Writing about my experiences flying on company passes and about the role of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in commercial aviation, gets me thinking about the eight months I spent working for a fixed based operator (FBO) at San Carlos Airport in California. I was a recent college graduate with a BA in sociology. My plans for graduate school had fallen through at the last minute because there was a recession and funding had been cut for the program I had been accepted into. My only option was to come home to my parents and start looking for work.
Not one of my college professors had ever talked about the kinds of work that a degree in sociology might support. If they talked about anything it was graduate school, and at the time I didn't consider graduate school in sociology to be an option. Years later I learned about all kinds of jobs in local, state and federal government that welcomed folks with sociology degrees. But at the time, in 1973, I only knew to look for businesses. Luckily I had strong typing skills, so I went looking for jobs that would use that skill.
Something that younger people don't realize is that in 1973, almost all jobs advertised in local papers were categorized by gender. There were two separate columns - jobs for hire male, and jobs for hire female. Rules were rigid and a young woman could not just go after jobs advertised for males. I was dogged, every day for two weeks, I got up, opened up the morning paper, circled all the jobs I thought I might possibly qualify for, then got in the car and drove to each and every location. Some required a call ahead and an appointment, but most one could just show up and fill out the employment form. Most employers gave you a typing test (which I aced), and many also gave a general knowledge test (which I also aced), but in the end, almost all of them hired a young woman with formal secretarial training over the young woman with a BA in sociology. In those two weeks I applied for at least 60 jobs.
At the end of the first week, one of the places that I interviewed was a small aviation company called Cherry Tree Aviation at the San Carlos airport about 10 minute freeway drive from my parents home. The president, John Pritchard, of the company which was very small, interviewed me and liked me. He was particularly interested in the fact that I'd gone to Oberlin College. He had spent more than a decade working for the FAA at the big tracking station just outside Oberlin and knew the community and the college well. But in the end he told me they decided to go with a young lady who had formal secretarial training. And I went on to another week of job hunting.
The second week did not provide any job offers either. I was not too discouraged, but rather, more determined than ever to start looking anew the next week. But that Saturday, I got an unexpected call from Mr. Pritchard. He said that the young woman they had hired had not worked out and was I still interested in working for Cherry Tree, if so I should come to work at 8 am on Monday. He told me on the phone that I might not have formal secretarial training, but he knew Oberlin College and if I was an Oberlin graduate than I ought to be able to learn anything I needed on the job.
So the third Monday in June 1973, I started working at Cherry Tree Aviation. A fixed base operator was the workhorse of general aviation in those days. Cherry Tree Aviation did multiple things in the field of aviation. First, the company had two pilots and two planes that could be chartered for a wide range of purposes. Second, they owned hangars that could be rented by individual plane owners to keep their planes, and they owned tie-down spaces (places outside to keep a private plane). Third, they had a professional mechanic who maintained their own planes but who could also do work for private individuals with planes. The mechanic was allocated a large hangar for maintenance use. Fourth, they rented space to even smaller, specialized aviation businesses: a parachute jump and skydiving school, a small flight instruction school (who had one plane and two instructors), and a two person helicopter company that did charter work. Fifth, they operated aviation fuel tanks and fuel trucks that scouted the field constantly looking for visiting planes to fuel. Sixth, Cherry Tree entered into a partnership with a man who sold planes, both new ones for Piper Aircraft and used planes.
Technically I was hired to work for the aircraft salesman, a man who went by the name "Tom" Sawyer. That actually should have been a hint about the man's character. I was to be his secretary, do all of his correspondence, answer his phone, etc. I had a desk in the central office area, where everyone gathered for coffee and conversation, and the other secretary for the company answer phones. As it turned out, there being a recession going on, plane sales were almost non-existent, and so I got called upon to do lots of other things for anyone who needed something done. Mr. Pritchard would ask me to help him come up with advertising campaigns, and have me work on promotional materials. The pilots would ask me to do paper work for them. Even then I often ran out of things to do. So I started volunteering to do things like learning how to move the planes around and to wash them. I would bring clothes to change into for that, from my "office dress".
It was the kind of business where one could go many days in a row without anything much happening, and then something would happen and we'd have multiple requests for charter work. Much of the charter work we did would come without any warning. For example, we did charter ambulance flights for the military. It took me a long time to understand what was going on. This was still during the Vietnam War years, and it was not at all uncommon for young men who were tired of serving to go AWOL and run off into the rural areas of California. Then something would happen to them, they'd break a leg, or get sick, or get in an accident, and suddenly local law enforcement or hospitals would notify the military that they had an AWOL soldier or sailor in their jurisdiction. The military would hire us to go get their wayward men. Depending upon the severity of the illness or injury a nurse or maybe even two nurses would have to be hired for the flight from the local nurses registry. There would be a sudden flurry of phone calls and arrangements to be made and the main secretary would need my help to handle all of it.
After I'd been with Cherry Tree for about six months, the Navy called us with a job to retrieve a man in a full-body cast (he'd had a motorcycle accident) from Chico. We were given several days to plan for this, and it was going to be on a Saturday, so the pilot asked me if I'd like to ride "shot-gun" with him, get to go flying on a beautiful day. It was a gorgeous day, the sky was so blue and it went on forever, there were no clouds anywhere and you could see great distances, that thing that pilots call CAVU (ceiling and visibility unlimited). I actually got a chance to fly the plane for a while, and do some simple slow banks and turns. It was an amazing day. We picked up the man and a nurse at Chico and came home. The man was quiet and said almost nothing. When the flight was over, and the man had been placed into a Navy ambulance and taken away, the pilot reached under the seat I'd been sitting in and pulled out a pistol. It turned out I actually was riding "shotgun" so to speak. He explained that while they had never had a problem, these men were in fact fugitives and might fight to get away. The only reason that he had decided it was safe to bring me, rather than the other pilot who was also former military and trained with firearms was that they knew the man was in a full-body cast and could barely move.
Another kind of charter flight that we often did was for news organizations, TV stations and newspapers when there was breaking news and the reporters wanted to get there quickly. These also were things that often happened with little warning and involved an all hands on deck response. During my time at Cherry Tree Aviation there were several earthquakes in nearby parts of northern California, for which TV camera crews were eager to get footage. One time when the task of talking to the news departments and scheduling flights for crews, I made a rookie error. I put the camera crews from two competing network affiliates in one plane. No news center wants their aerial footage to be from exactly the same angle as that of their competitors it would seem.
Not only was there a recession happening, but in October of 1973 an event occurred that rocked the small aviation industry, as well as many other industries that relied on oil from the middle east. On October 6, 1973 (the war started on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur and also was in the middle of the holiest month of the Muslim world Ramadan) an alliance of Arab nations lead by Egypt and Syria made a surprise attack on Israel. The war lasted until a truce was called on October 25, 1973. One of the many consequences of this war was an embargo by Arab oil producing states against the U.S. and other nations that had supported Israel in the conflict. The oil embargo went into effect almost immediately. Supply of aviation fuel was dramatically cut and prices skyrocketed. Aviation fuel sales had been a major portion of Cherry Tree Aviations revenue. Suddenly, the company only had enough fuel for their own planes, and none to sell. Not only did they need to stop selling fuel, they needed to sell their fuel trucks and lay-off all the young women who worked the fuel trucks.
A little side note here: selling aviation fuel at a small airport is a very competitive business, at least two other fixed base operators at the very small San Carlos field also had fuel trucks running around the field trying to sell fuel. John Pritchard had very effective, if highly sexist idea. All the other operators hired young men to run their trucks. Cherry Tree Aviation not only hired attractive young women (college age or just out of college), they also outfitted them in bright blue hotpants (the term in 1970s for tight, very short shorts). It worked, until there was no more fuel to sell.
The oil embargo affected the companies income in multiple ways - including the cost of heating the building. The decision was made to lay off not only the young women who ran the fuel trucks, but also several of the other workers deemed non-essential, that included the young man who had done all the janitorial work (which was picked up by all of us who were left), the accountant, and the young woman who was the main secretary (who had been there for months before me). Pritchard justified laying her off, instead of me, by pointing out that I was really Tom Sawyer's employee, not Cherry Tree's, but it was really because he had come to find me a far more useful, flexible and interested employee. Moreover, he knew I'd do things like wash planes and get dirty, and the original secretary wouldn't do anything outside the office. I was also paid less, minimum wage, which was $1.80 an hour at that time. Note that the President took a salary only equivalent to $2 an hour for 40 hours a week, despite all the work he did outside those hours. Only the pilots and the mechanic were paid more, because the company couldn't operate without them. I know what folks were paid, because my new chores included doing the books and the payroll.
My job became more and more interesting, and more and more varied. Mr. Pritchard would often sit down with me or call me into his office to talk about the business and the problems that it faced. He talked a lot about the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). It was almost impossible for a small FBO to land a contract with the CAB for a regular "route" between two locations. Mr. Pritchard wanted Cherry Tree to start regular service between San Carlos and Reno, to take gamblers every weekend. We could do charter flights for people to anywhere, but the real money came from having regular flights, where one could fill all the seats and charge less per person. The big airlines also chaffed at the control of the CAB. The CAB limited the number of airlines and the number of transcontinental routes. Any large airline that was awarded one of the plumb transcontinental routes (like SFO to NYC or LAX to NYC) was also required to serve a number of smaller markets that often lost them money. The CAB guaranteed that every community that had an airport that could handle large planes would be served by the large airlines, even if they did so through subsidiary, regional, commuter airlines. No city would get left behind, even if they weren't a money making market for the big airlines. But smaller air companies, like Cherry Tree, didn't get a chance at tackling those smaller markets either.
Mr. Pritchard felt that the solution to Cherry Tree's problems was to be bought out by a somewhat larger aviation corporation. By December 1973, Mr. Pritchard had found a buy, and we became a subsidiary of a larger company. Now added to my work was writing reports of income and expenditures, activities and services and sending them daily to the "head" office. They took over accounting functions like issuing paychecks, all I did was report everyone's hours and the pilots' flight hours. I still had all my other responsibilities, manning the phones, scheduling charters, finding nurses for the ambulance flights, moving planes, washing planes, and being Mr. Pritchard's sounding board.
I haven't said much about the man I officially worked for, "Tom" Sawyer. He was a slick operator, who craved to be much richer than he was. But he had not been very successful as a plane salesman, not for lack of trying, but simply because the market just wasn't there. Shortly before Christmas 1973, about the time that Cherry Tree was being taken over by the larger company. We became aware that Tom who had been a cosigner on the company checks, had cashed a couple of large checks (several thousand dollars each) with only his signature on them (not legal) and one of them had bounced. This was brought to our attention by the San Mateo County Sheriff who had come to arrest him for writing a bad check. Tom was not in the office that day, and none of us knew where he was. While the Sheriff was standing there talking with people, the phone rang and I answered it and it was someone from Pan American Airlines wanting to talk to Mr. Sawyer to tell him that his flight to South Korea was going to be delayed by several hours. We were able to ascertain that Tom was at the airport already waiting for his flight, so I gave the Sheriff all the information, flight number, gate number and the Sheriff talked to the airline agent to see if they could locate and keep an eye on him. Then off the Sheriff went to arrest Tom. I do not know how the story ended, other than Tom Sawyer was no longer associated with Cherry Tree Aviation after that day.
Unfortunately, the sale of Cherry Tree Aviation to the larger company did not really help its bottom line. By Valentine's Day 1974, the decision was made to close the business down, and I lost my first post college job. Luckily I met a lot of people, who kept their planes in our hangers or used our charter services, through working there. One of them owned a small manufacturing company, Sanderson Racing Headers (which does still exist!) and needed a new bookkeeper. His current bookkeeper was pregnant and would be leaving the job before her baby was born. So I got signed up to work for Sanderson, before my job at Cherry Tree Aviation ended.
Couple of little add-ons:
One of the people who hangered his plane with us was a man named Stephen Bechtel, who drove the most beautiful Lamborghini (with a personalized license plate that said STEEL) which he left in the hangar while he was out flying. I was in love with that Lamborghini. I didn't know until many years later who he actually was and all the things, many of them reprehensible for which Bechtel Corporation was responsible.
Cherry Tree Aviation rented space to a two person helicopter company called Golden Gate Helicopters. The company consisted of the owner/pilot and his secretary/assistant who could also fly. They did a lot of television and movie work, including work for the very popular show The Streets of San Francisco staring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, both of whom I got to meet on a couple of occasions when they came down to fly out of San Carlos with the chopper. For one episode The Streets of San Francisco even chartered one of Cherry Trees Planes to be the "bad guy escaping" so the whole camera crew, etc. were at San Carlos Airport for that.
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