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In a tight-rope business, Rentschler is far from infallible. "We naturally make mistakes," says he, "but we have the guts and sense to make it go the next time." For example, the Wasp Majors in Boeing's Stratocruisers developed a long list of bugs when put into service. United went methodically to work to help eliminate them, and offered to provide replacement parts for the four lines using Stratocruisers. One line (United) got $1,200,000 worth of free parts. At home with his family, Rentschler relaxes—like an engine idling. He usually takes a Martini or two before dinner, and may sip champagne afterward. With both daughters married, he and his slender, attractive wife Faye live pretty much by themselves. Winters they spend in their Spanish villa near Florida's Boca Raton Club, where Rentschler plays tennis well enough to take on ex-Wimbledon Champion Fred Perry. He travels back & forth to East Hartford—as well as everywhere else—by plane. Even in the roughest weather, Rentschler merely grunts to his pilot, "Getting a bit dusty outside," then resumes reading memos about engines. Money in the Bank. Fred Rentschler was taught to be single-minded by his father, George Adam Rentschler. Adam's father brought him to the U.S. from Germany when he was three. Orphaned at eleven, Adam had to scratch hard for every penny, scratched so hard that he eventually became a millionaire out of the foundry he started in Hamilton, Ohio. "Only two things are worth having," Adam always said, "money in the bank and pig iron in the plant."
A stern master to his sons, Robert, Gordon, Fred and George, he made them do the threshing on his 130-acre farm near Hamilton, made them learn the iron business by sweating as puddlers in the foundry, sent them all to Princeton* (where Robert died in his junior year).
Fred liked to play poker ("He played them close to his chest," says a boyhood chum), drink beer and drive a car at breakneck speed. After graduation, when his father took a fling at making autos, Fred helped him turn out a few of his four-and six-cylinder Republics before they gave it up. But it taught Fred about engines, and when, at 30, he was commissioned a ist lieutenant in World War I, the Army made him an aircraft-engine inspector. He was sent to New Brunswick, N.J., where Wright-Martin was making the famed Hispano-Suiza engine under French license. There Rentschler was converted to aviation. At war's end, he told brother George: "Come hell or high water, I'm going to stay in it."*
Poker Player's Bet. With the war over, the big demand for engines was over, too. Wright-Martin liquidated and sold its plant. But Rentschler had so impressed everyone that he was asked to help start a smaller company with $3,000,000 in Wright-Martin assets. He hired Wright-Martin's best engineers, and in 1919 found himself president of the fledgling Wright Aeronautical Corp.