Word: hams
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...will celebrate a coincidence: 25 years ago they both got into commercial aviation on the same day (Dec. 28). Since then both have shared in making the adventure into a globe-girdling industry. The men: United Air Lines' "dean of all airmen in the world," Captain E. Hamilton ("Ham") Lee; and North American Aviation's president and production genius, James Howard ("Dutch") Kindelberger...
Barnstormer Ham Lee went to work 25 years ago for the U.S. Post Office, flying the nation's first air mail route (Washington-New York); salary: $300 a month. Army pilot Dutch Kindelberger went to work for Glenn Martin as a $27.50-a-week draftsman. Ever since then Dutch has built them and Ham has flown them...
Dutch is big (6 ft., 194 lb. stripped), has a famous temper (he once really broke all his golf clubs), and his wispy grey hair is thickest above his ears, which makes him look something like a horned owl. Ham is small (5 ft. 5 in., 150 lb.), mild-spoken and teetotaling. Dutch left Glenn Martin in 1925 to be Donald Douglas' chief engineer in Santa Monica. In 1934 General Motors picked Dutch to manage and expand its North American Aviation. But while Donald Douglas held back against the inevitable expansion of U.S. aircraft production (TIME, Nov. 22), Dutch...
...Ham Lee's career has had more superlatives. The chief one: his 3,500,000 miles of flying-enough to girdle the globe at least 150 times-put him far & away ahead of every other commercial pilot in the world. He has had only three bosses in his 25 years: the Post Office, Boeing, and, since 1927, United Air Lines. And the nearest thing to a serious accident in his 24,000 hours of flying time was when he got lost in a fog over New York Harbor in 1920, had to make a groundloop forced landing...
...Ham Lee's maxim is "When a plane stops flying, it falls"; and though his approach to the air is cucumber-calm, he also says: "Heaven help us if the human race ever gets to where it isn't afraid of flying." But about the only time he visibly showed any excitement was in 1941, when his son Robert E. Lee (the General was a distant ancestor) became co-pilot on Ham's regular Los Angeles-San Francisco...