King Lear
He was a great stout paradox of a man, brilliantly creative yet restless and insecure, lighting up skies with his inventions yet repeatedly facing bankruptcy, founding major corporations yet proving unable to run them, succeeding repeatedly with self-taught technical intuition in a world of technologists with advanced degrees. A high school dropout, he was awarded numerous honorary doctorates. A salesman of the first order, he left at his death a company that would wind up nearly half a billion dollars in debt. All doors opened for him, but in his own home he repeatedly threatened suicide.
He cherished and depended on the love of his wife of thirty-six years, yet lived the life of an international playboy. He spent his career seeking path-breaking inventions that would secure his fame, but when his name indeed became a household word it was for an exercise in style and pizzazz—the Lear jet—rather than for anything truly innovative.
William Powell Lear was born in 1902 in Hannibal, Missouri, and lived there for eleven years. At the outset he had to face the problem of being extremely intelligent, for while America lavishes opportunities upon children with strong athletic skills, those with strong intellectual skills usually must shift for themselves. Such children can hardly help being different. Their interests are not the same as those of their classmates, and they may be bored with what the people around them find enthralling. They can easily raise antagonisms or fail to make friends simply by being themselves—inquisitive, expressive, and bright in ways others find unfamiliar.
Certainly the human psyche is tough, and most young geniuses grow up to live reasonably normal lives. But the young Lear had a particular problem in his mother. She spent his earliest years repeatedly walking out on her husband, taking Willy along, and living with a series of men. Then, in 1908, she met the man she wanted and stayed with him. But the boy, six years old, found little stability. Over and over, in subsequent years, his mother abused him severely, raging at him, lashing him with vicious insults, beating him until her man pleaded with her to stop.
The family, such as it was, moved to Chicago in 1913. There the lad found escape in the world of technology and books. Here was no capriciousness or unpredictability or abuse; if you learned what you needed to know and did things properly, they would work as you wished. By age twelve he had built his first radio receiver, with earphones, and had assembled a telegraph. He had few friends, but one of them had a father who worked with electricity; in the friend’s basement he spent long afternoons tinkering with coils and batteries. He also discovered the local library, where he read everything he could on electricity, along with the adventure stories of Tom Swift and the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger. At seventeen, until his mother stopped him, he began hanging around the local airport. He did chores for the mechanics; he admired the pilots and once in a while wangled a flight. Already he had all the formal education he would ever receive, for he had dropped out of high school in his freshman year.
This was the boy who would be father to the man. Having lacked warmth and affection in his youth, he would surround himself with the sycophants and admirers who readily flock to a man with money. Denied the ordinary reassurances of a normal upbringing, he would live a life of compulsiveness, demanding to have it all. Abused as a child, he would abuse the women who loved him with infidelities, and the engineers and managers he employed by treating them as lackeys rather than as valued colleagues. He would dress nattily, spend money freely, go out of his way to win people’s attention—and through it all he would nourish an unslakable insecurity, a driving fear of being worthless and inadequate.
He craved attention, wealth, the gratification of his wishes. Because attaining these would depend on other people, he quickly learned the value of a welldressed appearance and a confident, self-assured manner. These, along with his self-taught background in electronics, launched him into the world of radio in the 1920s. It was a yeasty, entrepreneurial world, like automobiles fifteen years earlier or personal computers fifty years later. Radio lacked a Detroit or a Silicon Valley, however; almost any bright tinkerer, working in a shop on any town’s Main Street, might wire up an innovative circuit and proceed to launch a company. At the height of the radio craze, more than two hundred and fifty firms were building receivers. Five of them would survive the Depression.
Lear served six months in the Navy and tried a succèssion of jobs—salesman, radio announcer, circuit designer and builder—and grew bored. None of them promised a quick path to success. In 1925 he was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a wife named Ethel and a baby. He was building an airplane in his backyard, from a kit; in addition, he had fallen in with Elmer Wavering, who in time would become president of Motorola. None of this satisfied him. He soon became smitten with a drugstore cashier named Madeline. He pursued her avidly, at last taking her off to Dallas, Texas, for a weekend in a hotel. That was no innocent escapade in 1926; it was a violation of the Mann Act, and Lear soon found himself facing jail for the crime of transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. He beat the rap by divorcing Ethel and marrying Madeline. Then, a few years later, he began cheating on Madeline, keeping steady company with a secretary.
Meanwhile, he set out to make his name as an inventor. He moved to Chicago, where there was much more radio business than in Tulsa, and in 1928 made his first invention: a miniaturized coil, wound with fine enamel-coated wire. Seeking to sell these coils to established firms, he approached a radio company headed by Paul Galvin, who hired Lear as chief engineer. The following year auto radios suddenly emerged as the latest thing, and Lear was ready to make a move.
A few years earlier he and Wavering had already tried to invent one. The car-radio problem was technically demanding; spark plugs were potent sources of static, and Lear had been unable to do more than install a radio and an antenna for use when the car was parked. This attempt had introduced him to the problems, however, and Lear convinced Galvin that Galvin Manufacturing must devise a way to muffle the static. Lear then brought Wavering in to help him, and they succeeded. The new product needed a catchy name, and Galvin came up with “Motorola.”
The Motorola was not the only car radio on the market, but it proved sufficiently successful to keep Calvin’s firm operating as the Depression deepened. Then, in 1931, Lear found the path to his first breakthrough. He was becoming well known in radio engineering, and he drew the attention of P. R. Mallory, a company president. One of Mallory’s engineers had an idea for a battery eliminator. The auto radios of the day needed a bulky and expensive highvoltage battery; the battery eliminator would instead convert low-voltage current from the car’s battery into the high-voltage alternating current the radio demanded. Along the way it would filter out noise and static. None of Mallory’s people could make the idea work. Would Lear care to give it a try?
He did, and succeeded again. It proved to be largely a matter of cut-and-try, guided by Lear’s well-honed intuition. The result was a successful product that Mallory could sell in large numbers for installation within the complete Motorola radios being built by Galvin. The union of Mallory’s battery eliminator with Calvin’s car radio made the 1932 Motorola the first modern and truly practical car radio on the market. Galvin soon changed the company name to Motorola and lived to see it grow into one of the giants of the electronics industry.
Almost immediately Lear lost all interest in auto radios. He abandoned the field, in which he Had made his name and was ready to prosper. The reason: He had found a new love. His radio earnings had permitted him to buy an airplane, and he plunged now into aviation, flying frequently and often bringing his mistress along as a passenger. Victory, to Lear, quickly grew stale; he would leave to others the fortunes of Motorola. What mattered was the pursuit and the conquest, the demonstration that he could do it all over again.
Even before meeting MaIlory, he was running a small company, Lear Developments, out at the Chicago airport. Working with partners, he Weis building radio receivers and installing them in privately owned aircraft. The technical problems, filtering out noise and static, were much the same as with the Motorola. But this airplane receiver—he called it the Radioaire—was not in the cockpit for entertainment. It was to be a navigational aid, picking up signals from Department of Commerce radio beacons that were transmitting from major airports.
Lear found few buyers for the Radioaire. The Depression was hurting pilots’ pocketbooks; what was worse, few were convinced they needed it. They had always navigated by following railroad tracks, now and then swooping down to read signs. Hoping to boost his sales, Lear moved his operation to New York, where he could meet many more pilots. High living and business expenses soon drove him into debt. Then he saw an opportunity in another inventor’s patented radio tuner, made some improvements, sold the new instrument to RCA in exchange for a fat consulting arrangement, and went back to aviation radio. What interested him was to invent a direction finder for aircraft.
With every major city in 1934 now having at least one powerful radio station, a pilot might be able to scan his receiver across the radio band and pick up broadcasts for hundreds of miles around. Each frequency would match a particular city; to be sure, he could listen for the call letters. A suitable antenna and receiving circuit then might indicate the direction to that station, turning the receiver into a radio compass. With it, a pilot might navigate all over the country.
Lear hooked his Radioaire receiver to a two-foot-wide loop antenna, whose reception would grow stronger or weaker as the loop faced toward or edge-on to a particular station. He added circuitry that would determine whether the loop was pointing to the right or left of the station and would correspondingly move an instrument needle to left or right. As long as the pilot kept that needle centered, he was heading in the station’s direction. Lear christened this instrument the Learoscope. It was a part of a lifelong penchant for putting his name on everything he touched.
As with the Radioaire, though, the Learoscope found few buyers. Lear particularly wanted to make sales to the Army Air Corps, but it was buying a competitor’s instrument. Nevertheless, Lear hand-tooled a few prototypes and sold or gave them to Amelia Earhart and other famous pilots, who used them on round-theworld flights and other record setters. The resulting publicity still swayed few potential stateside customers but helped him make overseas sales, which soon grew into his mainstay.
Moreover, he made improvements: a smaller loop antenna that would create less drag and rotate on a reel to face a particular station; an instrument indicator that would show the true direction to the station instead of whether it was merely to the left or right; a teardrop-shaped enclosure that would surround the loop antenna on high-speed planes. Then he added a control system that would automatically point the loop toward a station. Teaming up with another inventor, Ward Davis, he built the Learomatic navigational system. It featured a gyrocompass that would tell the pilot whether he was on course.
His rotating loop antenna relied on an electric motor to turn the loop precisely. With the technology of the day, however, this was difficult to achieve. The problem was solved when Lear encountered the work of the inventor Arling Ryberg, who had built an electromechanical clutch that could disengage a motor from a shaft with particularly high accuracy. Lear called this the fastop clutch and made it a feature of his instruments.
World War II was breaking out and President Roosevelt was calling for fifty thousand planes per year. Every one of them might use Lear’s instruments. But the Army Air Corps wouldn’t touch his stuff, because Lear had a bad reputation when it came to mass production. He did very well at handcrafting his items in small numbers, but when it came to building instruments on an assembly line, his quality control was weak. His free-spending habits had often left him short of cash, leading him to cut corners by using low-quality coils or capacitors. And he rarely kept production workers long enough to let them learn their jobs well.
Nevertheless, it was the fastop clutch that saw him and his company, Lear Avia, through the war. He adapted it to a host of uses on a wide variety of aircraft. The clutch became a key element in a line of electrical actuators, lightweight controls that could move aircraft parts with great precision. These actuators soon replaced the clumsy and heavy hydraulic systems that had been in common use. They represented Lear’s niche in aviation, his contribution to the war effort.
Although Lear had hoped to ride his inventions to glory, the Army awarded the best contracts to Bendix, RCA, GE, and the like. Lear Avia never came close to anything so glamorous as radar, the Norden bombsight, or the fire-control systems that allowed a bomber to fire all its guns in one direction. Still less was Lear anywhere near to building complete aircraft, which had once been his dream.
Lear was far from unhappy, however. He had money aplenty—more than he could spend, for one of the few times in his life—and he had a new wife. She was Moya Olsen, and she understood him. Her own father had been a womanizer, and she knew that a man could be unfaithful and still be a good husband in other respects. She gave him a degree of acceptance and nurturing warmth that had been rare in his driven life. He responded by calling her Mommie. They were together from 1942 until his death thirty-six years later.
Lear Avia was located in Piqua, Ohio, a town known for having twenty-six churches and two bars. The location was unfortunate; it was hard to bring in enough production workers to meet his schedules. Lear eventually licked his quality-control problems with the help of a new chief engineer, Richard Mock, but he kept falling behind on deliveries. And so at war’s end there still were plenty of people who viewed Lear as a great salesman and inventor but a poor company president.
Lear, Inc.—the firm’s new name—would survive the end of the war, though for a time it faced bankruptcy. Few new planes were on order, but there were some, and they all would need Lear’s proprietary electrical actuators. Still, while such orders would keep him in business, they offered little challenge or opportunity for growth. Lear reinvaded the home-radio business but soon retreated in defeat. He tried to sell a line of wire recorders and lost out to competitors who had better products. Once again he needed to find something new.
He found it in autopilots for aircraft. Early versions had interested him for years; he was fond of taking a woman for a flight in his personal plane, putting it on autopilot, then repairing with her to a bed he had installed in the back while the plane automatically stayed straight and level. These autopilots, however, were heavy and slow in reaction, suitable only for bombers and transports. Lear wanted a lightweight version that would respond quickly to disturbances, making it suitable for fighter aircraft.
He faced competition from big firms such as Bendix and RCA, which had grown very rich on wartime avionics contracts. Being big, however, these competitors also could be somewhat sluggish and bureaucratic. Lear, by contrast, was vigorously entrepreneurial, which gave him an advantage. He needed such an edge, for the technical problems were formidable. The autopilot would have to fit in a forty-pound package. It would need gyroscopes of reduced size and exquisite precision. It called for electronic control circuits so intricate that they would need advanced math for their design (the old cutand-try methods wouldn’t work), along with a simulator to test them as their designs evolved. And the autopilot needed electromechanical clutches even faster in response than the fastop.
It took Lear two years, from 1945 to 1947, to piece together the necessary technology. Then he realized that his instrument, which he had designed for use with the piston-driven fighters of the recent war, wouldn’t work with jets. The Air Force was already prepared to give him a production order, but he asked it to hold off. Because he had always flighttested his own instruments, he got the Air Force to teach him to fly the F-80, the first of the new breed of jets, thereby becoming one of the few civilians to qualify on these hot new planes. Four months later he had the instrument the Air Force wanted. It responded by giving his company an order that was worth nearly a billion dollars over the next twelve years.
Lear then added a characteristic touch: He modified the autopilot into a blindlanding system. The autopilot, after all, worked by responding to signals from its gyros and electronic controls. It was no large matter to modify it to respond to other signals, indicating direction to a radio beacon at the airport. The resulting instrument would pick up the signal, determine its direction with the help of a loop antenna, then feed this directional information to the autopilot so that the plane would home in on the beacon. As it approached the airport, the plane’s radio receiver would pick up the ground-controlled approach transmission, indicating the proper glide path, and would follow this beam down to the runway itself. Since radio beams penetrated fog and rain with ease, the system would work even in bad weather. It would not actually land the plane—the pilot had to take over during the last few feet of the descent—but except for those last few feet, it was fully automatic.
For this blind-landing system, as well as for his autopilot, Lear in 1950 received the Collier Trophy, one of aviation’s most prestigious prizes. He and his wife went to the White House to receive the award from President Truman. It was another major success for Lear, and he reacted characteristically: he went into a funk. He kept tinkering with the designs, even though the Korean War was raging and the Air Force was requiring that the instruments be manufactured to rigid and unchanging specifications.
Once again, Lear found himself at loose ends, needing something to do. He found it not in autopilots or instruments but in one of the planes he had used for their developmental testing. Some time earlier the Air Force had given him a Lockheed Lodestar, a twin-engine transport dating to the 1930s, as a test-bed for his autopilots. Lear called it the Greenie Weenie. After winning the Collier Trophy, he began customizing it like a kid with a hot rod. He smoothed some of its protruding edges, cutting its drag and raising its speed. He remodeled the interior, putting in carpeting and adding paneled walls and a bar. Then one of his friends fell in love with the new plane, so Lear sold it to him for two hundred thousand dollars. It was a turning point; from then on airplanes rather than instruments would be his major focus.
With great delight he decided there was a large market among business executives for his reconditioned version of the Lodestar, which he called the Learstar. About two hundred Lodestars still existed; he could buy them cheaply. He brought in experienced aeronautical engineers and proceeded to design a new wing. He added new engines, executive-class interiors, and a full line of his company’s instruments. The result, he believed, would be the Cadillac of business aircraft.
Business airplanes represented a specialized branch of aviation, intermediate between private ownership of Cessnas and Beechcraft and airline ownership of small commercial airliners. With them businesses could set their travel plans without regard to airline schedules, allowing key people to travel when and where they pleased. In addition, to own such an aircraft was a sign of prosperity, and these planes were frequently used to entertain clients or customers. Moreover, the business-aircraft field was ripe for innovation. It offered Lear an irresistible combination of technical challenge, salesmanship, and style.
The Learstar was not a success. He sold only about sixty of the rebuilt aircraft, leaving his board of directors looking askance at the idea of another such venture. But an advanced business aircraft was precisely what Lear wanted to build next. By the mid-1950s, amid growing European prosperity and expanding markets for his company’s instruments, Lear had moved to Switzerland to set up a subsidiary. There he lived a life of luxury while keeping a sharp eye out for technically useful ideas. He found what he wanted in a Swiss-built jet fighter-bomber, for which prototypes were already flying. This, he decided, could be the basis for his new business aircraft. A few years later it would emerge as the Lear jet.
Because it would become a legend, and would turn Lear from a company president into a cult figure, it is worth appreciating why this airplane was significant. Technically it offered little that was new. It amounted to an adaptation of a Swiss military jet. Its military background, however, meant that it offered particularly high performance—it could reach a speed of seven hundred miles per hour—and it would come to be cherished by its owners as an aeronautical hot rod. Light in weight, it was extremely maneuverable and agile. But from the perspective of military aviation, it offered only what had already existed in the late 1940s.
In the public view, however, the Lear jet was something else again. It came close to being the ultimate status symbol. Everyone appreciated that a rich man might own a limousine, a yacht, a penthouse in Manhattan, a mansion in the country. But now a wealthy man might also own not merely a private plane but a jet—and an agile, beautifully designed one that seemed ready to break the sound barrier even when sitting on the runway. Less than half the general public had then ever flown at all, and the phrase jet set meant those glamorous people who could fly to Europe in commercial 707s and DC-8s. To own a personal jet plane was as exciting a thought as to be close to the Kennedys.
Finally, with the Learjet, this driven man could receive the adulation and admiration he had craved for so long. During the war, as a humble manufacturer of aircraft parts, he had taken a date to the Stork Club in Manhattan one evening and had seen the columnist Walter Winchell at the next table. He had been crushed when Winchell failed to give him a nod of recognition. Now, however, the famous and glamorous were beating a path to his door. Arthur Godfrey and Danny Kaye became personal friends. Lear secured celebrity endorsements from the Smothers Brothers, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, the singer Roger Miller, and the television newsmen Peter Jennings and Howard K. Smith. Next to the astronauts, few people in aviation had greater public renown.
What was more, at nearly the same time, he was scoring a breakthrough in consumer electronics: eighttrack stereo. He had latched on to a four-track version, a tape player for an auto dashboard, built by the inventor Earl Muntz. Characteristically, Lear took it apart and found ways to make major improvements. The result, during the mid-1960s, was another symbol of the era. Art Buchwald wrote that whereas young men in the war had ridden in a half-track, their children now rode with an eight-track. It was the success of the Motorola all over again, and it launched auto tape players and their recordings as one of the most popular new options in the era of the Mustang and the GTO.
Better yet, like Frank Sinatra, Lear had done it all his way. His board of directors had failed to back his early work on the Lear jet, regarding it as just one more of his enthusiasms. They had been concerned by Wall Street’s widespread perception that Lear, Inc., was merely an extension of Bill Lear. The board had solved both problems by arranging a merger, forming the new firm of LearSiegler, and having Lear sell out his share of ownership. That had given him twelve million dollars with which to launch his new Lear Jet Company. Then, in 1967, when a slump in aircraft sales threatened this company, Lear sold out anew, once again merging his company with a financially stronger buyer, in exchange for more than twenty million dollars in cash. So when that old restlessness set in and Lear once again sought new worlds to conquer, he had plenty of money with which to try.
For fifty years, ever since his boyhood days at the radio workbench and the local airport, Lear’s career had oscillated between the two poles of electronics and aviation. They were what he knew, what he was good at. And when he combined the two, as in his autopilot and blind-landing system, he could win a Collier Trophy. Now, however, he was more than an inventor or businessman; he was something like a cult figure. He had an adoring league of Lear jet owners who would gladly invest in any venture he proposed. And, like a Napoleon whose ambition knew no bounds, he proceeded recklessly to commit himself to work in areas of which he knew almost nothing.
His situation was a rare one and is worth a close look. The archetypal example is that of the nineteenth century French count Ferdinand de Lesseps, who built the Suez Canal and tried to build a canal in Panama. Count de Lesseps was no technologist, but he was an inspiring leader and speaker, and he had a feel for what might be done with the technology of the age. He had harnessed the mighty machines of his day—the railroads, dredges, steam engines—and had dug the canal at Suez, completing it in 1869. With this, and particularly in the wake of France’s shattering defeat in the 1870 war with Prussia, Lesseps, like Lear, became a cult figure. He too would find backers for whatever he proposed without having to prove that his ideas were correct.
What Lesseps wanted was to repeat his triumph by dig- ging across Panama. He had no appreciation that Panama would be a far more difficult problem than Suez. The climate was unhealthy and destroyed workers’ lives by the tens of thousands; the public health measures of the day were utterly inadequate. The land was subject to heavy rainfall and to landslides. Tall hills and jungle blocked the way; a major river lay in the path, awesome in flood, ready to wash out the engineers’ works. But to Lesseps and to France, which backed him with adoration, none of this mattered. He was the hero; that was to be enough. And when the effort eventually collapsed, amid enormous waste both of lives and of the investments of French citizens, France was shaken so severely that even the German kaiser lamented that such a fate should befall that nation.
William Lear never came near the point where his work would so distress a nation, but what happened after the Lear jet was bad enough. At the outset, beginning in 1968, he decided he could lick the problem of air pollution by inventing a steam engine that would power the cars and buses of the future. This engine would depend on a miracle fluid called Learium, which he wanted to invent. (In the end it was ordinary water.) With characteristic recklessness, Lear announced that he would build a steam-powered race car that would win at Indianapolis.
He managed to build a steam-powered Chevrolet; it crossed the Sierras, then broke down. His steam bus was somewhat less unsuccessful. It was a conventional city bus of ordinary appearance with STEAM IS BEAUTIFUL lettered across the top of the front. It carried passengers around San Francisco during August 1972 and indeed emitted less pollution than a conventional diesel. But its fuel mileage was three to five times worse. No further support was forthcoming, and Lear had to write off a fifteen-milliondollar loss, with nothing to show for it.
He was in his seventies now and still unwilling to retire. So it was with joy and a sense of release that he returned for the last time to the world of aviation. He hoped to come up with an innovative design for a new business aircraft and to live the saga of the Lear jet all over again. The result of this, in time, was a leap into new technology called the Lear Fan.
The Lear Fan was the sort of concept that would make people sit up and take notice. It was to be built entirely out of composites—black, glossy, plasticlike materials reinforced with carbon fibers. Boeing, which had long experience with the vagaries of new materials, was introducing such composites very gingerly on its new airliners, but Lear would rely on an all-composite design for his first try. And it would have a pusher propeller at the rear of the plane, driven by two turboshaft engines mounted on the center line. That would eliminate the common danger of a wingmounted-engine failure so unbalancing the plane that it would crash. Instead, a Lear Fan pilot with a failed engine would simply push the throttle forward, with the surviving engine continuing to drive that rearmounted prop.
The potential problems were vast. No one had ever certified such a propulsion system; the Federal Aviation Administration, which would have to issue the needed approvals, had no experience on which to draw. Composites tantalized the engineering mind with their light weight and high strength, but no one had ever built even a wing or fuselage from them, let alone a complete aircraft. The greatest prob- lems, however, would prove to be financial.
The project needed $30 million for research and development. The network of Lear jet owners would see to that, through arrangements worked out by the New York underwriting firm of Oppenheimer and Company. But for the plan to go through, Oppenheimer’s people needed assurance that the Lear Fan would actually go into production. That required an extra $50 million, to build a factory. This money eventually came from the British government, which wanted to build plants in economically depressed Northern Ireland. The resulting factory turned into a money sponge. Amid continuing management and engineering problems, the Lear Fan engineers were unable to come up with a certifiable design. Meanwhile, the factory had to be fed, even though it was producing nothing. When the Lear Fan finally crashed, in 1985, the company had $475 million in debts and only $67 million in assets.
By then Lear himself was long gone, dead of leukemia in 1978 at seventy-five. His wife and co-workers had carried on, inspired by the hope of building the Lear Fan aircraft as a final monument to his genius. In the end, though, what was astonishing about the Lear Fan was not its innovative engineering or sleekly designed curves. It was that so many investors would put up so much money largely on the strength of Lear’s name.
Who was he, then? When we cut through the bombast and self-promotion, he emerges as an authentic inventor who repeatedly used his intuition and intelligence to accomplish the breakthroughs of which he dreamed. He wanted to be this century’s Tom Edison, and never came close. But the legacy he left was solid: the Motorola car radio; then a long line of improving aircraft navigational systems and his automatic pilot and blind-landing system; his electromechanical actuators for aircraft; his eight-track stereo. He brought business aviation into the jet age, music into everybody’s car, and navigational improvements without which aviation might have remained too risky and uncertain to grow.
But there was also another side of him, which is well summed up by an incident that took place two days before he died. He knew he was gravely ill, and Moya wanted to take him to the hospital, but he resisted. “I want to go the plant,” he told her. “I want to beat on my boys.”
He meant he wanted to talk to his engineers, criticize their designs, tell them what they were doing wrong, urge them to put in more overtime. His choice of words, however, is telling. Virtually at the moment of his death, he spoke of dealing with those who trusted him in terms that described what his mother had done to him.
