Memoir excerpt linking a Tulsa industrialist to James Forrestal and WWII-era Spartan Aircraft conversions

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 Chapter 1: Recollections 1/06/16 4 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010920