ease with which the Ruby forces defeated them in 1966.
“Our strategy was to get Ruby out, and then pick somebody else,” says Flournoy.
“That was the wrong approach.”
One section of the Committee of Fifteen’s report dealt with an obvious failure on Ruby’s part, one that the anti-Ruby faction felt strongly about and would subsequently use against him. “The Association is not taking advantage of the benefits to be derived through our affiliation with the AFL-CIO,” the report stated. That sore spot offered another opening to the anti-Ruby group. Although ALPA owed everything to its connection with organized labor, the increasing affluence of its members as jet pay came in had made them receptive to the ideas of the Republican Party and other antilabor elements. Charley Ruby admits to distancing himself from the AFL-CIO on the grounds that “they never had anything to offer us and didn’t know anything about our business.” Ruby’s thinly veiled antiunionism rankled many ALPA members, although probably not a majority.
“It was obvious a political crunch was coming somewhere down the road,” Rich Flournoy recalls, “and our view was that Charley was just not offering any leadership at all in this area. Ruby was offended by the whole idea of political action, but later on he did accept the fact that we were a labor union, and had to function like one, and that meant getting our nose bloody, if it came to that.”
Other areas of controversy between Ruby and Flournoy simmered. The age-60 retirement rule was badly handled, according to Flournoy, although Ruby admitted opposing it with only “limited pressure,” owing to the stagnant promotion lists that made many younger pilots support it. “Most of us felt that Ruby was completely under the thumb of Henry Weiss on this issue, and that blanket opposition to the age 60 rule was all wrong. What we wanted was a system of waivers to the rule, so that a pilot who was over 60 and able to pass rigorous relicensing tests could get a waiver and keep flying.” But Ruby and Henry Weiss, perhaps more aware of the difficulties of a selective approach to opposing the age 60 rule than was Flournoy, decided to fight it out “all or nothing.”
The move to
Opposition to the
The board’s 1962 mandate of the move and Ruby’s resistance for
one reason or another until 1968 provided one more round in the intensifying
debate over Charley Ruby’s fitness to lead ALPA. Eventually, Ruby’s alleged
recalcitrance over the
The August 1968 meeting of the Executive Committee saw the
introduction of a formal resolution calling for Ruby to resign. Rich Flournoy of
TWA led the move, alleging that Ruby had failed to carry out the 1962 Board of
Directors’ requirement that ALPA move to
The crucial individual in the debate was Stewart Hopkins of Delta Air Lines (DAL). “Stu Hopkins opposed us very reluctantly,” Flournoy says. “His feeling was that Charley was no prize, but that he’d be gone in two more years anyway.”
“Ruby was kind of a country boy,” says
Hopkins’s decision not to join Flournoy, Muirheid, John Nevins (master chairman of TWA, serving as a proxy for ALPA Secretary J. G. Fickling of Piedmont), Seth Oberg of Western Air Lines (WAL), and Gerry Goss of Frontier Airlines (FAL) meant that Ruby himself could cast the vote that would tie the censure motion. Voting against Ruby’s removal were Hopkins, Bill Davis of UAL, Marge Cooper (vice-president of the Steward & Stewardess Division), and Don Nichols of UAL.
In the final analysis, the Ruby forces were able to beat back the
1968 recall attempt because the insurgents, led by Flournoy of TWA and Muirheid
of EAL, lacked broad support from the rank and file. Stewart Hopkins sided with
Ruby because he was bothered by the insurgents’ methods. In
And so Charley Ruby and his supporters overcame the rising centrifugal forces that threatened not only his presidency, but ALPA’s cohesiveness as well. Ever since the AAL defection in 1963, ALPA had lived under the haunting fear of another major separatist break. In the considered opinion of ALPA insiders, another such defections would doom the organization. Furthermore, thoughtful observers of ALPA affairs believed that the Executive Committee itself, owing to its status, was largely responsible for the teetering instability that marked the period. As Wally Anderson, who has been at the right hand of every ALPA president since Dave Behncke, puts it:
My own recollection of those
days, and I sat through every Executive Committee meeting, was that personal and
political activities surrounding the committee caused the internal schisms.
There was a growing feeling that the structure of the Executive Committee and
its stated responsibilities were at fault. The regional vice-president concept,
which provided five members for the Executive Committee, was at the core of most
problems. For years the Executive Committee was a thorn in Sayen’s side. It
continued through the presidency of Ruby, generating significant political
problems and harassment. There was little improvement after O’Donnell became
president, with the regional vice-presidents frequently attacking and destroying
the effectiveness of the management structure. The Executive Committee structure
was the core of most of the presidential problems between 1958 and 1968.
As we shall see, the Board of Directors meeting in convention would subsequently pull the Executive Committee’s teeth, but not until 1974. Until then, Ruby and his successor, J.J. O’Donnell, would be dogged by an Executive Committee whose constitutional responsibilities were murky enough to allow it to interfere in daily administration. Both the Committee of Fifteen and outside management experts hired to study ALPA’s administration (notably Professors George Shultz and Arnold Webber of the University of Chicago) had cited the inherent dangers of allowing a committee whose real purpose was to “advise and consent” to involve itself in direct administrative matters. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, then the constitutionally induced weakness of the ALPA presidency was the result of government by committee, rather than government by a central officer charged with responsibility and authority. Put simply, the Executive Committee had some constitutional authority, but no direct responsibility to run ALPA.
After Ruby’s trouble with the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors began to recognize the basic problem. In 1968, the board amended the bylaws to spell out the president’s responsibilities and authority. As a counter to the Executive Committee, the board provided for regular meetings of the 30-odd master chairmen (the Executive Board) and gave them new policy-making power. But the Executive Committee, made up of the five regional vice-presidents and the national officers, was only curbed, not destroyed. Finally, in 1974 the continuing troubles generated by the committee led the Board of Directors to replace the regional vice-presidents with five executive vice-presidents elected from among the Board of Directors while in biennial session. The division of authority and responsibility between regionally elected vice-presidents and master chairmen thus came to an end, but not before it had caused nearly two decades of turmoil.
If only the 1974 reforms had come earlier, ALPA’s history in the 1960s might have been vastly different. Although nothing is more uncertain that the “might-have-beens” of history, timely structural reforms in ALPA’s governance might even have prevented the defection of AAL pilots in 1963. Holding ALPA together after that earthquake might well have been Charley Ruby’s finest hour. A lesser man might have lost ALPA altogether.