Word: tillinghast
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...desperately short of the jets by then necessary to stay alive. TWA went into the red by no less than $38.7 million in 1961. Yet that same year, two happy things happened. First, the capricious hand of Billionaire Howard Hughes was lifted from corporate controls. Second, Charles Carpenter Tillinghast Jr., a Vermont-born lawyer, became TWA's president and chief executive officer. Under Tillinghast's regime, TWA took the U.S. airlines' profit leadership from Pan Am-$50.1 million to $47.2 million last year. In February, TWA paid its first cash dividend (250) in 30 years...
...Tillinghast talks the sort of language that comes out of a well-fed computer. "My toughest job," he says, "is to figure out with some precision what the growth of the airline industry is going to be and then to order the right amount and kind of equipment. Profitability lies in a very few points of load factor...
Efficient maintenance conserves his own sturdy load factor (5 ft. 11 in., 185 lbs.) under the pressures of his $122,000-a-year job. Tillinghast carefully budgets time for such morale-boosting chores as awarding 20-year pins to employees. With his wife Lisette, he lives in a 22-room Georgian house in suburban Bronxville, N.Y., golfs (badly), shoots clay pigeons (much better), occasionally plays high-stakes poker (superbly). Though little in his background prepared him for the airline business, Tillinghast holds: "Special knowledge is a lot less important than a keen mind." That...
...Second String. Tillinghast went to high school at New York's Horace Mann, an academically demanding private day school in The Bronx, which was run by his father for 30 years. Explained the school newspaper: "Till can't get high marks because his father is headmaster; Till can't get low marks because his father is headmaster." A scholarship English major at Brown University ('32), Tillinghast also was second-string center on the football team. His big moment came when he blocked a Colby punt in 1932, producing a safety in a game Brown...
...Tillinghast went from Columbia Law School to a $175-a-month job with the Manhattan law firm headed by Charles Evans Hughes Jr., son of the onetime Chief Justice. Except for 29 months as a deputy assistant Manhattan district attorney under Thomas E. Dewey, he spent the next 22 years practicing corporate law. It was through law that Tillinghast eventually became associated with TWA-and was brought into classic corporate conflict with TWA's eccentric genius, Howard Hughes...