It was an interesting circumstance that the particular group should have joined up in the new outfit. For I had put the bee on Chance Vought that had produced the prescription for the Pratt and Whitney Wasp, and had later sent Bill Boeing to Fred Rentschler for the engines for his mail planes, the very engines that had made possible a tidy profit out of a venture that Bill’s competition had called impossible. And save for the Martin torpedo bombers, this group had supplied all the equipment for our carriers, including the engines for the Martins. And the marriage seemed natural from another point of view: the parties at interest were all pioneers with a zeal for aviation and they had all played the game according to Hoyle. On arrival at the Biltmore I found another old-timer in their company. Thomas Hamilton, like Bill Boeing, had grown up in Seattle, but unlike Bill Boeing he had not had money to spend on airplanes. Instead he had taught himself to fly in a crate of his own construction and had then built his own business. On the outbreak of World War I, Tom had rushed to Washington to get a contract to build airplanes but had been diverted to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the home of furniture manufacture, to make propellers. He had, however, established his own Metalplane Company and built a high-wing metal monoplane that, he claimed, antedated the Ford. And when the new United Aircraft and Transport Corporation had looked around for a propeller company to round out their line, they had taken over Tom Hamilton, his Hamilton Aero Manufacturing Company, and his Hamilton Metalplane Company. Tom, like every other Tom, Dick, and Harry of that time, had been in the stock market but, unlike some of them, had done well. At dinner that evening, I noted the changes that had come over these men. The time had been when they had scratched gravel for the last trace of “color” that might lie close to bedrock. Now they flew high, wide, and handsome on the crest of the current boom. They had flown in aboard their own Ford Trimotor; they had taken a suite at the Biltmore and now they ordered the exotic foods on the menu. One advantage of the naval service was that much of this had passed us by; we had security, but no wealth. These men had wealth but little security, and even at the height of the great boom of the late ’twenties, Fred Rentschler, at least, clearly foresaw the ultimate outcome. To him the whole thing was crazy—a house of cards built on a foundation of sand, foredoomed to collapse at the first real tremor. Meanwhile they shop-talked back and forth, discussing their current management problems, one of which seemed to concern Tom Hamilton and his propeller company.