Aces (37 page)

The difficulties Gold was experiencing with his business associates seemed suddenly very petty, and were shoved onto the back
burner amidst the turmoil of the market crash in October of 1929. GAT and Skyworld, along with the nation’s other big aviation
concerns, emerged relatively unscathed. GAT was sustained by its government contract for G-1 Yellowjackets, and while private
industry orders for Yellowjacket cargo planes and Dragonfly airliners lessened, they did not totally dry up. Tim Campbell
did his part for Skyworld by coming up with an innovative air-travel discount rate plan for business passengers. Those businessmen
who were surviving the hard times still had to travel, and for them, time was still money—which made air transport a necessity.
Campbell’s “Blue Skies Ahead Credit Plan” offered these corporate customers a twenty percent discount in exchange for their
cash deposit committing them to a certain amount of travel with Skyworld within a six-month period.

Campbell started small, strong-arming all of GAT/Skyworld’s suppliers into signing up on threat of losing their accounts.
Once the money-saving feature of the plan proved itself, Campbell didn’t have to twist arms. Skyworld’s exclusive discount
plan kept old customers loyal and attracted new ones away from the competition. Soon more than 100 companies were signed up,
and Skyworld had traveling sales representatives pitching the plan all over the country.

GAT/Skyworld’s balance sheets looked so good that Gold and Campbell were constantly arguing about further expansion. Thinking
back on it, Gold realized that considering the differences in their personalities, conflict was inevitable. Campbell was a
gambler. Gold was conservative in money matters. Campbell was a supremely confident financial wizard. Most of the time Gold
had only the faintest of notions of what Campbell was talking about when Tim got going with his financial hocus-pocus.

Campbell usually won their arguments. He would reason that thanks to the depression there were acquisition opportunities all
over the country: air terminals, airplane fleets, parts inventories, ground transport companies, instrument and engine manufacturers,
and so on. If they didn’t gobble up those buys, a competitor would. Campbell would remind Gold that he hadn’t yet let the
company down, and that he wouldn’t in the future. Finally, Campbell would march upon Gold’s crumbling defenses with an army
of figures: projected revenues, compound interest calculations, income tax dodges. Reeling against the onslaught, Gold would
give in, letting Tim do what he wanted. GAT and Skyworld became the holding companies for more than sixty separate operations.

In 1930 GAT’s modified G-1 Yellowjacket won the United States Navy’s competition for a new torpedo bomber. The navy contracted
for an initial order of 150 airplanes, along with an extensive spare-parts order. This new cash infusion gave Gold the confidence
to authorize Teddy Quinn to augment his staff with a dozen new, young aeronautical engineers who had been let go by those
smaller companies that had gone under. Gold also authorized R&D on a new, all-metal, large-capacity passenger airliner, tentatively
dubbed the Monarch, meant to steal a little thunder from Ford’s “Tin Goose” Tri-Motor. The Ford was the premier passenger
plane in the world—Skyworld owned nine of them—but the “Tin Goose” had its problems. It was noisy and slow, giving it little
advantage over travel by rail for long trips. GAT, Ford, Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, Douglas, and others, were looking to
the future with new concepts as they raced to come up with a large, fast, comfortable airliner.

That same year, widespread reports of corruption in the ways that the scores of smaller air transport companies were billing
the postal service for carrying the mail led Congress to pass the McNary-Watres Act. The act was designed to rid the country
of shoestring carrier operations, and to promote passenger air travel. The act’s first key provision was that U.S. airmail
carriers would no longer be paid by the pound. Carriers would be paid a sliding-scale flat rate, based on the amount of interior
space its airplanes could offer, regardless of whether that space was used to carry mail. A large carrier like Skyworld had
the big passenger airplanes to receive the maximum flat rate, thereby reaping grand profits. The marginal carriers with their
little airplanes received the minimum rate, which was purposely fixed so low as to force them out of business. This dovetailed
with the second key provision of the Watres Act, which gave the postmaster general the right to consolidate those routes abandoned
by the marginal carriers, and award the territory to the lowest
responsible
bidder.

Thanks to the Watres Act, only the largest, most established carrier companies would henceforth be eligible to fly the mail.
All others need not apply.

A meeting was held in Washington to divvy up the nation’s newly consolidated routes among the aviation giants. Tim Campbell
represented Skyworld, and went to Washington vowing to come back with a grand prize: a coveted transcontinental route. The
conference lasted twelve days. Campbell came home without his coast-to-coast plum, but with a decent consolation prize: all
the territory Skyworld currently held, plus a profitable route between Kansas City and Chicago. Skyworld’s scarlet and turquoise
fleet was now authorized to fly over the western two-thirds of the nation.

The Watres Act cut the legs from the civilian market for the G-1 Yellowjacket and G-1a Dragonfly. They were just too small.
Fortunately, Gold still had his navy contract for torpedo bombers. He shut down the Dragonfly assembly line, stockpiled the
six unsold passenger airliners on his airfields, and poured money into the Monarch project.

In 1931 the crash of a TWA Fokker tri-motor in Kansas took the life of Knute Rockne, the famed football coach, among others.
An investigation revealed that the cause of the crash was rotted wood in the Fokker’s all-spruce, internal wing assembly.
The Fokker tri-motors were the workhorses of the airlines, and when they all had to be grounded for inspections it created
havoc. Virtually all the major airlines, Skyworld excluded, flew them. The only reason Gold had stayed away from them was
his unpleasant experience in the aftermath of the crash of his German-built Spatz, back in 1925. He was now a naturalized
citizen, but because of his German origins he’d vowed to play it safe in the future and avoid all controversy by only buying
American—until he could build a plane of his own to fulfill a specific need.

With the Fokkers out of service, the airlines looked around at what was available in a large-capacity transport, all-metal
design, and found not very much. Gold’s surplus of all-metal Dragonfly airliners was quickly sold out, but the G-1a was a
stopgap solution. The Dragonfly was too small, while the larger, all-metal tri-motor offered by Ford was too uncomfortable
and slow. Something better had always been needed, but now that need was crucial, and the potential rewards for the firm that
satisfied that need had become far greater. The race to build a state-of-the-art airliner was heating up.

The Monarch project became GAT’s top priority. Gold spent most of his time working with Teddy Quinn and the expanded pool
of engineers. Long gone were the good old days back in Santa Monica, when the group could sit around one table, chewing the
fat and brainstorming as they gazed out the windows at the sparkling blue bay. Today, Gold had engineers working for him whose
names he didn’t know.

The new airliner had started out as a tri-motor, but Rogers and Simpson had told Gold about their latest design for a powerful
radial engine that made him think the Monarch could be a twin-engined craft. In the months since the project had gone into
high gear, Teddy Quinn and his gang of boy genuises had worked out a fuselage design that would allow the Monarch to carry
twelve passengers plus a three-man crew in swift, quiet comfort. A prototype model of a twin-engined Monarch—designated the
Gold Commercial One (GC-1)—had been built. Wind tunnel tests had proved that the aircraft could effortlessly cruise with only
one working engine at any practical altitude. Unfortunately, wind tunnel tests also showed unsatisfactory rudder control flying
on only one engine.

GAT could start on a full-scale prototype as soon as the damned rudder control problem was licked. Gold worked late nights
at his own drafting table, laboriously struggling with the Monarch’s engineering problems; dreaming about them during fitful
sleep. He knew that he was obsessing on the Monarch at the expense of other important matters, but he couldn’t help it. He
did his best creative work when he was obsessed. Anyway, he’d always believed that Campbell could take care of routine business
matters concerning Sky-world well enough without him.

The intercom snarled. Gold pressed the button. “Mister Campbell is here,” his secretary said.

“Send him in.” Gold took the anonymous note accusing Campbell of treachery out of its envelope. He folded the sheet of stationery
into a paper airplane, meanwhile brooding that perhaps Campbell had been taking care of things without him
too well
…

“What’s this about, Herman?” Campbell complained as he came into the office.

Gold watched him approach. It was fifty paces from the double doors to Gold’s marble-topped, oak desk. The journey took Campbell
past sideboards lining the paneled walls, the burgundy leather sofas and armchairs grouped together like campsites on the
vast moss green plain of wall-to-wall carpeting. The walls above the sideboards were taken up with ornately framed, murky
oil paintings of hunting scenes and seascapes. Gold did not know any of the artists. Erica had furnished and decorated the
office for him. Banished to one corner of the cavernous room, looking somewhat forlorn, like country cousins come to the big
city, were Gold’s battered, old drafting table and glass-fronted bookcases filled with technical manuals. Erica had given
him a hard time about that table, but Gold had stood his ground, insisting to her that he still spent more time at his drafting
table than he did at his desk. He wished he were at his table right now, instead of desperately trying to come up with an
idea of how to resolve this confrontation without losing Campbell’s friendship.

“I’ve got a ton of crap to take care of before lunch,” Campbell was saying. “And I get this goddamned summons from your secretary
like I’m some kind of goddamned errand boy—”

Gold gestured toward a leather armchair in front of his desk. “Sit down. I’ve got something serious to discuss with you.”

Campbell settled into the chair. He took a gold cigarette case from out of the breast pocket of his gray flannel, double-breasted
suit jacket, extracted a cigarette, and then lit it with a matching gold lighter. His eyes flicked desultorily over the two
envelopes lying on the burgundy leather desk blotter, and then at the paper airplane in Gold’s hand. “Well?” He exhaled a
stream of smoke. “I trust that gizmo in your hand isn’t another new design you want me to finance for you?—”

Gold sailed the paper airplane into Campbell’s lap. “Read it.”

Campbell unfolded the note and skimmed its contents. When he was finished he looked up at Gold, his expression contemptuous.
“You believe this?” he asked.

Gold shrugged. “Not if you tell me it’s a lie.”

Campbell didn’t say anything for a moment; then he smiled. “Why the fuck should I bother lying? You were going to find out
sooner or later.” He crumpled the sheet into a ball.

“You want to tell me why?” Gold asked.

Campbell stared at him. “You don’t know? Could your self-absorption—
your fucking ego
—be that big? You mean to try and tell me that you’ve been so focused on that goddamned Monarch project that you don’t remember
what happened?”

Gold frowned. “You mean that flap we had over Cargo Air Transport?”

“That
flap
, as you put it, was the final straw as far as I was concerned,” Campbell said.

Gold leaned back in his chair. At present Skyworld was authorized to fly as far east as Chicago. A small airline, Cargo Air
Transport, had managed to survive the Watres Act, holding on to its single, lucrative Chicago/New York route, but now the
company—in other words, its route—was up for sale. Campbell had wanted to go after Cargo Transport, calling it the last piece
in the puzzle to make Skyworld a coast-to-coast airline. Gold had balked. There were other transport companies with the same
idea; the bidding for Cargo Air had hugely inflated the price of its stock. Campbell was willing to overpay, believing that
Cargo Air would turn out to be a worthy buy in the long-term, but Gold had refused to let Campbell sink Skyworld that deeply
into debt.

“Cargo Air has made me realize that for the longest while we’ve been like two mules straining to go in opposite directions,
but tied together by a piece of rope,” Campbell said. “I figured it was time to cut the rope.”

“That rope you’re talking about cutting belongs to
me
,” Gold said sharply.

“A public company belongs to its stockholders,” Campbell said evenly. “I believe that when the truth comes out, Skyworld’s
stockholders will not react kindly to your argument against the Cargo Air acquisition: that buying up all that inflated stock
would rob Skyworld of its liquidity at a time when GAT might want to borrow on those cash reserves to fund the Monarch project.
The thing of it is, I’m sick of Skyworld always getting the short end of the stick. I’m willing to wager that most stockholders
will agree with me.”

“You know my philosophy—”

Campbell nodded. “That as far as you’re concerned, GAT will always come first. Well, one thing I have to say for you, Herman,
you’ve stuck to your guns on that. But a lot of us have worked damn hard to make Skyworld what it is today, and we don’t see
why we should have to take a backseat.”

“Tim, listen to me,” Gold began. “For once, I think it’s you who’s losing sight of the big picture.”

“This I’ve got to hear.” Campbell scowled, stubbing out the remains of his cigarette in the smoking stand beside his chair,
and immediately lighting another.