Throughout this tortured period of indecision, my wife had taken no other position than the traditional one of the Navy wife, “Whither thou goest!” She had listened with her usual patience to my reasoning, but reserved to herself the intuitive process that proved in the end to be right. For it was only after we had been out of the service some time that I learned a fact that would have made the decision far easier, one that she had sensed all along. In civil life we were free. No longer were we social and professional slaves to every officer and his wife who happened, by accident of date of appointment or scholastic standing at Annapolis, to outrank us on the precedence list. But one basic fact was clear; the slipstream that had sucked me into naval aviation had now blasted me out of the service I had loved, and into civil life. CHAPTER NINETEEN Necessity, the Mother of Creation When, shortly after the first of January, 1930, Tom Hamilton took me up to Milwaukee to look over the Hamilton Aero plant there, the stock market crash had already enveloped the country in a cold chill. Along the Northwestern Railway’s right of way, cold smoke stacks pointed dead fingers toward leaden skies and fear gripped the land. However, we found Tom’s modern factory still bright and cheerful for it had been well equipped and was now well run by Arvid Nelson, its manager. While the civilian demand for propellers had collapsed with the boom, military business had continued firm under the five-year Army and Navy building programs. It was when we went down to Pittsburgh to look over Standard Steel that I got a jolt. The plant, located across the river in Homestead in a former cap-pistol factory, was as drab and cheerless as Pittsburgh itself. With many of the steel mills down as a result of the market collapse, there was less smog than usual along the Monongahela, but the grime of the past still clung to treeless slopes. After a look over the situation there it was clear we must cut the consolidated propeller company back to a size suited to the reduced demand. While the plant in Milwaukee appeared the better of the two, the State of Wisconsin had a heavy corporation income tax that would have to be included in costs; and besides, Milwaukee lay off the main east-west line of rail communication. At Pittsburgh, Harry Kraeling had just completed a new three-story loft building in which we might concentrate the machinery of both companies, and the plant had a siding to the main line of the Pennsylvania. Here, about halfway between Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio, was a situation that offered such advantages that we decided to consolidate the best equipment and the most skilled workmen there. We would then abandon all excess facilities and endeavor to set up a plant with a break-even point calculated to keep us in the black even with the greatly reduced military production level.