“There’s a lot going on around here,” he remarked, using the very words with which he had received me the morning I reported to him. “I can’t keep track of all of it,” he added, and then with a grin that drew down the tight corners of his mouth, “keep your eyes open. If you see anything you think needs handling, take care of it, whether or not it comes under your department.”
As we moved toward the door the admiral caught my elbow.
“That fellow Mitchell is on the rampage again,” he said. “The Army has decided to order him to Texas to get him out of Washington. But he’ll break out at the worst time, wherever he is.” He struck another match and took two reflective puffs on his pipe.
“Keep your eye on him,” he concluded, “and be ready to lend a hand with the counterpublicity.”
CHAPTER SIX
What the Doctor Ordered
The “Affair Fleet,” as the celebrated episode of the Consolidated training plane came to be called in BUAERO, not only marked the advancement of the Engine Section from the limited environment of trouble-shooting into the more intricate realms of Bureau politics, but it also forecast our early graduation into the more creative field of aircraft engine development. And this important transition dated from a visit to the Engine Section by an aircraft manufacturer, Chance Milton Vought, president of the Chance Vought Corporation, of Long Island City, New York, a man with a waxed moustache and a fertile brain from which sprang the idea that touched off a chain reaction destined to alter the whole course of aviation.
Chance Vought was perhaps the most colorful of the unique personalities who made up the “airplane trade” as differentiated from the “engine trade.” Unlike Glenn L. Martin, whose tastes then inclined to rather dressy suits, Chance favored the tweedy look. With dark hair and eyebrows and his blond moustache, he was our example of sartorial perfection—except upon certain occasions.
After he had about completed one contract and had begun to feel the pressing need for another, he would make his appearance in the Bureau in a dilapidated tweed suit, under a moth-eaten coonskin coat, wearing a lean and hungry look, and talking very poor. At least he tried to make his look lean and hungry, but behind the façade still shone the dapper first-nighter of Keith’s Palace Theatre. Of course everyone was wise to the act, and since Chance himself was one of the wisest, he knew they were, and the recurrence of the cycle of poverty had become a source of amusement tending to soften up whatever sales resistance might develop.
This was a period of one-man organizations, when a Don Douglas, a Dutch Kindleberger, a Tony Fokker, or an Igor Sikorsky carried under the crown of his hat all there was to know about aircraft engineering. Most of these men dealt with the Design Section, located in larger quarters up the corridor from the Engine Section, but as time passed, and especially after the “Affair Fleet,” others like Claire Egtvedt, of the Boeing Company, out in Seattle, and Chance Vought began filtering into the Engine Section. And now as Chance slid through our door, rigged out in his tramp regalia, the Section gathered around my desk for a little plain and fancy kidding. Although the room was warm, Chance was too much the showman to offer to take off the coat. Instead, he posed his question.
“What’s cooking?” he inquired, biting his waxed moustache.