Word: mails
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...completely under control of the new Civil Aeronautics Authority. Before that, it had been the concern of an assortment of Federal agencies. One of Washington's most sprawled-out bureaus, CAA took up its quarters partly in the Bureau of Air Commerce, partly in the Bureau of Air Mail, partly in rooms rented over Childs Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue...
Just before CAA took over, the Post Office Department had to award contracts for several new airmail lines. Average Government subsidy for carrying the mail, during the four years since airmail contracts have been subject to competitive bidding, has been about 17? a mile. But for the new routes, bids reached new lows. Reason: successful bidders were to get their franchises confirmed as long as "public convenience and necessity" demanded them, when CAA took over, and would consequently have places in line if or when CAA handed out a fatter subsidy...
Choicest of the new mail links was one between Brownsville, Tex., Houston and San Antonio. Border-town Brownsville is a U. S. terminus for Pan American Airways. Only other regular commercial airline out of Brownsville, connecting with such points as Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Kansas City and Chicago, has been veteran Operator Tom Braniff's bustling Braniff Airways. Capt. Eddie Ricken-backer's Eastern Airlines, whose network of routes over the eastern side of the continent now reaches as far southwest as Houston, has coveted some of neighbor Braniff's exclusive shuttle trade...
...that mere bigness did not mean badness, he argued that small business despite certain "nostalgic reminiscences" was not necessarily competitive or humane. "The village grocery store, the village blacksmith, the village grist mill, were all monopolies. . . . Such competition as there has been, curiously enough, came from large-scale enterprise; mail-order houses, and later the chain stores...
...dour old Captain Robert Dollar who needed ships for his lumber business in the newly opened Pacific Northwest. A goat-bearded gaffer with a self-made man's canniness and mistrust of others, he drove many a skinflint bargain. In 1928, at 84, he wangled a Government ocean mail subsidy calculated to pay him about $3,000,000 annually. For some $9,000,000 he had already purchased on time from the U. S. Shipping Board twelve vessels then valued at almost $16,000,000. By 1931 his fleet of President liners had been increased by two bought from...