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No Ponies, No Yachts. With all his wealth, Fairchild leads an expensively simple life: "I have no yachts, no polo ponies, no house on the Riviera." But he does have a ten-room chateau-type second home at Huntington, L.I., where he plays tennis on a $25,000 enclosed court. Fairchild is a friend of and frequent host to jazz musicians, recently threw a party for Old Friend Hoagy (Star Dust) Carmichael. At such parties, Fairchild likes to get into his control booth and record performances, mix drinks at his bar (he drinks little himself), or rustle up a quick meal for his guests. His current favorite: a recipe he picked up in Italy for dumplings made with ricotta (Italian cottage cheese) and ground spinach.
Well-meaning friends are constantly introducing him to pretty young women. Fairchild usually takes them to dinner, sometimes gets so involved in a technical or musical discussion with friends that the girl is left to stare vacantly at the wall. His maiden aunt, May, in her 80s, lives with him. "I don't know why I haven't gotten married," he says. "Perhaps it's that I've been so busy. Let's hope it isn't too late. I'm not a bachelor by conviction. I think I am very unfortunate."
Raiding the Plant. Fairchild has been tinkering ever since he was old enough to handle tools. His father, George Winthrop Fairchild, the first president and chairman of IBM, encouraged his son and let him range through his plant near Oneonta, N.Y., raiding it for parts for young Sherman's inventions. Sherman went off to Harvard in 1915, where he designed a forerunner of the news flash camera, but was packed off to Arizona in his sophomore year when threatened by tuberculosis. Though he later attended both the University of Arizona and Columbia, he never bothered to get a college degree.
Not long after, Fairchild built his famous aerial camera. Left $2,000,000 when his father died in 1924, he set up Fairchild Aviation and turned it into a $6,000,000 business in a few years. Wall Street bankers, eying it as the nucleus for a "General Motors of the air," bought control. But the new management was not equal to the idea, and Fairchild got his company back in 1931. In 1936 he formed Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp. in a share-for-share spin-off of Fairchild Aviation, turned the older company into Fairchild Camera. Fairchild hired J. Carlton Ward Jr., a vice president of United Aircraft, to head Fairchild Engine, and Ward led the company during World War II, when its sales shot from $3,300,000 to $102 million.
Lucky Break. Ward and Fairchild had a falling out in 1946 over Fairchild's steady barrage of ideas, and Fairchild resigned from the company. Three years later he returned to wage a zestful proxy fight, plotted the battle so carefully (he even put real stamps on proxy letters because he felt that people ignored prestamped envelopes) that he won the battle five to one. He promoted Vice President Boutelle to president. In 1958, after Fairchild Engine lost its huge missile contract and went into a tailspin, Fairchild replaced him with J. M. Carmichael, former chairman of Capital Airlines. Boutelle, bearing no grudge, still speaks of Fairchild as "an extremely gracious, nice person," asked him to be best man at his second wedding.