Even naval officers, who up until then had seemed to pride themselves on a certain aloofness to the marts of trade, now began dabbling in “the market.” Profits here were sure and swift—provided always you were on the inside. One of our friends had an inside tip on a new graveyard to be constructed within the city limits of Los Angeles, with the advice and consent of the City Council, where profits were quick and sure. The harvest for this enterprise was guaranteed to be as sure as—say, death and taxes. This friend looked down his nose at another man whose mouselike wife had been inveigled by a door-to-door salesman into buying a lot in Long Beach, California. The extra burden of paying for this “investment” was about to break the couple down when someone poked a hole in a nearby piece of ground and the oil field on Signal Hill was born. Now the young wife followed the young husband’s battleship around in her private yacht. But none of this seemed to discourage creative enterprise, like the rising aircraft manufacturing and air-transport industries. Among the newcomers in the manufacturing field, Donald Douglas and “Dutch” Kindleberger began to stand out. Prior to their advent, most of the newcomers had been alumni of the great Curtiss Aeroplane Company, of Garden City, Long Island. But Glenn L. Martin, an early bird who had pioneered American twin-engined bombers with his famous Martin bomber, had collected a stable of promising colts; Don Douglas, Dutch Kindleberger, and Larry Bell had worked for him until some temperamental disagreement sent all three on independent projects. After that, each concentrated his efforts to outdoing the others, and especially the old master, Glenn Martin. We in BUAERO, sitting as we did at the crossroads, could always get the dirt and low-down from the visiting firemen and, after sifting it and appraising it, use our own judgment in how to make it pay dividends in new development. Intercompany competition mixed up with interservice competition and whirled about in the old slipstream might look disorderly and inefficient, but it was motivated by highly creative impulses. Admiral Moffett kept his own Bureau on its toes by involving us in all sorts of racing or other projects. Back in Bruce Leighton’s time, BUAERO had given Don Douglas the job of building an experimental single-engined Liberty torpedo-bomber plane—one with extra large tanks for long-range flying. But after Don had produced a masterpiece, the Army Air Service seized upon the type while the Navy dawdled, and the Army had completed the first ’round-the-world flight. This job, a masterpiece of planning and operations, proved such a pronounced success that it gave great impetus to other projects. It also gave the Navy such pain that Admiral Moffett never got over it.