| This article originally appeared in the Eagle on Monday, February 11, 1985. |
By Joe Earle
The Wichita Eagle
 |
Olive Ann and Walter Beech inspect some of the military planes manufactured by their company. (File photo) |
In 1936, Beech Aircraft Co. was 4 years old and looking for a showcase
for the “Staggerwing,” its speedy but unusual-looking airplane.
Walter and Olive Ann Beech, who had founded the company, decided to enter
their plane in the coast-to-coast race of the National Air Races, an event
certain to attract the newest and fastest planes.
Then Olive Ann Beech had another suggestion, one met with some skepticism
at first. Have a woman pilot fly the race, she said.
“I decided that would be more spectacular… ” she said last week
during a rare interview at her east Wichita office.
She was right. That September, Louise Thaden, a Wichita native,
accompanied by navigator Blanche Noyes of California, won the cross-country
race. They flew from Bendix, N.J., to Los Angeles in 14 hours and 55 minutes,
stopping only once, in Wichita, to refuel. They landed more than a half-hour
before the second-place plane. The race won pilot and plane international
fame.
The Bendix Trophy now is just one of dozens of honors collected by the
Beeches and the planes built by the company that Olive Ann Beech and her
husband started in the depths of the Depression, that they headed together
until his death in 1950 and that she ran for more than 30 years after his
death.
The Beeches have been installed in the Aviation Hall of Fame. Olive Ann
Beech was the first woman awarded the National Aeronautic Association’s Wright
Brothers Memorial Trophy, which has been called aviation’s highest honor.
In 1943, the New York Times picked her as one of the 12 most distinguished
women in America. Thirty years later, Fortune Magazine called her one of the
10 highest-ranking women executives in major corporations. In 1965, she was
chosen “Outstanding Woman in the Field of Business” by Who’s Who of American
Women.
Olive Ann Beech, 81, now bristles at a question about whether it was
difficult to be a woman executive in a business dominated by men. The question
irritates her, she said.
“If you enjoy your work, all you have to do is be capable and take the
pitfalls along with the good… We had a fine product. I understood the
work to be done. I understood the job.”
Few people, if any, disagree. From its inception with a handful of
employees, Beech Aircraft grew to employ thousands and sell millions of
dollars worth of airplanes. The company, which merged into Raytheon in 1980,
is Wichita’s fourth-largest employer.
Throughout Beech Aircraft’s history, Olive Ann Beech watched over the
business side of the company, friends and admirers say. Her husband was an
outgoing, rambunctious, barnstorming pilot-turned-salesman-turned-executive
who continually sought to build better airplanes and sell the world on flying.
She was a shy, soft-spoken, dignified and decisive executive who started as a
secretary-bookkeeper and was savvy about business.
“She was the one that kept trying to get the money together to pay the
bills,” said Frank Hedrick, her nephew, who worked with her at Beech for more
than 40 years and who succeeded her in 1968 as president of Beech Aircraft.
“She’s very astute and very pleasant to deal with,” said Paul Woods,
retired president of the First National Bank. “But when she makes up her mind,
she won’t give…
“When she told a person working for her the way she wanted it done, she
didn’t want any rag-chewing about it. She wanted it done,” Woods said.
Through the years, she has been just as decisive about keeping her
privacy. She fiercely protects her family from publicity – she has two
daughters, one who lives in Wichita and one who lives in California – and
rarely grants interviews or makes public statements.
In one such interview in her stylish, cream-and-light-blue office at Beech
Hedrick Investments in east Wichita, she was surrounded by signs of an
aviation career that began 60 years ago. She wore a model Staggerwing as a
lapel pin. A pen stand on her desk supported a small, metal model of the
Travel Air Manufacturing Co.’s “Mystery S,” a racer that stunned the aviation
world with a surprise win at the 1929 National Air Races and set dozens of
speed records in the next few years. A table beside her desk was decorated
with stickers commemorating Apollo flights to the moon.
A large portrait of her late husband – whom she refers to in conversation
as “Mr. Beech” – hung over her desk.
She answered questions about her career with brief, direct comments and
self-effacing humor.
She shares office space with Hedrick and still goes to the office several
days a week. Not every day, she said, but most days. She is a director at
Beech and is president of the Beech Foundation and the Beech Memorial
Foundation, tax-exempt organizations that make contributions to community
groups and schools. She has been actively involved in community activities
ranging from the Wichita Symphony to the United Way to the Wichita Area
Chamber of Commerce.
She also is a multi-millionaire. In 1982, when Raytheon Co. took over
Beech Aircraft, her stock was estimated to be worth at least $16 million.
But Olive Ann Mellor Beech’s aviation career started almost by chance. It
was 1924. Miss Mellor, 21, born Sept. 25, 1903, at Waverly in eastern Kansas,
was looking for a job.
She applied for a bookkeeping job at Travel Air Manufacturing Co., a
brand-new airplane-building company set up in Wichita by Walter Beech and
Lloyd Stearman, joined a short time later by Clyde Cessna. She was hired.
Olive Ann Mellor was Travel Air’s 12th employee, the only employee of the
company who didn’t know how to fly an airplane, she said. “I didn’t have to.”
In fact, she didn’t know much at all about airplanes, she said. She had
someone make her a skeleton drawing of an airplane and label all the parts,
she said, so she could use the right terms when writing letters for the
company. “We had lots of fun with my ‘dictionary.’ “
Everyone pitched in around the factory, she said. It was exciting. But
“it wasn’t any picnic. We all worked hard. We had to keep abreast of the
times.”
As Travel Air grew, Stearman and Cessna split off to start their own
companies which grew into Boeing Military Airplane Co. and Cessna Aircraft Co.
Miss Mellor advanced from bookkeeper to office manager to Mr. Beech’s
secretary.
In 1929, Travel Air merged into Curtiss-Wright, a conglomerate, and become
Curtiss-Wright Airplane Co. Walter Beech was named vice president of
Curtiss-Wright Sales Co. and headed the airplane division.
The Beeches were married in Wichita on Feb. 24, 1930. They then moved to
Curtiss-Wright offices in New York. They later moved to St. Louis. Olive Ann
Beech was not actively involved in business.
In 1932, the Beeches decided to return to Wichita to start their own
company. “Mr. Beech didn’t like big companies like Curtiss-Wright,” she said.
“He wanted to run his own show.”
She said she didn’t give much thought to the problems of starting a new
company at a time when most airplane companies were closing, not opening. “Mr.
Beech thought about that,” she said. “(But) he had this dream and was going to
do it. He probably didn’t know how long the Depression was going to last.”
The first few years were difficult, she said. They sold few airplanes. “We
had to crawl back up that ladder.”
In 1937, the company bought the old Travel Air factory and moved in. That
same year, Beech Aircraft introduced its second model, the Model 18
Beechcraft. The plane turned out to be one of the company’s most successful
airplanes. The Model 18 was produced for 33 years.
The company’s annual sales first reached $1 million in 1938.
With World War II, the airplane-building business changed. The military
needed airplanes and needed them fast. Beech, like other airplane-builders,
expanded dramatically, jumping from several hundred employees to several
thousand. Wartime employment peaked at about 14,000.
In 1940, Walter Beech was struck by illness and hospitalized for nearly a
year. Olive Ann Beech guided the company through the wartime production
expansion by arranging several financial packages, including a $50 million
loan from a syndicate of 36 banks.
During the war, she also started what became one of her trademarks –
hanging flags around the Beech offices.
“During World War II we used to have a lot of fun with them,” she said.
“I had a whole series of them. We used them throughout the years. When an
executive did something spectacular, we flew flags over his door.”
One flag had a bright yellow, smiling sun on a blue field and said, “Oh
Happy Day!” Another had a red field with a noncommittal sun and said “Fair!”
Another had a bolt of lightning. Another was black, had a crying sun, and said
“Woe!!”
The small flags flew in her office. A larger version of the “Oh Happy Day”
flag flew on the flagstaff outside the plant.
Asked whether the flags expressed her mood or the mood of the company’s
business, she said, “Both.”
She still keeps the flags at her office and has stickers with the same
designs in her desk drawer.
Another of her trademarks has been the color light blue. It’s the color of
her stationery, of the stenciled patterns on the walls of her office, of
Wedgewood trays placed around her desk. Her cars, the seats in her airplane,
even the ribbons on her in-flight lunch boxes have been light blue.
“It just happened to be my color. It just happened to be a color I like.”
After a lifetime working with companies that built airplanes, she has never
learned to fly, she said. “I didn’t have to,” she said. “… I only drive
when I have to. I’m not the courageous woman.”
She stepped down as chairman of Beech in 1982, two years after the company
was merged into Raytheon Co., a company she calls “bigger than big.”
She continues as chairman emeritus of Beech and has no comment on the way
the company is now operated, except, “I think they have to do their job the
way they see it.”
Of the “Starship,” a lightweight composite plane now in development, “they
have a spectacular airplane now, if it comes to be produced,” she said.
Back in the early days, she never realized how the aviation business would
grow, she said.
“We had work to do and went on our way. I’m sure the late Mr. Beech would
be amazed it went from a $2 million to nearly a billion (dollar business). Our
people got to throwing billions… ‘
“I would say I was very fortunate throughout my life that I didn’t have
to do anything that I didn’t like. I enjoyed what I did.
©The Wichita Eagle