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That began at my father’s Spartan Aircraft Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He hadn’t
meant to buy it. He had bought control of Skelly Oil, centered in Tulsa, and Spartan
turned out to be one of its holdings. Then came Pearl Harbor. My father was 48
years old, and had been a yachtsman. He took a navigation course at USC along with
kids half his age, led the class, and volunteered for sea duty. His old friend James
Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, steered him to Spartan instead. Spartan could make
training planes and could train pilots. My father accepted. He paid himself a salary of
one dollar a year.
He had decisions to make when MacArthur and Matzushita signed the peace treaty.
The training planes were not meant to leave the ground. Spartan lacked the
capacity to make the real thing up to competition. The demand for training planes
pretty much ended with the war. My father could sell out or find another use. He
decided to make house trailers. It worked. | had lived in a Spartan trailer in the
Neutral Zone, like the rest of the senior staff, when | stayed at our Wafra oil field
rather than the house at Mina Saud. We and the market had liked them fine.
Herschel Shelton had been one of my father’s right-hand men during the conversion
to trailers. He said that the place to look for him was never in his office. You would
find him in overalls under a trailer on the factory floor, with a welding iron or
riveting gun. He liked to be able to do any job his workers did. How else would he
know if they were doing it right?
I stayed in my father’s house at Spartan, as at Mina Saud. It stood at the opposite end
of the runway from the offices and trailer plant. I drove another seasoned Cadillac
that my father had left in case he came back. Max Balfour, who ran Spartan, called it
a clunker. It clunked me around the countryside on weekends, or to Jamil’s
restaurant or Cap Balfour’s house for dinner, or downtown to the movies or
symphony or opera house. Cap (Captain) Balfour had flown in World War I, and
showed crippled hands from when his plane caught fire. He was cranky, urbane and
razor-sharp. His problem was that Spartan couldn’t seem to come out in the black.
He worshipped my father, and figured he had let him down. He seems to have
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