Unlike topflight executives of other major U. S. airlines, 35-year-old Jack Frye of Transcontinental & Western Air and his 43-year-old executive vice president Paul Ernest Richter, are tough, practical airlines pilots. Burly Jack Frye bats up & down the line through all kinds of weather in his Northrop Gamma, usually testing new equipment as he flies. Wiry Paul Richter regularly gets into a captain's grey uniform and shoves a passenger-laden DC-3 over a scheduled run.
About the technical operation of well-run TWA, Frye and Richter today have few worries as they fly the line from San Francisco to Newark. But they never look at the instrument board on a line run without seeing on the compass card a sharp reminder of a TWA deficiency: all its routes run east and west. For TWA is, more strictly than its two coast-to-coast competitors (United and American), a transcontinental line, a long thin line with no feeders to bring in side traffic.
Last week Jack Frye, worried about his growing waistline, announced a deal that will fatten his airline: the purchase for $350,000 of Marquette Airlines which (when Civil Aeronautics Authority approves) will give TWA a closely knit 565-mile feeder system in the heart of rich midwest traffic territory.
Marquette was organized little more than a year ago, by another executive with an airline pilot's ticket in his pocket: convivial, pianoplaying, 33-year-old Winston Weidner Kratz. He ran it on a shoestring for months with outdated Stinson tri-motors. The line was a natural. From a TWA connection at St. Louis it ran to Cincinnati, crossed TWA again at Dayton, and continued north to Toledo and Detroit. But until CAA gave it a certificate of convenience and necessity it was not an airline entity, had no sales value. Loudest to shout against a certificate for Marquette was naturally Jack Frye's TWA which wanted no newcomer in the field it hoped eventually to develop. When it was granted TWA lost no time in demanding a rehearing from the CAA.
That was the beginning of a deal. While the airlines' lawyers were arguing before the CAA, opponents Frye and Kratz went hangar-flying over drinks in a nearby bar, became fast friends. A few weeks ago they met again on a New Mexico dude ranch at a meeting of Conquistadores del Cielo (Conquerors of the Sky), an airline executives' organization for making hoopla in ten-gallon hats and hair pants (see cut). Over the poker table where they played with steady hand for fat stakes, and on horseback trips where they rode for saddle-galls, the deal was made. The sale was for cash, in which Marquette's chief financial backer, Pittsburgh Capitalist John McKelvy, will have the chief share. It also included a job in TWA's executive line for shrewd "Wink" Kratz.