Brash Young Man

In the fall of 1939 a young man with a moonish, almost childish face flew his single-engined Beechcraft airplane from New York to Boston, where he huddled with savants at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His incisive understanding of their experiments with a new radio tube left them speechless, unable to believe that he had quit school when he was 13. That night he flew back to New York, repaired immediately to the Stork Club with an eyesome blonde. Near his table sat Walter Winchell. The moony young man's eyes bulged with appeal to Winchell for a word or even a look of recognition. Ignored, William P. Lear forgot his triumph of the morning, snarled at the blonde slunk sadly from the Stork Club, and astonished his companions by going home alone.

Many people who work with Bill Lear in laboratories by day think he is a genius. Many who see him by night, paying his way into cafe society, think he is daffy. What the latter fail to understand is that he works while he plays. Some of his best ideas for improving aircraft radios and instruments have hit him in the Stork (which he calls "my night office"). He pays alimony to four ex-wives, is one of the outstanding answers to the prayers of chorines in Manhattan, Hollywood and points between. He is also a prolific inventor, an untutored natural master of electrical mechanics who has been known to devise a complete electrical control system on a luncheon napkin. Like Henry J. Kaiser in a different field he belongs to that completely individual type of miracle man that flourishes chiefly in the U. S. For years he has had the radio and aircraft industries in a mixed dither of admiration, envy and dislike.

Said brash Bill Lear: "Many were the times I had my ears pinned back." First to pin them was Grigsby-Grunow Co., shortly after he had hit on the idea of adapting to radio the dynamic speaker, which launched the Majestic radio. Grigsby stock boomed, but bumptious Engineer Lear had been fired. Disappointed, he drifted until 1929, then on his own introduced the Motorola (first practical commercial radio for automobiles). Two years later he got interested in airplane radio, began to find his stride.

Today. Bill Lear is founder, president and principal owner (51%) of Lear Avia, Inc., which makes radios, instruments and control accessories for airplanes. Best known is his Learmatic Navigator, a combined automatic radio direction finder and directional gyro, for which he got the Frank Hawks Memorial Award last December. Better seller is a cheaper, non-automatic direction finder for use in private planes. In 1939, Lear Avia lost $15,000 on a $222,000 volume. Said Lear then: "I'd give my life for $55,000." Just out of a Miami hospital (result of a crackup in his new Cessna), he values his life more now. Last week he estimated Lear Avia's 1940 earnings: in excess of $100,000 on sales of $968,000. And sales are no longer a problem. His $5,000,000 backlog includes South American, Norwegian and Canadian orders. To help fill them Lear has a new factory in Hollywood (making electric motors with magnetic clutches), plans another near Dayton.

U. S. travelers to Europe and the Mediterranean spent more than $250,000,000 a year in the late '20s. Last year their expenditures fell to $6,000,000, were exceeded for the first time on record by receipts from European and Mediterranean visitors to the U. S.

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