Henry John Van Olst
Henry John Van Olst 85, a retired inspector for Lockheed, died recently in Lancaster after a five-year illness. Services were held Monday for Mr. Van Olst, a Lancaster resident who was born in Orange City, Iowa.
He is survived by his wife, Celia and a daughter, both of Lancaster; a brother, Egbert of Santa Cruz; sisters, Henrietta Graber, Myrtle Wilsie and Mildred Haines, all of Inverness, Fla.; and two grandchildren.
"My first taste of aviation, if you care to call it that, was in 1916 when I was sixteen years old in my hometown of Orange City, Iowa. My older brother and a couple of neighbor boys built a glider out of bamboo and linen. Looked something like a large box kite meant to fly horizontally. Had two wing panels with a couple of fore and aft bars in the center of the lower panel were the pilot was supposed to support himself by his hands and shift his body forward or backward to go up or down. They decided to try it one moonlight nite in a cow pasture. Since I was the lightest kid around, I was elected to be the pilot. They tied a long rope to it and started running down the hill. They thought they were flying a kite, I guess. You ran along as long as your feet touched the ground and then sailed into the air. When the thing started to climb and was about ten feet off the ground, I got panicky and over shifted forward. Or should I say, over-controlled and came down with quite a bump. Anyway it was what Pilots later called a "good landing", as I walked away from it. The Glider needed some repairs and I felt lucky not to have any broken bones. They didn't get me to try again. They couldn't catch me.
The first airplane I ever saw flown was at our home town County Fair also about this same time. Our town was the County Seat of this farming community. Every year they had a County Fair that was the big event of the fall season. The big special event of the Fair one year before World War I, was an exhibition Airplane Flight. Some brave airman brought in a pusher type aircraft that he took off and landed inside the infield boundaries of the half mile oval dirt track. As I remember it was a Pusher type biplane with the engine supported by struts and wires behind and above the pilot. The Pilot sat out in front of the wings on an arrangement of wires and skids. No cockpit, just a seat of sorts, with wires leading from the control wheel and rudder bar. The Pilot wore leather putties and also goggles to protect his eyes from the rushing wind. When you consider that he had less than a quarter of a mile over rough grassy ground to get that thing off the ground and clear the track and fence around the track you just know he was a brave or crazy and I must say everyone there thought he was nuts. I'll be there wasn't one out of ten of those Iowa farmers who would believe that thing would ever fly. But fly she did. After two or three false starts, with everyone still betting he would never make it, he finally cleared the fence and was flying. I'll bet it got as high as 500 feet. After circling the Fairgrounds awhile, he came in and made a bumpy landing back inside the race track. There were sure a lot of strained necks and sun-burned tonsils that day. I still think he was a brave man.
The first airplane ride I ever had was in 1919 in Iowa City, Iowa. A barn-storming Pilot, I believe his name was Casey Jones, was hopping passengers in a Curtis Oriole for ten dollars a straight ride and fifteen dollars for stunts. I had saved up enough money from my last job as a railroad station clerk. Believe me fifteen dollars as a lot of lettuce for a poor boy to collect in those days. I hung around practically all afternoon watching others taken up for their ten minute hops before I got up enough nerve to approach the pilot and ask for a ride. I intended to spend ten dollars but after we were airborn I decided that a straight ride was too tame and I wasn't as scared as I thought I should be for ten dollars so I turned to the Pilot in the aft cockpit and tried to motion to him that I wanted some stunts. He throttled back the engine so I could hear him and hollered at me asking if I wanted some stunts. I nodded and so he said he'd start with a couple of loops. I didn't trust that flimsy looking strap I had for a seat belt so I reached out and got a firm grip on the two cabin struts in front of me to be sure I could at least hang by my hands if I did start to fall out of the seat. I 'll bet the Pilot got a kick out of that. Of course he did a nice easy tight loop, in fact, three of them. Then he throttled back again and said he would now show me how they got on the tail of a German. Then he did a couple of steep wing-overs. They were more thrilling than the loops. The last thing he did was dive straight for the ground. It was probably a pretty shallow dive but the ground seemed to be coming up awful fast. I thought he wasn't going to pull up in time. That really scared me. I guess I looked kinda green because he asked if I was feeling sick and if this was my first time up. I nodded my head to both questions and so he brought us back in. Fifteen dollars was a lot of money but I considered I got my money worth.
A year or so after that I switched to horses. That is to say I joined the National Guard Cavalry Unit in Iowa City. At this time I also attended the University of Iowa for a little over two years. That was when Iowa football teams were ruling the Big Ten and Howard Jones was their coach. In fact Coach Jones made such a name for himself that USC out bid Iowa and got him to come to Southern California .
This was a time when such airplane companies as Waco, Travelair, Spartan, Eagle Rock and Cessna wee just getting started I that area. Flying fields were usually cow pastures outside of the towns. There were still War Surplus Jennies and some Standards flying around the country. There was practically no market for aircraft as there were few pilots and people were just not air minded.
About May, 1926 a roommate of mine in Kansas City, Missouri who was working as Chief engine mechanic for a new Airplane factory got me a job as a mechanic. I wasn't looking for a ‘big pay, popularity, success' job as the aircraft companies headed their ads later on. At that time I was just hungry and looking for work. The factory was the American Eagle Aircraft Company, Ed Porterfield, President. The factory was housed in an old two story garage building in town and employed about thirty people at first. Of course, none of these people had any previous aircraft experience. The only person that knew anything at all about airplanes was the so-called engineer and the pilot had some flying experience. Employees worked ten hour days and half a day on Saturdays. The upstairs room was the wing department. In those days everything was made by hand, except the engines. The only machines in the place were a couple of small drill presses and an emery wheel or two. Ex-pipe line welders were hired to do the welding on the steel tubing fuselage. My first job was cutting and fitting the steel tubing for the fuselage. The only tools I used were a hacksaw and a file and the company furnished the files and hacksaw blades. The tubing came in twenty foot lengths and each fuselage required the cutting and fitting of 67 pieces and installing them in a jig for the welders to weld together. At first it took over a week for one other man and myself to finish one assembly. About 200 fuselages later we raced the clock and completed one in one hour and fifty seven minutes. A salesman tried to sell the President a power tubing saw about that time and he said he didn't need a power saw as he had a couple of guys who could cut tubing faster by hand. When we got ahead with our work we would help out in the wing department, covering and doping wings or perhaps help install the engine. No one did any squawking about working outside of their classification. We were all working to build an airplane and proud of it. The engines were war surplus Curtis OX-5's which came in crates and were new, but each engine was completely covered with Cosmoline, a very sticky grease that was used to protect the engines during storage. The dirty job was removing that sticky grease before installing the engines. The wings and fuselage had to be trucked outside of town to what was known as Old Richard's Field, and there assembled and flown. Of course this flying field was only an oversized pasture with one old tin hanger.
It took a lot of work to build an airplane in those days and then when it was finished and test-flown you had to sell it. And who could you sell it to? In the late twenties there were very few Pilots, most from WWI, to fly these airplanes after they were built. So the factory started a Flying School to train what they hoped would be their future customers. For $250.00 you could get enough dual training to solo and most students usually soloed in about ten or twelve hours. Young students just worshipped their instructors. Of course, not many of these new Pilots had money enough to buy an airplane and few Pilot jobs were available. So most kept right on working as mechanics or went back to the farm. Some few would get together, pool their money, and buy an airplane to go barnstorming. Or when your super salesman talked some rancher or oil man into buying an airplane it made a job for some flying school graduate. If the new Pilot didn't wash out the airplane in his first hundred hours, you had a live and satisfied customer and maybe soon some more customers from the same area.
I never did learn to fly but spent all of my time in the factory fabricating the steel tubing fuselages and doing other factory work such as helping hang wings, rigging, and doping the fabric covered wings and fuselage. A feller could get on a cheap drunk inhaling the fumes from that nitrate dope. (see American Eagle beginnings) Of course, we had our fun too on our off time. On Sundays some of us were always out at the field helping the pilots who were flying students. This help consisted mostly in having a couple of bottles of bootleg hootch available in the hangar so the Pilots could sneak a drink between flights. This Pilot training was strenuous work. And then at night we would often have to take a visiting Pilot out on a round of the night spots. This was during Prohibition but there was many a bar running all night long in Kansas City, Missouri in those days.
The one man that did more for Aviation than anyone else was Colonel Lindberg. When he made his tour of the country after his flight to Paris he stopped in Kansas City. He came to our factory and really pepped us all up. He even flew one of our new airplanes. That was great publicity for our company. I know he was doing it just to help aviation in general and not just for us. In those days most people were far from convinced that it was safe to ride in an airplane. I think Colonel Lindberg did more for Aviation in this country than any one person. He got everyone in the country air-minded at a time when the aviation industry was really struggling to get started.
Several new airplane factories started up but many did not last long. Two new factories started up in Kansas City alone. One was started by a rich broker named Rearwin and he named it for his two sons, Ken and Royce. The first biplane he built was called the Ken Royce. And then another factory built a high wing monoplane called the Inland Sport, a small high wing monoplane. This company was headed by the President of the local City Ice Company. Neither place built more than two or three airplanes.
After the American Eagle Company went bankrupt around 1930, I worked for Rearwin a short time and also for Inland Sport. The Inland Sport President, Arthur Hargrave, did buy a Lockheed Vega. I like to think I helped a little to sell this Lockheed Vega as the Pilot salesman was an old friend of mine named Herb Putnam who had been one of the old American Eagle Pilots. I introduced him to the customer and Mr. Putnam was kind enough to give me a ride at the Kansas City Airport, in the Vega he was using to demonstrate. I remember it well because Herb set the controls, at one time during the flight, and came and sat in the cabin with us for a moment or two to show us how stable the aircraft was.
Then Benny Howard decided to build a couple of racing airplanes to fly in the National Air Races. At that time Bennie was just about the hottest racing pilot in the country. He was also a pilot for American Airlines, and spent all his spare time with racing. The previous year his "Little Pete" racer had been quite a sensation at the Cleveland National Air Races. He wanted to build two ships just alike and get an Approved Type Certificate on them. You must understand that these were strictly hand made aircraft. He designed and built his own racers. He rented the American Eagle factory building with all its equipment, as the company had gone bankrupt just shortly before and most of the equipment was still available. He hired four or five of us former American Eagle employees to build the ships which he called "Ike and Mike" and he worked right with us whenever he was in town. He spent all of his off time helping us with the work and laying out the plans. He was his own engineer and a mighty good one too. He told us what the top speed of the ships would be and he only missed it by about three miles per hour. He must have spent all his time while flying for the Airlines thinking up new ideas because he sure was full of good suggestions whenever he showed up. He modified as he went along. He bought metal propellers but whittled them down to suit his own ideas and did that work himself as he wanted to be sure they were properly balanced. To my mind Bennie Howard should be classed as one of the truly great Aviation Pioneers. He is also a great guy to know. When completed, "Ike and "Mike were two sleek little low-wing racers all painted white. They were finished in time for the Cleveland Races. After Ike and Mike were shipped to Cleveland, I went to work as an airplane mechanic for Transcontinental and Western Air Lines at their Kansas City base. I obtained my C.A.A. mechanics license in 1931. We had some Lockheeds to work on at one time. I believe a couple of Altair. Seems to me the Altair had a retractable landing gear and was a low-wing monoplane. I worked there until March, 1934 when the government cancelled all air-mail contracts. That put a lot of mechanics out of work, but T. W. A. arranged with Douglas at Santa Monica, California to put most of us to work on the new DC2 and DC3 models that were just getting started in production for the Airlines to replace the old Ford Trimotors.
So with a letter of introduction, (loaded the car with wife, puppy and all our possessions) drove across country to Santa Monica. Later TWA called most of us back to Kansas City. They sent me a wire saying my old job was open if I wanted it. I replied that I was sorry, but I would have to stay in California.
I left Douglas in May 1938 to go to work at the North American Aviation in Inglewood. Only worked there about six months as I got caught in a layoff there in December. Finally in June 1940 a friend of mine who knew Robert Gross, talked to him about me and as a result I finally got on at Lockheed as a senior inspector in Final Assembly. I needed a job badly at the time and I have always felt deeply indebted to Robert Gross and have always tried to be deserving of his trust. Must say that Lockheed was just the place I had been looking for. I had been hearing that Lockheed was the best place to work for from many of my old friends, and I soon found the stories were not exaggerated. After being an airplane tramp for years, I was surprised at the really pleasant working conditions. The Supervisors were kind and considerate, especially my first one, Inspector Supervisor Les Hickman. They insisted I become an inspector when I hired in and I could soon see why. At least I did have some (14 years) previous experience on aircraft and a vast majority of those being hired in 1940 had little or no mechanical experience of any kind.
I was inspector on the Lodestars during the war years and then was transferred into Engineering Flight Test after the last Lodestar was built in old Plant 3. Was Flight Test Inspector on the "Truculent Turtle" until just before it made its record flight. Then was sent to Van Nuys as one of the Flight Test Inspectors on the P-80's. That was when Lockheed got the Speed Record with a P-80. I was in Engineering Flight Test until my retirement in April 1965. (from the Palmdale Plant.) Saw a lot of records broken and delivered many jet aircraft to the Air Force. The work has been interesting and the people have been wonderful to work with. My years with Lockheed have been the best years of my life and the most rewarding in many, many ways. It has been a great honor to work with such people as Tony LeVier, Herman Salmon, Bob Matye, Ellie Hawks, and Ernie Joiner just to mention a few. A more conscientious and dedicated group you will find nowhere else in the country. After all, its people who make a company what it is and Lockheed has the right people. I guess you just have to put in lots of years before you realize just how rich you are when you have such wonderful friends."
-Henry John Van Olst -1965
Henry John Van Olst 85, a retired inspector for Lockheed, died recently in Lancaster after a five-year illness. Services were held Monday for Mr. Van Olst, a Lancaster resident who was born in Orange City, Iowa.
He is survived by his wife, Celia and a daughter, both of Lancaster; a brother, Egbert of Santa Cruz; sisters, Henrietta Graber, Myrtle Wilsie and Mildred Haines, all of Inverness, Fla.; and two grandchildren.
"My first taste of aviation, if you care to call it that, was in 1916 when I was sixteen years old in my hometown of Orange City, Iowa. My older brother and a couple of neighbor boys built a glider out of bamboo and linen. Looked something like a large box kite meant to fly horizontally. Had two wing panels with a couple of fore and aft bars in the center of the lower panel were the pilot was supposed to support himself by his hands and shift his body forward or backward to go up or down. They decided to try it one moonlight nite in a cow pasture. Since I was the lightest kid around, I was elected to be the pilot. They tied a long rope to it and started running down the hill. They thought they were flying a kite, I guess. You ran along as long as your feet touched the ground and then sailed into the air. When the thing started to climb and was about ten feet off the ground, I got panicky and over shifted forward. Or should I say, over-controlled and came down with quite a bump. Anyway it was what Pilots later called a "good landing", as I walked away from it. The Glider needed some repairs and I felt lucky not to have any broken bones. They didn't get me to try again. They couldn't catch me.
The first airplane I ever saw flown was at our home town County Fair also about this same time. Our town was the County Seat of this farming community. Every year they had a County Fair that was the big event of the fall season. The big special event of the Fair one year before World War I, was an exhibition Airplane Flight. Some brave airman brought in a pusher type aircraft that he took off and landed inside the infield boundaries of the half mile oval dirt track. As I remember it was a Pusher type biplane with the engine supported by struts and wires behind and above the pilot. The Pilot sat out in front of the wings on an arrangement of wires and skids. No cockpit, just a seat of sorts, with wires leading from the control wheel and rudder bar. The Pilot wore leather putties and also goggles to protect his eyes from the rushing wind. When you consider that he had less than a quarter of a mile over rough grassy ground to get that thing off the ground and clear the track and fence around the track you just know he was a brave or crazy and I must say everyone there thought he was nuts. I'll be there wasn't one out of ten of those Iowa farmers who would believe that thing would ever fly. But fly she did. After two or three false starts, with everyone still betting he would never make it, he finally cleared the fence and was flying. I'll bet it got as high as 500 feet. After circling the Fairgrounds awhile, he came in and made a bumpy landing back inside the race track. There were sure a lot of strained necks and sun-burned tonsils that day. I still think he was a brave man.
The first airplane ride I ever had was in 1919 in Iowa City, Iowa. A barn-storming Pilot, I believe his name was Casey Jones, was hopping passengers in a Curtis Oriole for ten dollars a straight ride and fifteen dollars for stunts. I had saved up enough money from my last job as a railroad station clerk. Believe me fifteen dollars as a lot of lettuce for a poor boy to collect in those days. I hung around practically all afternoon watching others taken up for their ten minute hops before I got up enough nerve to approach the pilot and ask for a ride. I intended to spend ten dollars but after we were airborn I decided that a straight ride was too tame and I wasn't as scared as I thought I should be for ten dollars so I turned to the Pilot in the aft cockpit and tried to motion to him that I wanted some stunts. He throttled back the engine so I could hear him and hollered at me asking if I wanted some stunts. I nodded and so he said he'd start with a couple of loops. I didn't trust that flimsy looking strap I had for a seat belt so I reached out and got a firm grip on the two cabin struts in front of me to be sure I could at least hang by my hands if I did start to fall out of the seat. I 'll bet the Pilot got a kick out of that. Of course he did a nice easy tight loop, in fact, three of them. Then he throttled back again and said he would now show me how they got on the tail of a German. Then he did a couple of steep wing-overs. They were more thrilling than the loops. The last thing he did was dive straight for the ground. It was probably a pretty shallow dive but the ground seemed to be coming up awful fast. I thought he wasn't going to pull up in time. That really scared me. I guess I looked kinda green because he asked if I was feeling sick and if this was my first time up. I nodded my head to both questions and so he brought us back in. Fifteen dollars was a lot of money but I considered I got my money worth.
A year or so after that I switched to horses. That is to say I joined the National Guard Cavalry Unit in Iowa City. At this time I also attended the University of Iowa for a little over two years. That was when Iowa football teams were ruling the Big Ten and Howard Jones was their coach. In fact Coach Jones made such a name for himself that USC out bid Iowa and got him to come to Southern California .
This was a time when such airplane companies as Waco, Travelair, Spartan, Eagle Rock and Cessna wee just getting started I that area. Flying fields were usually cow pastures outside of the towns. There were still War Surplus Jennies and some Standards flying around the country. There was practically no market for aircraft as there were few pilots and people were just not air minded.
About May, 1926 a roommate of mine in Kansas City, Missouri who was working as Chief engine mechanic for a new Airplane factory got me a job as a mechanic. I wasn't looking for a ‘big pay, popularity, success' job as the aircraft companies headed their ads later on. At that time I was just hungry and looking for work. The factory was the American Eagle Aircraft Company, Ed Porterfield, President. The factory was housed in an old two story garage building in town and employed about thirty people at first. Of course, none of these people had any previous aircraft experience. The only person that knew anything at all about airplanes was the so-called engineer and the pilot had some flying experience. Employees worked ten hour days and half a day on Saturdays. The upstairs room was the wing department. In those days everything was made by hand, except the engines. The only machines in the place were a couple of small drill presses and an emery wheel or two. Ex-pipe line welders were hired to do the welding on the steel tubing fuselage. My first job was cutting and fitting the steel tubing for the fuselage. The only tools I used were a hacksaw and a file and the company furnished the files and hacksaw blades. The tubing came in twenty foot lengths and each fuselage required the cutting and fitting of 67 pieces and installing them in a jig for the welders to weld together. At first it took over a week for one other man and myself to finish one assembly. About 200 fuselages later we raced the clock and completed one in one hour and fifty seven minutes. A salesman tried to sell the President a power tubing saw about that time and he said he didn't need a power saw as he had a couple of guys who could cut tubing faster by hand. When we got ahead with our work we would help out in the wing department, covering and doping wings or perhaps help install the engine. No one did any squawking about working outside of their classification. We were all working to build an airplane and proud of it. The engines were war surplus Curtis OX-5's which came in crates and were new, but each engine was completely covered with Cosmoline, a very sticky grease that was used to protect the engines during storage. The dirty job was removing that sticky grease before installing the engines. The wings and fuselage had to be trucked outside of town to what was known as Old Richard's Field, and there assembled and flown. Of course this flying field was only an oversized pasture with one old tin hanger.
It took a lot of work to build an airplane in those days and then when it was finished and test-flown you had to sell it. And who could you sell it to? In the late twenties there were very few Pilots, most from WWI, to fly these airplanes after they were built. So the factory started a Flying School to train what they hoped would be their future customers. For $250.00 you could get enough dual training to solo and most students usually soloed in about ten or twelve hours. Young students just worshipped their instructors. Of course, not many of these new Pilots had money enough to buy an airplane and few Pilot jobs were available. So most kept right on working as mechanics or went back to the farm. Some few would get together, pool their money, and buy an airplane to go barnstorming. Or when your super salesman talked some rancher or oil man into buying an airplane it made a job for some flying school graduate. If the new Pilot didn't wash out the airplane in his first hundred hours, you had a live and satisfied customer and maybe soon some more customers from the same area.
I never did learn to fly but spent all of my time in the factory fabricating the steel tubing fuselages and doing other factory work such as helping hang wings, rigging, and doping the fabric covered wings and fuselage. A feller could get on a cheap drunk inhaling the fumes from that nitrate dope. (see American Eagle beginnings) Of course, we had our fun too on our off time. On Sundays some of us were always out at the field helping the pilots who were flying students. This help consisted mostly in having a couple of bottles of bootleg hootch available in the hangar so the Pilots could sneak a drink between flights. This Pilot training was strenuous work. And then at night we would often have to take a visiting Pilot out on a round of the night spots. This was during Prohibition but there was many a bar running all night long in Kansas City, Missouri in those days.
The one man that did more for Aviation than anyone else was Colonel Lindberg. When he made his tour of the country after his flight to Paris he stopped in Kansas City. He came to our factory and really pepped us all up. He even flew one of our new airplanes. That was great publicity for our company. I know he was doing it just to help aviation in general and not just for us. In those days most people were far from convinced that it was safe to ride in an airplane. I think Colonel Lindberg did more for Aviation in this country than any one person. He got everyone in the country air-minded at a time when the aviation industry was really struggling to get started.
Several new airplane factories started up but many did not last long. Two new factories started up in Kansas City alone. One was started by a rich broker named Rearwin and he named it for his two sons, Ken and Royce. The first biplane he built was called the Ken Royce. And then another factory built a high wing monoplane called the Inland Sport, a small high wing monoplane. This company was headed by the President of the local City Ice Company. Neither place built more than two or three airplanes.
After the American Eagle Company went bankrupt around 1930, I worked for Rearwin a short time and also for Inland Sport. The Inland Sport President, Arthur Hargrave, did buy a Lockheed Vega. I like to think I helped a little to sell this Lockheed Vega as the Pilot salesman was an old friend of mine named Herb Putnam who had been one of the old American Eagle Pilots. I introduced him to the customer and Mr. Putnam was kind enough to give me a ride at the Kansas City Airport, in the Vega he was using to demonstrate. I remember it well because Herb set the controls, at one time during the flight, and came and sat in the cabin with us for a moment or two to show us how stable the aircraft was.
Then Benny Howard decided to build a couple of racing airplanes to fly in the National Air Races. At that time Bennie was just about the hottest racing pilot in the country. He was also a pilot for American Airlines, and spent all his spare time with racing. The previous year his "Little Pete" racer had been quite a sensation at the Cleveland National Air Races. He wanted to build two ships just alike and get an Approved Type Certificate on them. You must understand that these were strictly hand made aircraft. He designed and built his own racers. He rented the American Eagle factory building with all its equipment, as the company had gone bankrupt just shortly before and most of the equipment was still available. He hired four or five of us former American Eagle employees to build the ships which he called "Ike and Mike" and he worked right with us whenever he was in town. He spent all of his off time helping us with the work and laying out the plans. He was his own engineer and a mighty good one too. He told us what the top speed of the ships would be and he only missed it by about three miles per hour. He must have spent all his time while flying for the Airlines thinking up new ideas because he sure was full of good suggestions whenever he showed up. He modified as he went along. He bought metal propellers but whittled them down to suit his own ideas and did that work himself as he wanted to be sure they were properly balanced. To my mind Bennie Howard should be classed as one of the truly great Aviation Pioneers. He is also a great guy to know. When completed, "Ike and "Mike were two sleek little low-wing racers all painted white. They were finished in time for the Cleveland Races. After Ike and Mike were shipped to Cleveland, I went to work as an airplane mechanic for Transcontinental and Western Air Lines at their Kansas City base. I obtained my C.A.A. mechanics license in 1931. We had some Lockheeds to work on at one time. I believe a couple of Altair. Seems to me the Altair had a retractable landing gear and was a low-wing monoplane. I worked there until March, 1934 when the government cancelled all air-mail contracts. That put a lot of mechanics out of work, but T. W. A. arranged with Douglas at Santa Monica, California to put most of us to work on the new DC2 and DC3 models that were just getting started in production for the Airlines to replace the old Ford Trimotors.
So with a letter of introduction, (loaded the car with wife, puppy and all our possessions) drove across country to Santa Monica. Later TWA called most of us back to Kansas City. They sent me a wire saying my old job was open if I wanted it. I replied that I was sorry, but I would have to stay in California.
I left Douglas in May 1938 to go to work at the North American Aviation in Inglewood. Only worked there about six months as I got caught in a layoff there in December. Finally in June 1940 a friend of mine who knew Robert Gross, talked to him about me and as a result I finally got on at Lockheed as a senior inspector in Final Assembly. I needed a job badly at the time and I have always felt deeply indebted to Robert Gross and have always tried to be deserving of his trust. Must say that Lockheed was just the place I had been looking for. I had been hearing that Lockheed was the best place to work for from many of my old friends, and I soon found the stories were not exaggerated. After being an airplane tramp for years, I was surprised at the really pleasant working conditions. The Supervisors were kind and considerate, especially my first one, Inspector Supervisor Les Hickman. They insisted I become an inspector when I hired in and I could soon see why. At least I did have some (14 years) previous experience on aircraft and a vast majority of those being hired in 1940 had little or no mechanical experience of any kind.
I was inspector on the Lodestars during the war years and then was transferred into Engineering Flight Test after the last Lodestar was built in old Plant 3. Was Flight Test Inspector on the "Truculent Turtle" until just before it made its record flight. Then was sent to Van Nuys as one of the Flight Test Inspectors on the P-80's. That was when Lockheed got the Speed Record with a P-80. I was in Engineering Flight Test until my retirement in April 1965. (from the Palmdale Plant.) Saw a lot of records broken and delivered many jet aircraft to the Air Force. The work has been interesting and the people have been wonderful to work with. My years with Lockheed have been the best years of my life and the most rewarding in many, many ways. It has been a great honor to work with such people as Tony LeVier, Herman Salmon, Bob Matye, Ellie Hawks, and Ernie Joiner just to mention a few. A more conscientious and dedicated group you will find nowhere else in the country. After all, its people who make a company what it is and Lockheed has the right people. I guess you just have to put in lots of years before you realize just how rich you are when you have such wonderful friends."
-Henry John Van Olst -1965
Henry John Van Olst
Henry John Van Olst 85, a retired inspector for Lockheed, died recently in Lancaster after a five-year illness. Services were held Monday for Mr. Van Olst, a Lancaster resident who was born in Orange City, Iowa.
He is survived by his wife, Celia and a daughter, both of Lancaster; a brother, Egbert of Santa Cruz; sisters, Henrietta Graber, Myrtle Wilsie and Mildred Haines, all of Inverness, Fla.; and two grandchildren.
"My first taste of aviation, if you care to call it that, was in 1916 when I was sixteen years old in my hometown of Orange City, Iowa. My older brother and a couple of neighbor boys built a glider out of bamboo and linen. Looked something like a large box kite meant to fly horizontally. Had two wing panels with a couple of fore and aft bars in the center of the lower panel were the pilot was supposed to support himself by his hands and shift his body forward or backward to go up or down. They decided to try it one moonlight nite in a cow pasture. Since I was the lightest kid around, I was elected to be the pilot. They tied a long rope to it and started running down the hill. They thought they were flying a kite, I guess. You ran along as long as your feet touched the ground and then sailed into the air. When the thing started to climb and was about ten feet off the ground, I got panicky and over shifted forward. Or should I say, over-controlled and came down with quite a bump. Anyway it was what Pilots later called a "good landing", as I walked away from it. The Glider needed some repairs and I felt lucky not to have any broken bones. They didn't get me to try again. They couldn't catch me.
The first airplane I ever saw flown was at our home town County Fair also about this same time. Our town was the County Seat of this farming community. Every year they had a County Fair that was the big event of the fall season. The big special event of the Fair one year before World War I, was an exhibition Airplane Flight. Some brave airman brought in a pusher type aircraft that he took off and landed inside the infield boundaries of the half mile oval dirt track. As I remember it was a Pusher type biplane with the engine supported by struts and wires behind and above the pilot. The Pilot sat out in front of the wings on an arrangement of wires and skids. No cockpit, just a seat of sorts, with wires leading from the control wheel and rudder bar. The Pilot wore leather putties and also goggles to protect his eyes from the rushing wind. When you consider that he had less than a quarter of a mile over rough grassy ground to get that thing off the ground and clear the track and fence around the track you just know he was a brave or crazy and I must say everyone there thought he was nuts. I'll be there wasn't one out of ten of those Iowa farmers who would believe that thing would ever fly. But fly she did. After two or three false starts, with everyone still betting he would never make it, he finally cleared the fence and was flying. I'll bet it got as high as 500 feet. After circling the Fairgrounds awhile, he came in and made a bumpy landing back inside the race track. There were sure a lot of strained necks and sun-burned tonsils that day. I still think he was a brave man.
The first airplane ride I ever had was in 1919 in Iowa City, Iowa. A barn-storming Pilot, I believe his name was Casey Jones, was hopping passengers in a Curtis Oriole for ten dollars a straight ride and fifteen dollars for stunts. I had saved up enough money from my last job as a railroad station clerk. Believe me fifteen dollars as a lot of lettuce for a poor boy to collect in those days. I hung around practically all afternoon watching others taken up for their ten minute hops before I got up enough nerve to approach the pilot and ask for a ride. I intended to spend ten dollars but after we were airborn I decided that a straight ride was too tame and I wasn't as scared as I thought I should be for ten dollars so I turned to the Pilot in the aft cockpit and tried to motion to him that I wanted some stunts. He throttled back the engine so I could hear him and hollered at me asking if I wanted some stunts. I nodded and so he said he'd start with a couple of loops. I didn't trust that flimsy looking strap I had for a seat belt so I reached out and got a firm grip on the two cabin struts in front of me to be sure I could at least hang by my hands if I did start to fall out of the seat. I 'll bet the Pilot got a kick out of that. Of course he did a nice easy tight loop, in fact, three of them. Then he throttled back again and said he would now show me how they got on the tail of a German. Then he did a couple of steep wing-overs. They were more thrilling than the loops. The last thing he did was dive straight for the ground. It was probably a pretty shallow dive but the ground seemed to be coming up awful fast. I thought he wasn't going to pull up in time. That really scared me. I guess I looked kinda green because he asked if I was feeling sick and if this was my first time up. I nodded my head to both questions and so he brought us back in. Fifteen dollars was a lot of money but I considered I got my money worth.
A year or so after that I switched to horses. That is to say I joined the National Guard Cavalry Unit in Iowa City. At this time I also attended the University of Iowa for a little over two years. That was when Iowa football teams were ruling the Big Ten and Howard Jones was their coach. In fact Coach Jones made such a name for himself that USC out bid Iowa and got him to come to Southern California .
This was a time when such airplane companies as Waco, Travelair, Spartan, Eagle Rock and Cessna wee just getting started I that area. Flying fields were usually cow pastures outside of the towns. There were still War Surplus Jennies and some Standards flying around the country. There was practically no market for aircraft as there were few pilots and people were just not air minded.
About May, 1926 a roommate of mine in Kansas City, Missouri who was working as Chief engine mechanic for a new Airplane factory got me a job as a mechanic. I wasn't looking for a ‘big pay, popularity, success' job as the aircraft companies headed their ads later on. At that time I was just hungry and looking for work. The factory was the American Eagle Aircraft Company, Ed Porterfield, President. The factory was housed in an old two story garage building in town and employed about thirty people at first. Of course, none of these people had any previous aircraft experience. The only person that knew anything at all about airplanes was the so-called engineer and the pilot had some flying experience. Employees worked ten hour days and half a day on Saturdays. The upstairs room was the wing department. In those days everything was made by hand, except the engines. The only machines in the place were a couple of small drill presses and an emery wheel or two. Ex-pipe line welders were hired to do the welding on the steel tubing fuselage. My first job was cutting and fitting the steel tubing for the fuselage. The only tools I used were a hacksaw and a file and the company furnished the files and hacksaw blades. The tubing came in twenty foot lengths and each fuselage required the cutting and fitting of 67 pieces and installing them in a jig for the welders to weld together. At first it took over a week for one other man and myself to finish one assembly. About 200 fuselages later we raced the clock and completed one in one hour and fifty seven minutes. A salesman tried to sell the President a power tubing saw about that time and he said he didn't need a power saw as he had a couple of guys who could cut tubing faster by hand. When we got ahead with our work we would help out in the wing department, covering and doping wings or perhaps help install the engine. No one did any squawking about working outside of their classification. We were all working to build an airplane and proud of it. The engines were war surplus Curtis OX-5's which came in crates and were new, but each engine was completely covered with Cosmoline, a very sticky grease that was used to protect the engines during storage. The dirty job was removing that sticky grease before installing the engines. The wings and fuselage had to be trucked outside of town to what was known as Old Richard's Field, and there assembled and flown. Of course this flying field was only an oversized pasture with one old tin hanger.
It took a lot of work to build an airplane in those days and then when it was finished and test-flown you had to sell it. And who could you sell it to? In the late twenties there were very few Pilots, most from WWI, to fly these airplanes after they were built. So the factory started a Flying School to train what they hoped would be their future customers. For $250.00 you could get enough dual training to solo and most students usually soloed in about ten or twelve hours. Young students just worshipped their instructors. Of course, not many of these new Pilots had money enough to buy an airplane and few Pilot jobs were available. So most kept right on working as mechanics or went back to the farm. Some few would get together, pool their money, and buy an airplane to go barnstorming. Or when your super salesman talked some rancher or oil man into buying an airplane it made a job for some flying school graduate. If the new Pilot didn't wash out the airplane in his first hundred hours, you had a live and satisfied customer and maybe soon some more customers from the same area.
I never did learn to fly but spent all of my time in the factory fabricating the steel tubing fuselages and doing other factory work such as helping hang wings, rigging, and doping the fabric covered wings and fuselage. A feller could get on a cheap drunk inhaling the fumes from that nitrate dope. (see American Eagle beginnings) Of course, we had our fun too on our off time. On Sundays some of us were always out at the field helping the pilots who were flying students. This help consisted mostly in having a couple of bottles of bootleg hootch available in the hangar so the Pilots could sneak a drink between flights. This Pilot training was strenuous work. And then at night we would often have to take a visiting Pilot out on a round of the night spots. This was during Prohibition but there was many a bar running all night long in Kansas City, Missouri in those days.
The one man that did more for Aviation than anyone else was Colonel Lindberg. When he made his tour of the country after his flight to Paris he stopped in Kansas City. He came to our factory and really pepped us all up. He even flew one of our new airplanes. That was great publicity for our company. I know he was doing it just to help aviation in general and not just for us. In those days most people were far from convinced that it was safe to ride in an airplane. I think Colonel Lindberg did more for Aviation in this country than any one person. He got everyone in the country air-minded at a time when the aviation industry was really struggling to get started.
Several new airplane factories started up but many did not last long. Two new factories started up in Kansas City alone. One was started by a rich broker named Rearwin and he named it for his two sons, Ken and Royce. The first biplane he built was called the Ken Royce. And then another factory built a high wing monoplane called the Inland Sport, a small high wing monoplane. This company was headed by the President of the local City Ice Company. Neither place built more than two or three airplanes.
After the American Eagle Company went bankrupt around 1930, I worked for Rearwin a short time and also for Inland Sport. The Inland Sport President, Arthur Hargrave, did buy a Lockheed Vega. I like to think I helped a little to sell this Lockheed Vega as the Pilot salesman was an old friend of mine named Herb Putnam who had been one of the old American Eagle Pilots. I introduced him to the customer and Mr. Putnam was kind enough to give me a ride at the Kansas City Airport, in the Vega he was using to demonstrate. I remember it well because Herb set the controls, at one time during the flight, and came and sat in the cabin with us for a moment or two to show us how stable the aircraft was.
Then Benny Howard decided to build a couple of racing airplanes to fly in the National Air Races. At that time Bennie was just about the hottest racing pilot in the country. He was also a pilot for American Airlines, and spent all his spare time with racing. The previous year his "Little Pete" racer had been quite a sensation at the Cleveland National Air Races. He wanted to build two ships just alike and get an Approved Type Certificate on them. You must understand that these were strictly hand made aircraft. He designed and built his own racers. He rented the American Eagle factory building with all its equipment, as the company had gone bankrupt just shortly before and most of the equipment was still available. He hired four or five of us former American Eagle employees to build the ships which he called "Ike and Mike" and he worked right with us whenever he was in town. He spent all of his off time helping us with the work and laying out the plans. He was his own engineer and a mighty good one too. He told us what the top speed of the ships would be and he only missed it by about three miles per hour. He must have spent all his time while flying for the Airlines thinking up new ideas because he sure was full of good suggestions whenever he showed up. He modified as he went along. He bought metal propellers but whittled them down to suit his own ideas and did that work himself as he wanted to be sure they were properly balanced. To my mind Bennie Howard should be classed as one of the truly great Aviation Pioneers. He is also a great guy to know. When completed, "Ike and "Mike were two sleek little low-wing racers all painted white. They were finished in time for the Cleveland Races. After Ike and Mike were shipped to Cleveland, I went to work as an airplane mechanic for Transcontinental and Western Air Lines at their Kansas City base. I obtained my C.A.A. mechanics license in 1931. We had some Lockheeds to work on at one time. I believe a couple of Altair. Seems to me the Altair had a retractable landing gear and was a low-wing monoplane. I worked there until March, 1934 when the government cancelled all air-mail contracts. That put a lot of mechanics out of work, but T. W. A. arranged with Douglas at Santa Monica, California to put most of us to work on the new DC2 and DC3 models that were just getting started in production for the Airlines to replace the old Ford Trimotors.
So with a letter of introduction, (loaded the car with wife, puppy and all our possessions) drove across country to Santa Monica. Later TWA called most of us back to Kansas City. They sent me a wire saying my old job was open if I wanted it. I replied that I was sorry, but I would have to stay in California.
I left Douglas in May 1938 to go to work at the North American Aviation in Inglewood. Only worked there about six months as I got caught in a layoff there in December. Finally in June 1940 a friend of mine who knew Robert Gross, talked to him about me and as a result I finally got on at Lockheed as a senior inspector in Final Assembly. I needed a job badly at the time and I have always felt deeply indebted to Robert Gross and have always tried to be deserving of his trust. Must say that Lockheed was just the place I had been looking for. I had been hearing that Lockheed was the best place to work for from many of my old friends, and I soon found the stories were not exaggerated. After being an airplane tramp for years, I was surprised at the really pleasant working conditions. The Supervisors were kind and considerate, especially my first one, Inspector Supervisor Les Hickman. They insisted I become an inspector when I hired in and I could soon see why. At least I did have some (14 years) previous experience on aircraft and a vast majority of those being hired in 1940 had little or no mechanical experience of any kind.
I was inspector on the Lodestars during the war years and then was transferred into Engineering Flight Test after the last Lodestar was built in old Plant 3. Was Flight Test Inspector on the "Truculent Turtle" until just before it made its record flight. Then was sent to Van Nuys as one of the Flight Test Inspectors on the P-80's. That was when Lockheed got the Speed Record with a P-80. I was in Engineering Flight Test until my retirement in April 1965. (from the Palmdale Plant.) Saw a lot of records broken and delivered many jet aircraft to the Air Force. The work has been interesting and the people have been wonderful to work with. My years with Lockheed have been the best years of my life and the most rewarding in many, many ways. It has been a great honor to work with such people as Tony LeVier, Herman Salmon, Bob Matye, Ellie Hawks, and Ernie Joiner just to mention a few. A more conscientious and dedicated group you will find nowhere else in the country. After all, its people who make a company what it is and Lockheed has the right people. I guess you just have to put in lots of years before you realize just how rich you are when you have such wonderful friends."
-Henry John Van Olst -1965
Henry John Van Olst 85, a retired inspector for Lockheed, died recently in Lancaster after a five-year illness. Services were held Monday for Mr. Van Olst, a Lancaster resident who was born in Orange City, Iowa.
He is survived by his wife, Celia and a daughter, both of Lancaster; a brother, Egbert of Santa Cruz; sisters, Henrietta Graber, Myrtle Wilsie and Mildred Haines, all of Inverness, Fla.; and two grandchildren.
"My first taste of aviation, if you care to call it that, was in 1916 when I was sixteen years old in my hometown of Orange City, Iowa. My older brother and a couple of neighbor boys built a glider out of bamboo and linen. Looked something like a large box kite meant to fly horizontally. Had two wing panels with a couple of fore and aft bars in the center of the lower panel were the pilot was supposed to support himself by his hands and shift his body forward or backward to go up or down. They decided to try it one moonlight nite in a cow pasture. Since I was the lightest kid around, I was elected to be the pilot. They tied a long rope to it and started running down the hill. They thought they were flying a kite, I guess. You ran along as long as your feet touched the ground and then sailed into the air. When the thing started to climb and was about ten feet off the ground, I got panicky and over shifted forward. Or should I say, over-controlled and came down with quite a bump. Anyway it was what Pilots later called a "good landing", as I walked away from it. The Glider needed some repairs and I felt lucky not to have any broken bones. They didn't get me to try again. They couldn't catch me.
The first airplane I ever saw flown was at our home town County Fair also about this same time. Our town was the County Seat of this farming community. Every year they had a County Fair that was the big event of the fall season. The big special event of the Fair one year before World War I, was an exhibition Airplane Flight. Some brave airman brought in a pusher type aircraft that he took off and landed inside the infield boundaries of the half mile oval dirt track. As I remember it was a Pusher type biplane with the engine supported by struts and wires behind and above the pilot. The Pilot sat out in front of the wings on an arrangement of wires and skids. No cockpit, just a seat of sorts, with wires leading from the control wheel and rudder bar. The Pilot wore leather putties and also goggles to protect his eyes from the rushing wind. When you consider that he had less than a quarter of a mile over rough grassy ground to get that thing off the ground and clear the track and fence around the track you just know he was a brave or crazy and I must say everyone there thought he was nuts. I'll be there wasn't one out of ten of those Iowa farmers who would believe that thing would ever fly. But fly she did. After two or three false starts, with everyone still betting he would never make it, he finally cleared the fence and was flying. I'll bet it got as high as 500 feet. After circling the Fairgrounds awhile, he came in and made a bumpy landing back inside the race track. There were sure a lot of strained necks and sun-burned tonsils that day. I still think he was a brave man.
The first airplane ride I ever had was in 1919 in Iowa City, Iowa. A barn-storming Pilot, I believe his name was Casey Jones, was hopping passengers in a Curtis Oriole for ten dollars a straight ride and fifteen dollars for stunts. I had saved up enough money from my last job as a railroad station clerk. Believe me fifteen dollars as a lot of lettuce for a poor boy to collect in those days. I hung around practically all afternoon watching others taken up for their ten minute hops before I got up enough nerve to approach the pilot and ask for a ride. I intended to spend ten dollars but after we were airborn I decided that a straight ride was too tame and I wasn't as scared as I thought I should be for ten dollars so I turned to the Pilot in the aft cockpit and tried to motion to him that I wanted some stunts. He throttled back the engine so I could hear him and hollered at me asking if I wanted some stunts. I nodded and so he said he'd start with a couple of loops. I didn't trust that flimsy looking strap I had for a seat belt so I reached out and got a firm grip on the two cabin struts in front of me to be sure I could at least hang by my hands if I did start to fall out of the seat. I 'll bet the Pilot got a kick out of that. Of course he did a nice easy tight loop, in fact, three of them. Then he throttled back again and said he would now show me how they got on the tail of a German. Then he did a couple of steep wing-overs. They were more thrilling than the loops. The last thing he did was dive straight for the ground. It was probably a pretty shallow dive but the ground seemed to be coming up awful fast. I thought he wasn't going to pull up in time. That really scared me. I guess I looked kinda green because he asked if I was feeling sick and if this was my first time up. I nodded my head to both questions and so he brought us back in. Fifteen dollars was a lot of money but I considered I got my money worth.
A year or so after that I switched to horses. That is to say I joined the National Guard Cavalry Unit in Iowa City. At this time I also attended the University of Iowa for a little over two years. That was when Iowa football teams were ruling the Big Ten and Howard Jones was their coach. In fact Coach Jones made such a name for himself that USC out bid Iowa and got him to come to Southern California .
This was a time when such airplane companies as Waco, Travelair, Spartan, Eagle Rock and Cessna wee just getting started I that area. Flying fields were usually cow pastures outside of the towns. There were still War Surplus Jennies and some Standards flying around the country. There was practically no market for aircraft as there were few pilots and people were just not air minded.
About May, 1926 a roommate of mine in Kansas City, Missouri who was working as Chief engine mechanic for a new Airplane factory got me a job as a mechanic. I wasn't looking for a ‘big pay, popularity, success' job as the aircraft companies headed their ads later on. At that time I was just hungry and looking for work. The factory was the American Eagle Aircraft Company, Ed Porterfield, President. The factory was housed in an old two story garage building in town and employed about thirty people at first. Of course, none of these people had any previous aircraft experience. The only person that knew anything at all about airplanes was the so-called engineer and the pilot had some flying experience. Employees worked ten hour days and half a day on Saturdays. The upstairs room was the wing department. In those days everything was made by hand, except the engines. The only machines in the place were a couple of small drill presses and an emery wheel or two. Ex-pipe line welders were hired to do the welding on the steel tubing fuselage. My first job was cutting and fitting the steel tubing for the fuselage. The only tools I used were a hacksaw and a file and the company furnished the files and hacksaw blades. The tubing came in twenty foot lengths and each fuselage required the cutting and fitting of 67 pieces and installing them in a jig for the welders to weld together. At first it took over a week for one other man and myself to finish one assembly. About 200 fuselages later we raced the clock and completed one in one hour and fifty seven minutes. A salesman tried to sell the President a power tubing saw about that time and he said he didn't need a power saw as he had a couple of guys who could cut tubing faster by hand. When we got ahead with our work we would help out in the wing department, covering and doping wings or perhaps help install the engine. No one did any squawking about working outside of their classification. We were all working to build an airplane and proud of it. The engines were war surplus Curtis OX-5's which came in crates and were new, but each engine was completely covered with Cosmoline, a very sticky grease that was used to protect the engines during storage. The dirty job was removing that sticky grease before installing the engines. The wings and fuselage had to be trucked outside of town to what was known as Old Richard's Field, and there assembled and flown. Of course this flying field was only an oversized pasture with one old tin hanger.
It took a lot of work to build an airplane in those days and then when it was finished and test-flown you had to sell it. And who could you sell it to? In the late twenties there were very few Pilots, most from WWI, to fly these airplanes after they were built. So the factory started a Flying School to train what they hoped would be their future customers. For $250.00 you could get enough dual training to solo and most students usually soloed in about ten or twelve hours. Young students just worshipped their instructors. Of course, not many of these new Pilots had money enough to buy an airplane and few Pilot jobs were available. So most kept right on working as mechanics or went back to the farm. Some few would get together, pool their money, and buy an airplane to go barnstorming. Or when your super salesman talked some rancher or oil man into buying an airplane it made a job for some flying school graduate. If the new Pilot didn't wash out the airplane in his first hundred hours, you had a live and satisfied customer and maybe soon some more customers from the same area.
I never did learn to fly but spent all of my time in the factory fabricating the steel tubing fuselages and doing other factory work such as helping hang wings, rigging, and doping the fabric covered wings and fuselage. A feller could get on a cheap drunk inhaling the fumes from that nitrate dope. (see American Eagle beginnings) Of course, we had our fun too on our off time. On Sundays some of us were always out at the field helping the pilots who were flying students. This help consisted mostly in having a couple of bottles of bootleg hootch available in the hangar so the Pilots could sneak a drink between flights. This Pilot training was strenuous work. And then at night we would often have to take a visiting Pilot out on a round of the night spots. This was during Prohibition but there was many a bar running all night long in Kansas City, Missouri in those days.
The one man that did more for Aviation than anyone else was Colonel Lindberg. When he made his tour of the country after his flight to Paris he stopped in Kansas City. He came to our factory and really pepped us all up. He even flew one of our new airplanes. That was great publicity for our company. I know he was doing it just to help aviation in general and not just for us. In those days most people were far from convinced that it was safe to ride in an airplane. I think Colonel Lindberg did more for Aviation in this country than any one person. He got everyone in the country air-minded at a time when the aviation industry was really struggling to get started.
Several new airplane factories started up but many did not last long. Two new factories started up in Kansas City alone. One was started by a rich broker named Rearwin and he named it for his two sons, Ken and Royce. The first biplane he built was called the Ken Royce. And then another factory built a high wing monoplane called the Inland Sport, a small high wing monoplane. This company was headed by the President of the local City Ice Company. Neither place built more than two or three airplanes.
After the American Eagle Company went bankrupt around 1930, I worked for Rearwin a short time and also for Inland Sport. The Inland Sport President, Arthur Hargrave, did buy a Lockheed Vega. I like to think I helped a little to sell this Lockheed Vega as the Pilot salesman was an old friend of mine named Herb Putnam who had been one of the old American Eagle Pilots. I introduced him to the customer and Mr. Putnam was kind enough to give me a ride at the Kansas City Airport, in the Vega he was using to demonstrate. I remember it well because Herb set the controls, at one time during the flight, and came and sat in the cabin with us for a moment or two to show us how stable the aircraft was.
Then Benny Howard decided to build a couple of racing airplanes to fly in the National Air Races. At that time Bennie was just about the hottest racing pilot in the country. He was also a pilot for American Airlines, and spent all his spare time with racing. The previous year his "Little Pete" racer had been quite a sensation at the Cleveland National Air Races. He wanted to build two ships just alike and get an Approved Type Certificate on them. You must understand that these were strictly hand made aircraft. He designed and built his own racers. He rented the American Eagle factory building with all its equipment, as the company had gone bankrupt just shortly before and most of the equipment was still available. He hired four or five of us former American Eagle employees to build the ships which he called "Ike and Mike" and he worked right with us whenever he was in town. He spent all of his off time helping us with the work and laying out the plans. He was his own engineer and a mighty good one too. He told us what the top speed of the ships would be and he only missed it by about three miles per hour. He must have spent all his time while flying for the Airlines thinking up new ideas because he sure was full of good suggestions whenever he showed up. He modified as he went along. He bought metal propellers but whittled them down to suit his own ideas and did that work himself as he wanted to be sure they were properly balanced. To my mind Bennie Howard should be classed as one of the truly great Aviation Pioneers. He is also a great guy to know. When completed, "Ike and "Mike were two sleek little low-wing racers all painted white. They were finished in time for the Cleveland Races. After Ike and Mike were shipped to Cleveland, I went to work as an airplane mechanic for Transcontinental and Western Air Lines at their Kansas City base. I obtained my C.A.A. mechanics license in 1931. We had some Lockheeds to work on at one time. I believe a couple of Altair. Seems to me the Altair had a retractable landing gear and was a low-wing monoplane. I worked there until March, 1934 when the government cancelled all air-mail contracts. That put a lot of mechanics out of work, but T. W. A. arranged with Douglas at Santa Monica, California to put most of us to work on the new DC2 and DC3 models that were just getting started in production for the Airlines to replace the old Ford Trimotors.
So with a letter of introduction, (loaded the car with wife, puppy and all our possessions) drove across country to Santa Monica. Later TWA called most of us back to Kansas City. They sent me a wire saying my old job was open if I wanted it. I replied that I was sorry, but I would have to stay in California.
I left Douglas in May 1938 to go to work at the North American Aviation in Inglewood. Only worked there about six months as I got caught in a layoff there in December. Finally in June 1940 a friend of mine who knew Robert Gross, talked to him about me and as a result I finally got on at Lockheed as a senior inspector in Final Assembly. I needed a job badly at the time and I have always felt deeply indebted to Robert Gross and have always tried to be deserving of his trust. Must say that Lockheed was just the place I had been looking for. I had been hearing that Lockheed was the best place to work for from many of my old friends, and I soon found the stories were not exaggerated. After being an airplane tramp for years, I was surprised at the really pleasant working conditions. The Supervisors were kind and considerate, especially my first one, Inspector Supervisor Les Hickman. They insisted I become an inspector when I hired in and I could soon see why. At least I did have some (14 years) previous experience on aircraft and a vast majority of those being hired in 1940 had little or no mechanical experience of any kind.
I was inspector on the Lodestars during the war years and then was transferred into Engineering Flight Test after the last Lodestar was built in old Plant 3. Was Flight Test Inspector on the "Truculent Turtle" until just before it made its record flight. Then was sent to Van Nuys as one of the Flight Test Inspectors on the P-80's. That was when Lockheed got the Speed Record with a P-80. I was in Engineering Flight Test until my retirement in April 1965. (from the Palmdale Plant.) Saw a lot of records broken and delivered many jet aircraft to the Air Force. The work has been interesting and the people have been wonderful to work with. My years with Lockheed have been the best years of my life and the most rewarding in many, many ways. It has been a great honor to work with such people as Tony LeVier, Herman Salmon, Bob Matye, Ellie Hawks, and Ernie Joiner just to mention a few. A more conscientious and dedicated group you will find nowhere else in the country. After all, its people who make a company what it is and Lockheed has the right people. I guess you just have to put in lots of years before you realize just how rich you are when you have such wonderful friends."
-Henry John Van Olst -1965
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