Word: sportster
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...tiny yellow Aeronca, at $1,355 a Porterfield Zephyr. At $2,468 was the Rearwin Sportster, which flew in from Kansas City on $10.68 in fuel. Speediest looking of the little planes was the Ryan STA, only all-metal job as cheap as $4,885. In a higher bracket were the bigger ships like Bellanca ($23,000), Beechcraft C17R ($14,500), Stinson Reliant ($7,985), Waco ($5,395), Luscombe ($5,500), Monocoupe ($3,825), Argonaut ($5.450), Fairchild 24 ($5,590), stainless steel Fleetwing ($18,500), each with room for several passengers in luxurious automobile-like cabins. Great majority were cabin...
...Brothers Granville had rebuilt so many crashes they were ready to build planes of their own. Zantford Granville was the designer, the four younger brothers craftsmen, mechanics. Their first product, the Gee-Bee Sportster, won the favor of Maude Tait Moriarity, woman racing pilot. She persuaded her father, James C. Tait, rich ice cream maker of Springfield, Mass., to back the Granvilles with a factory in Springfield...
...built & sold 25 ships in four years. The collapse of the private plane market left scant demand for sport ships like theirs, but also left plenty of time for experiments with racing designs. With his smart Chief Engineer Robert L. Hall (since resigned) Granville produced the Gee-Bee Super Sportster in which the late Lowell Bayles broke the U. S. land plane speed record at the National Air Races in 1931. It was in a new Gee-Bee that famed "Jimmy'' Doolittle broke that record and made a new world record (296 m.p.h.) in last year...