I frequently write about flying, aircraft, and aviation history. I couldn't do it without studying what others have written or said, but apart from including brief quotations from sources in my Air-Minded posts, the writing in them is my own. It feels odd to put up a post that isn't my own, but this is too good to keep to myself.
I first saw this document—unsourced, crudely edited, and incomplete—in an email sent round to volunteer docents at Pima Air and Space Museum. It grabbed me immediately, so I took the trouble to track down the source and obtain a complete, unedited copy.
It's the transcript of a speech delivered to a 1968 meeting of the Aviation Industries Association Spare Parts Committee in San Francisco. The speaker was Denham S. Scott, an aviation industry veteran and historian. In it, he describes the "acorn days" of the American aviation industry, most particularly in southern California but also elsewhere, and talks about several young men who went on to become household names in the industry: Glenn Martin, Donald Douglas, Jack Northrop, Allan Loughead (Lockheed), Claude Ryan, Bill Boeing, and others. Other than adding a couple of photos and cleaning up some punctuation errors, the text of the speech is unaltered from the original.
This history Denham Scott outlined in his talk, insofar as I have been able to check the facts on Google and Wikipedia, is accurate. It's revelatory, fascinating, worthy of sharing in every respect. I respectfully turn the podium over to Mr. Scott.
THE ACORN DAYS
by Denham S. Scott, 19 March 1968
I am grateful to Ralph Emerson for this opportunity to burst into a swan song. When he asked me, I happened to be working with the Northrop Institute of Technology as we were putting together an aviation history event where 1,386 people sat down to dinner while Clete Roberts interviewed Donald Douglas Sr., Jack Northrop, Allan Lockheed, and Claude Ryan about their early days. I was in a nostalgic mood, and full of new knowledge about bygone days. I asked Ralph if I could speak about “The Acorn Days.”
You know the quotation, “The lofty oak from a small acorn grows.” Ralph said any subject was fine as long as it was about spare parts and provisioning. I promised to mention both of them and I have just now discharged that obligation. Now, how many of you know that in 1910 the mighty Martin-Marietta Company got its start in an abandoned church in Santa Ana, California, when the late Glenn L Martin, with his mother “Minta” Martin and a mechanic Roy Beal, built a fragile contraption with which Glenn taught himself to fly?
It has often been told how the Douglas Company started operations in 1920 by renting the rear of a barbershop on Pico Blvd. in Los Angeles. The barbershop is still there. The Lockheed Company built their first Vega in 1927 in what is now the Victory Cleaners and Dyers, 1040 Sycamore Ave, Hollywood.
Claude Ryan, who at 24 held a reserve commission as a flyer, had his hair cut in San Diego one day in 1922. The barber told him how the town aviator was in jail for smuggling Chinese across the border. Claude investigated and stayed on in San Diego to rent the old airfield from the city at fifty dollars a month and replace the guy in the pokey. He agreed to fly north instead of south.
Aerial view of Claude Ryan's airfield at Dutch Flats, San Diego (photo credit: unknown)
In 1928 the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, Transcontinental Air Transport (now TWA), and the Douglas Aircraft Company, chipped in enough money to start North American Aviation, a holding company.
The present company bearing the Northrop name came into being in a small hotel in Hawthorne. The hotel was conveniently vacant and available because the police had raided it and found that the steady residents were a passel of money-minded gals who entertained transitory male guests.
