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Soon after the U.S. got into the war, the general fell in love—with a statuesque blonde from Oklahoma who, as Ila Rhodes, had once been a B-picture starlet in Hollywood (among her movies: Secret Service in the Air). A few months before their marriage, Ila's father, Ray Curnutt, who had been a bus driver for 16 years, went on the payroll at $12,000 a year as "production manager." He spent several months just walking through the plant. When he quit, he got a $26,000 contract severance settlement, $19,000 of which bobbed up in his daughter's bank account.
Soon there were new ways to spend the company's swelling profits: a $10,000 decorating job on the Meyers' Washington apartment, an air-conditioning outfit at $825, a $700 radio, a $3,000 Cadillac. By these and other devices, Homer Ferguson's investigators figured that the general got at least $140,000 in four years.
Lies & Gallantry. While this evidence of his profiteering piled up against him, the general chomped on a cigar and scowled. But he sweated when Bleriot Lamarre took the stand. Lamarre meekly recited a self-incriminating accusation. He told of a visit by the general to the Lamarres' white frame bungalow in Dayton five months ago, when he felt the committee's hot breath on his neck. There, he related, General Meyers "sat in my favorite chair" and "concocted" a story to tell the investigators. The main theme was to be that Lamarre had taken large sums from the company and wasted it "in gambling and reckless living." Calmly, Lamarre admitted that he had twice perjured himself by telling this cooked-up story before the subcommittee's secret hearings.
That was enough to make up Senator Ferguson's mind to send the whole case to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.* But the general had to have his final say. His last confession was the ugliest. He said that Mrs. Lamarre had been his mistress—"with Mr. Lamarre's knowledge, approval and acquiescence." He had merely wanted the Lamarres to "live in the manner they wanted" and he wanted to keep Mrs. Lamarre near him; that was the whole reason for setting up Aviation Electric Corp. Cried Senator Ferguson: "Isn't it a greater disgrace . . . to do what you say you did . . . than what they say you did?" Hissed Bleriot Lamarre: "Snake!" (Mrs. Lamarre, in Dayton, said that "a suit for slander seems the only answer.")
This was too much for the officers who had once held Benny Meyers in high regard. Into the hearing stomped his wartime commander, General Hap Arnold, who let Meyers have it on the chin: "Disgraced his uniform and his rank. ... If, to our regret, we of the Air Force did not find a rotten apple in our barrel, we are grateful that others have done so."
This week the Air Force made the dishonoring of General Meyers almost complete. It stopped his pay ($550 a month), stripped him of his decorations and prepared to haul him before a court-martial.
* This week the Department of Justice prepared an income-tax evasion case against Meyers. It also got all the subcommittee's evidence, with a reminder from Senator Ferguson to look into "the question of perjury."