Authors: Walter J. Boyne
Hadley responded, "That's why I want the Emsco plant, dumb-ass!
More confident, Bandy retorted sharply, "Yeah, and that's why I'm talking like this to you. You want the plant, but you're still wedded to your old ideas. The physical plant is only half of it, maybe less than that, only ten percent. The first thing you have to have is a philosophy about building quality. You've got that now, no question. The second thing is a concept. What kind of airplanes are you going to build, how many, and who are you going to sell them to? That's what you've never worried about in the past."
Hadley's jaw was twitching, a sure sign that an explosion was
coming. He wanted to crush Bandy with a remark, but the best he could do was "Says you!"
Bandfield continued, "Nobody else has worried about it either, much, for some reason. We've been floundering around building
airplanes for the fun of it, always assuming somebody would buy it if
it was a good airplane. The fact that no market ever materialized didn't bother anyone."
Hadley sat, eyes cast down, his hands bending the blade of a table
knife back and forth.
"Out of probably a thousand would-be plane builders, only four or five have succeeded—Douglas, Boeing, Curtiss, Martin, a few more. The rest folded, some of them famous names. The Wright brothers themselves couldn't make it. Look at the rest—Loening, Dayton-Wright, Travelair—all gone because they couldn't compete. "
It was the right tack. As tough as times had been for Roget Aircraft, they had been bad elsewhere, too. Bandfield knew that
failing never really bothered Hadley if he felt the cause was external events. If it was the fault of the airplane—as in the case of the flying
wing—he was miserable.
"The reason the big guys succeeded was that they had an idea and
followed it. Douglas built quality transports, big airplanes, around-
the-world jobs. Boeing built fighters. Curtiss was a giant, did some of both, and Martin and Grumman tried to stick to the needs of the
Navy. If we want to succeed in a big way, to really do something for
aviation, then we've got to do the same thing. Target what we want to do, hire the right people, and then stick to it."
The knife blade snapped, and Roget threw the pieces against the
wall.
"What the hell do you think I had in mind?"
Bandfield sensed he was near the point of no return, and let a friendlier tone enter his voice.
"You're one of the brightest engineers in the world—I'd never be
able to hold a candle to you—but you're still playing around with airplanes as if they were model kits. I've got a race in Cleveland coming up, and you've forgotten about the Rascal. You've spent your time designing a brand-new airplane with brand-new bugs. You should have been thinking about how to improve the Rascal. Shit, I haven't had a chance to fly
it
yet."
The older man was obviously crushed, but Bandfield was relent
less. "Airplanes need to be cultivated, to grow. You just want to build 'em, fly 'em, and forget 'em, just like your old joke about sorority girls. What we need to do is improve the Rascal, put a canopy and retractable gear on it maybe, bring it along. Then we can build the Rambler over the next year or two, get it running right. I've seen too many crashes from people rushing things."
They were silent. In the background, Bandy could hear the
scratchy Atwater Kent radio pouring out "Night and Day." What he
was talking about was as different from Roget's thinking as night was
from day.
"Look, you know I think Bruno Hafner is the biggest prick in the
business. But he's got enough sense to stay out of Bineau's way, and
Charlotte does the same. They run a professional factory. I've got the greatest respect for Bineau, even though I don't think he's in
your league as an engineer. But he does his development work systematically."
Hadley was sourly defensive. "Yeah, and he's got all of Bruno's
dough behind him." He got up and rustled through the icebox,
pulling out two Baby Ruth candy bars. He tossed one to Bandy and
tore the wrapper off the other with his teeth. Bandfield peeled the
wrapper back. The damp of the icebox had changed the chocolate to
an unappetizing moldy white. He ate it anyway, afraid to give offense.
"Sure he does—he could afford to screw around the way you do,
but he doesn't. He's got more sense," he went on. "Hadley, you know it's not the money. I'll fly the race, and if I win, I'll give you
all the money, no strings attached. But if you want me to be a part of the plant, we've got to operate differently. If you want me in the new
company, I'll put up the dough, but I'll be the test pilot and the
president,
and we'll do things my way."
He paused, realizing he had to sink the harpoon deeper if he was to keep Hadley's attention.
"On the way in I walked past your flying wing. That was a damn
good airplane, radical, but with a lot of promise. You cracked it up
by pushing it. You could have tested it for six months and solved the
flutter problem. But you pushed ahead, and had to bail out when
the tail came off. No more airplane! All the work down the drain. It could have been a winner, but the wreckage is gathering dust in the
hangar."
He gulped and continued, "From now on you have to—we have
to—stop acting like it's still 1920. There's no point in taking over a
million-dollar factory and building the same kind of airplanes that you did here. And I hope you're thinking all-metal, because the time for tube and fabric is over. You know that, Hadley."
There was an edge to Roget's voice. "It's gone for fighters and
bombers, but it'll be around a long time in light planes and trainers,
and so will wood." He was silent for a moment, then tried to sound
conciliatory. "Bandy, I hear you, but I'm not sure I agree entirely.
I've spent twenty years doing things my way. It's tough to start new
methods now."
"Let's get it all on the table. If you do get the new factory, and you
really want me to work with you, there will have to be a lot of changes."
Roget nodded cautiously.
"You won't be doing many of the things you used to do. There
will be almost no hands-on work for you at all. You are past that.
You'll be supervising a team of engineers and a team of production people, making sure they draw what you invent. And you'll be seeing that they build it right."
Roget's expression was blank, and Bandy's voice took on a plead
ing note.
"Otherwise, there's no point in investing your time and effort.
We've got to use your talent as a lever to move a dozen people to do
what we can't do alone."
The older man looked sullenly at the table.
"Face up to it. Unless we get a work force, accountants, a
material manager, a floor manager, specialists, what can we do with
a big plant like Emsco?"
"Bandy, I want the plant to build a bomber with the fifty-five-foot
wing. We could get some big contracts, if not from the Air Corps, maybe from South America or something."
"You are already thinking wrong. Unless you get it from the Air
Corps, it's not worth doing. You set the highest standards in the
world for craftsmanship, then turn around and lower your sights on
sales. It's all wrong."
"Jesus, how come you got smart so soon and rich so slow? You
sound like Bruno Hafher, but you ain't got a pot to piss in." Roget looked pugnacious, triumphant.
"Let's not argue. We've been together a long time, and you've treated me wonderfully well all my life. I'll do anything you want, but for once think about Clarice. Don't you think she's entitled to a little security, a little stability, a few luxuries?"
It was a chance but telling shot. Clarice had subordinated herself to Roget's mad infatuation with airplanes all their married life, complaining all the while, but getting only a grudging enjoyment from the tyranny she exercised over the kitchen and the account books.
"Well, think it over. If you want to get into building airplanes on
a production-line basis, you need me. If you don't, you can take the
money, dump it in the factory, and then watch some other guy take it over when you can't pay the overhead."
Before he left, wishing to make amends, he said, "Maybe we
could put a canopy like that on the Rascal. It would give me maybe
two or three more miles per hour anyway."
Bandy left, sick at heart. Their years of nonstop arguing had really
been an engineering dialectic. This was the first real fight they'd
ever had. It was more distressing because there was a role reversal; in
the past, Hadley had done all the ranting and raving, keeping him on the defensive.
It didn't matter. Either Roget came around to agree with him and let the factory give him what he wanted—a chance to build better airplanes than Hafner, Boeing, or anybody else—or he would get out of flying. He wanted that factory. Badly.
***
Chapter 6
Cleveland, Ohio/August 27, 1932
It was obvious that race organizer and aviation evangelist Cliff Henderson had the antidote to the Depression. For eleven months a year, Cleveland was submerged in the industrial malaise gripping the country, worse off than most cities because all the heavy industry was shut down. But a month before the National Air Races
started in late August, the town came alive. Henderson's magic way with press and personalities brought everyone on board to share his
conviction that racing was the salvation of aviation, and that aviation was the salvation of the economy. It was the only thing that
would knock baseball out of the sports-page headlines as the Giants
and the Senators continued their battle toward the World Series. The half million people who would pay to see the races would resent the extra million crowding the roads leading to the airport—
Riverside Drive and Five Points Road especially—to catch a free
glimpse of the carnival that Henderson staged. He couldn't put airplanes under a big tent, and there was a continuous stream of visual excitement—parachutists, autogiros, aerobatics, and military
planes. Something was happening all day long, necessary dis
tractions to keep people occupied during the long intervals between
the races. The races themselves were hard to follow unless you had
grandstand seats, for the tiny airplanes, flying not more than fifty
feet off the ground, disappeared from sight as they growled around a
ten-mile triangular course with engines screaming, reappearing to
flash by on the home stretch. The real thrill, the crowd-gripper, was
the speculation about whether they'd all reappear. A crash in front of the grandstand was icing on the cake.
The audience had about the same economic profile as the partici
pants—95 percent were broke or nearly so, and 5 percent were very
well off. But there was plenty of cotton candy and millions of neon-pink hot dogs filled with grease from unmentionable parts of long-dead animals, and the kids could beg for toy helium-filled
dirigibles and blimps. The spice that made it carnival for individuals
in the crowd was their certain knowledge of surviving death while
enjoying the vicarious thrill of watching others at risk. One could see the hopes of the audience bulging like a weight lifter's biceps, and sense the Roman-circus anticipation of a bloody crash.
Bandy scanned the front-page headlines of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer.
"Cleveland Socialites Start National Air Race Parties,"
"Doolittle Lands Wheels Up," "Cliff Henderson Tells Pilots: Put Up
or Shut Up."
There was not a single mention of the arrival of the Roget Rascal,
itself a miracle owed solely to the sale of rights to the wing to Hafner
Aircraft. Charlotte had been a brick, speeding up the payments so they could pay off their debts and buy the rest of the material to finish the racer. He smiled wryly at the irony. Bruno Hafner had kept him out of the race to Paris, but Charlotte Hafner had helped him into the races here. Christ, it was a funny world!
Time, economics, and intuition had dictated that they build a
virtually new airplane as a simple design with a tiny seventeen-foot-
span slab wing and a long nose that Hadley had buttoned tightly
around an Army-surplus Curtiss D-12 engine. Bandy had looked at
the list of entrants, and he was the only pilot still behind a liquid-cooled power plant. There were a couple of in-line air-cooled
Menascos, but the rest were flying air-cooled radials.
On the next page was a four-column photospread on Charlotte Hafner. The main picture showed her in her now-classic pose, standing half in, half out of her Gee Bee's cockpit, helmet in one hand, lips glistening, hair blowing back in the slipstream of the idling engine, the tugging of the white scarf revealing her rounded bosom.