Word: thornburg
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...auspicious debut. Mom strummed the ukulele in the blind pig that she operated in Lansing, Mich., and out onto the floor came a skinny, freckled five-year-old named Betty June Thornburg, with her sister Marion, seven. While the speakeasy customers sipped needled beer, the blonde moppets sang and wriggled their way through Black Bottom and other favorite anthems of the year...
When she could get it, Betty's mother, Mabel Lum Thornburg, took daytime work on the assembly lines in automobile factories at 22? an hour. For a time, after she and the children had begun to share a Detroit basement flat with two other families, she worked as a "tackspitter," tacking upholstery into car seats. She would come home at night "with nails in her fingers where she'd missed." Says Betty grimly: "I made up my mind then that no one-no one-would keep us like that...
...Real Bad Hurt. Betty's life began on Feb. 26, 1921, in Battle Creek, Mich., "by the railroad tracks between Postum and Kellogg." She was two when her father, a railroad brakeman named Percy Thornburg, drifted off to California with another woman. Soon after, the mother took Betty and Marion to Lansing. They did not hear of Thornburg again until 1937, when he killed himself in a Los Angeles suburb and left the two girls $100 each...
...T.W.A. pilot for nine years, Thornburg entered the Navy in 1940, was an operations officer for the Naval Air Transport Service for the Caribbean and South America. When he got out of the Navy in 1946, he joined Waterman Airlines. With six planes - two DC-4s and four DC-3s - he has operated a nonscheduled service to Puerto Rico, Central America, England, Germany and South Africa, an intrastate line between six Alabama cities...
...Thornburg is well aware that despite TACA's long, colorful career, it can hardly be called a going concern today. In three years it has lost close to $4.5 million; last year's losses alone were approximately $2.6 million and were one of the big reasons that hard-pressed T.W.A. was glad to get out. But by tying the line in with Waterman's steamship operations from Gulf ports, Jack Thornburg thinks that he can get TACA flying high again. And Waterman also hopes to show CAB that steamship companies can operate an efficient, economic...