sedona legend helen frye

Jack Frye- Vision Unlimited

Publication- Coronet, Published- July-1942

Written by Douglas J. Ingells

This lost article, found in a rare and hard to locate magazine, was the subject of a 5-year search by Sedona Legend. Presented here in its entirety, the article is an unusually detailed documentation of TWA-Jack Frye's career and life! Enjoy!

'TWA'

“This is the house that Jack built: a continental-spanning airline that flies 'em as big and as fast as they come.
And this is the way he built it!”

This award winning image by Martha Holmes, captures Frye's essence remarkably well.

Out into the night from the big Los Angeles Air Terminal roared a sleek, silver airliner, its nose pointed eastward for New York. Aboard was a six-year-old girl, traveling alone for the first time by air. Sitting beside her was a big, handsome, curly-haired gentleman, who made friends easily and delighted in pointing out to her everything she wanted to know about the giant plane and how it worked. Like a bedtime story, he explained the blinking lights of the cities and towns below.

At Albuquerque, New Mexico, the man and little girl left the plane. She wanted to send a wire to her mother who was worried because she felt it was too dangerous for her daughter to fly. That wire today is one of the most prized memoirs of the man, who is the youngest first executive of any major U.S. airline and the only airline president holding an air transport pilot’s license. It said simply;

"Dear Mommy - Am having a very nice time. I think you are very wrong about planes. Love, Sally. P.S. “The president of TWA is a very nice man.”

Born in Sweetwater, Oklahoma, March 18, 1904, Jack Frye would have been a doctor if his rancher father had had his way. Instead, Jack left the ranch, and with his brother Donald, now head of the Frye Aircraft Schools, went to California.

Today his airline (TWA) covers nearly 6,000 miles; has 13,000,000 in assets, 23,000 stockholders and 3,400 employees. It flies higher, faster and with bigger land planes than any airline in the world. Its success (despite the fact that it hasn’t yet paid any cash dividends) is accredited to the progressive action of its youthful president and the friends around him.

Jack Frye is six feet two inches tall, or about the same height as Gary Cooper, but he is much stouter, weighing 205 pounds. He has dark hair frosted with gray; his eyes are dark brown. Handsome, in a thoroughly masculine way, he presents an excellent appearance at a directors’ conference or in flying togs in the cockpit of a plane. He much prefers the latter and frequently bats up and down the route in the company’s Lockheed twin-engined ship which it keeps for traveling executives and experimental work. Usually he is testing some new piece of equipment on those occasions when he flies.

The life story of Jack Frye is best described in the words of an after dinner speaker who said; “Mix together the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Rover Boys and Dick Tracy, and the result will be a near-picture of Jack Frye’s experiences. He started riding range at the age of seven -on his grandfather’s 15,000-acre cattle ranch in Texas. By the time he was 18, he was making a business out of flying. And plenty of things happened in between.”

At 14, he caught pneumonia -from over-enthusiasm at seeing his first airplane. When an old Army Jenny (World War vintage) was forced down near a pond on which young Frye was ice skating, the boy insisted on running errands for the pilot most of the day. It gave him a cold that put him in bed for 10 weeks and nearly claimed his life.

A couple of years later he ran away from home and enlisted in the Army Engineer Corps at El Paso. He quit the following year and went back to the ranch, only to leave soon after for California with his brother and two pals in a Model T Ford, which Frye sold. He lived off the proceeds until he got a job as a dishwasher for $12 a week. That saved the day with the landlady to whom he owed nearly six weeks’ rent because he was too proud to write home for help. When not scrubbing dishes, he sold papers which brought the weekly income up to about $15.

Then came a job as soda clerk and $25 a week. A friend he met over the fountain talked him into taking his first airplane ride, although it took him seven long days to convince Jack it was a safe thing to do. The now-famous flying Jack is an acrophobian. As a youth on the ranch he dreaded his turn at greasing windmills just 20 feet above ground. Today he still can’t stand on high places.

But in spite of this, he was bitten by the flying bug almost as soon as the plane left the ground. After this trial--cost, $5--he spent $150 of his earnings for flying lessons at the Burdette Fuller Flying School whose net asset was one Jenny bi-plane.

Jack Frye at the White House, with his wife, Helen, receiving the Merit for Merit, by order of President Harry S. Truman. Please see this new page.

Now, however, Jack Frye is flying in the big-time. He owns two homes-- one in Wheeler, Texas, and another on a five-acre tract in Merriam, Kansas, a few miles across the river from Kansas City, Missouri, where TWA’s general offices and shops are situated.

But he and Mrs. Frye--the former Helen Varner Vanderbilt who became the third Mrs. Jack Frye in Arizona on New Year’s morning last year-- spend very little time at home, or anywhere else. Whenever he travels, she goes with him. He frequently visits his ranch in Flagstaff, Arizona, or a second in the pan-handle of Texas, and works in the outdoors during the few days he is there.

In his home there is a large library which has everything in it from Eighteenth Century Poetry, through the technical history of the airplane, down to Saint Exupery, a favorite. Although Jack never completed a high-school education, there isn’t a neighbor in Texas whose complete library he has not read.

Magazine ads never escape him. He finds them most interesting and occasionally will jot down an idea which strikes his fancy and send it to his advertising department with the suggestion they “do something like this.” Definitely not prissy, he is, however, a most exacting person and wants everything to be accurate. He likes short sentences, short paragraphs. This is typical of his penchant for making quick decisions which has many times saved his life when he was piloting and equally many times has saved the life of his company.

He is always on the lookout for new ways to improve the company’s service. Every time he makes a trip aboard a TWA airliner he jots down little comments and sends them to department heads to follow through. Once he wrote about the carelessness of men passengers when undressing in the sleeper berths and recommended a different style curtain on the planes. Another time he found something wrong with the water faucet in the men’s room aboard the plane and scribbled: “This is, in fact, the mechanical abortion of the age.” He sees that the ladies’ room is well equipped in every detail, right down to the curling iron.

He has two offices-- one of them a simple affair at the airport in Kansas City, and the other a spacious suite in the Airlines Terminal in the corner of Park Avenue and 42nd Street in New York. He spends very little time in either.

At the company’s home office in Kansas City, where he can look out a long row of windows and see the planes land and take off, he sits behind a glass top desk and often twirls a big globe, eyeing it enviously as though trying to figure out some way of flying non-stop from Chicago to Moscow this year, and not in 1950. On a wall in a frame is his commission as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

The big New York office is a masterpiece in design. His desk and an office divan are done in striking red leather. The particular shade that is used is one he helped create. Up and down the route during his inspection tours, he noticed that on TWA’s planes, all the insignia seemed to be different shades of red. Then, one day on a piece of stationery he found a pleasing tone and sent it to his maintenance department with the recommendation: “I don’t care which color red you use on our planes from now on so long as it’s this one.” It was necessary to have artists and paint experts make up the special shade of crimson now known as TWA-Red.

Incidentally, his sense of color is acute. Once he sent back a printed piece of company advertising because the color scheme in it struck him wrong. There was a note attached: “Scrap this. If you can’t get pictures in color that look natural, don’t use color. Use black and white.”

He drives his Pontiac--upholstered with red leather--so fast that there isn’t a policeman in Kansas City who won’t tell you: “Sure, I know Jack Frye-- he’s the guy who tries to fly his automobile all over town.”

Below is displayed the hard to read caption from the following advertisement,
keep in mind it was written from information current in 1941.

Jack Frye, President and Director of Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc., is the only executive head of a major airline holding an airline transport pilot's license. He has over 5,000 flying hours in his pilot's log--and, when not busy concentrating on management problems, Mr. Frye frequently flies his airline's research plane on survey trips.

Above- an advertisement for Pontiac Motor Company with Jack Frye, from May of 1941. No longer is it a mystery why Jack had access to as many Pontiacs as he needed and seemingly the reason Helen Frye always had a new Pontiac convertible at the Sedona Ranch throughout the early years! Ad courtesy of Pontiac Motor Division of GMC and Jack Frye archives.

(The research plane the article speaks about is the Lockheed Electra 12A, NC-18137, which Jack acquired in the fall of 1940. See the private executive planes of Frye.)

The big New York office is a striking contrast to the dingy affair which he first had as part owner of the Burdette Fuller Flying School back in 1926 when he mortgaged his few Texas cattle to buy half interest in the old Jenny airplane. Then he met Paul Richter, who is today executive Vice President of TWA, and together they bought out Fuller and started the Aero Corporation of California, Jack Frye, President.

The corporation’s charter covered about every industry connected with the business of flying. Under it they acted as sales agents for Fokker airplanes; operated a school for training pilots; maintained a mechanical division for servicing airplanes of all and any makes; conducted sight-seeing trips; chartered planes; did stunt flying for motion pictures and producers, including a few crashes; sprayed crops; and even, at one time, flew fish to inland cities.

“Anything so we could make an honest dollar flying,” Richter says today. Anything, too, that Jack Frye could get his fingers on for the promotion of flying.

The young president started Standard Air Lines as part of the Aero Corporation and flew its big Fokker six-passenger transport planes between Los Angeles and Tucson, Arizona with such precision that residents called him “On the Dot” Frye.

With his eye to the future, Frye helped in the amalgamation of Standard Air Lines, Western Air Express and TAT-Maddux Airlines into a transcontinental air route that, in 1930, became TWA-- the transcontinental line. He was made president in 1934 and is still boss.

His early trouble was company finance. The reason was simple. He thought that planes, pilots, routes and safety were more important than dollars and cents.

A few years ago at a directors’ meeting, he slammed his fist down on the table and threatened to quit because bankers on the Board couldn’t see eye-to-eye with his ideas about tomorrow’s airline. When he made his threat so many of the line’s vice presidents got up to walk out with him that the directors reconsidered. Finally Howard Hughes, multi-millionaire pilot-inventor, and a personal friend, obtained control of TWA’s stock and gave Jack Frye the nod to “do as he damn well pleases” so long as he keeps “em going higher and farther and faster.”

That Frye will do the job is evidenced in his past record. He helped design the first Douglas airliner, now the most popular airplane in the world. He introduced the homing radio direction finder and modern methods of aerology to the airlines, and pioneered in the development of de-icing equipment to make flying safer. He inaugurated steam-heated cabins on planes for passenger comfort; brought out the flight plan system; put a fortune into the big Boeing Stratoliners, introducing upper level flight comfort and speedier non-stop schedules. Soon he will put in operation a plane which he and Howard Hughes developed in secret and which already has been acclaimed the world’s greatest air transport.

The new plane, known as the Lockheed “Constellation,” will go 100 miles per hour faster than any airliner today; will fly 10,000 feet higher, or in the neighborhood of 30,000 feet, and will fly farther (over 4,000) miles than any passenger plane ever built or in the works. It should make money, since it can carry 57 passengers, seven crew members and about 5,000 pounds of freight.

It is representative of Frye. His is the keen, sharp mind of a flyer, and a business man. And he will never stop being the “flying prophet” because he’s looking ahead of the Constellation for even bigger planes.

So if the day ever comes when you can climb aboard a space ship and take a weekend trip to the moon, it may be because Jack Frye thought the idea had merit and then went ahead and did it!

A oft published quote about Jack Frye-
"a man with a habit of making dreams come true"

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View of Cathedral Rock from the Jack and Helen Frye Ranch at Sedona Arizona

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