Word: patterson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Once, at an Air Transport Association meeting, Eastern Air Lines President Eddie Rickenbacker complained that he hadn't been informed of certain matters. Patterson snapped: "If you'd quit sitting on a life raft in the Pacific all your life you'd understand these things. We discussed them at our last meeting." Rickenbacker whipped back: "Yes, and it's little sonovabitches like you that make me wish I was back there...
Grounded. Patterson's machinelike way of operating enables him to get through an enormous amount of work in jigtime. In addition to bossing United, he is a director in three non-aviation companies. Yet his desk in his blue-green, semi-paneled office, across from Chicago's Municipal Airport, is usually clean of work. Sometimes he dictates for hours. He does it methodically, seldom fumbling for a word. He used to lunch at his desk, but an attack of stomach ulcers cured him of that. (The ulcers are also cured now.) As a result, he is a careful...
...goer, he spends most of his off time there with his attractive wife, Vera, and their two redheaded children, Bill Jr., at 13 already taller than his dad, and Patricia, 18. The farm has a chicken house (85 Rhode Island reds), a three-hole golf course gone to seed (Patterson is considered by his friends one of the world's worst golfers), and a small lake stocked with bass, blue gills and crappies...
...Patterson does not pretend to do the farming. He lets the caretaker and his wife do the chores. "The extent of my help," he gags, "is when I hold a chicken while someone doses it with an eye dropper." Usually he spends his time horseback riding, fishing in his lake or playing catch with his son. When mink began to eat his fish recently, the caretaker trapped the mink, and they are being made into a neckpiece for Mrs. Patterson...
Bottom of the Ladder. That Patterson became an airman was due largely to chance. But he came honestly by his liking for hard work. He was born on Oahu Island, where his father was overseer of a sugar plantation. A tireless man, his father often wore out three horses in the course of a day's riding about the fields. He died when Billy, as he was then called, was 8. Young Billy and his mother, who worked in different places while Billy sandwiched in his hit-or-miss schooling, traveled back & forth between San Francisco and Hawaii. When...