AIR: Builder of Big Ships

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The Major. For every military Aircraft builder, times have changed with the war. The whales of yesterday are the minnows of today. But in all the orderly uproar of controlled growth, 54-year-old Rube Fleet is little changed from the boy he was when he came out of Culver Military Academy in 1906. The years have rounded the angles of his bony, six-foot frame, thinned his hair, put spectacles on his massive, dominating nose, ruled deeper the purposeful line of his mouth. He is careful now about the harmony of his ties and shirts, has taken to buying things, as rich men will, such as a house in Hollywood, which he seldom visits. But these are externals, an outlet to a world that intrigues him but has affected him little.

Earnest, tin-voiced, egocentric, Rube Fleet has a world of his own, and in that world Rube Fleet is king. What other people think, what other people do, is simply a backdrop against which he stages his vastly complicated show. He would close that show down in a minute if it did not please him. Said he in a recent speech (at a luncheon in honor of OPM's Sidney Hillman): "If I thought I were heading a company whose sole purpose was to manufacture instruments of destruction to kill my fellow men, I would quit tomorrow. But I will not quit because I know that, first, it is my duty to stick by my country; and second, the airplane is an instrumentality for building future peace. . . . Since aviation is the only means of guarding our safety later on, augmented by a navy and by foot soldiers, we ought to get at it good and hard and get more big planes out."

In the company magazine, Rube Fleet lists his son Dave (his assistant) as "of American descent." He is proud of the fact that his father traveled to Washington on the Oregon trail, that they lost their money and that he himself owned no shoes from the time he was six until he was 13 (when he won a pair in a school children's advertising contest).

But he did get to expensive Culver (where he made $1,680 running the student paper). After graduation he went back to Montesano, Wash., set up in the lumber-real-estate business and made money. He also began influencing people. Shortly he was an officer in the National Guard, president of the local Chamber of Commerce, the youngest member of the State House of Representatives. Then Woodrow Wilson (whom he admired as little as he admires Franklin Roosevelt) was reelected. Rube Fleet saw the inevitable—war—made a characteristically abrupt decision.

He chucked business, joined the Army, became the 74th man to qualify for his wings in the young Army air service. The Army had got a harddriving, smart officer. Rube Fleet, soon a major, ran the Army's first Washington-New York airmail service (1918), was head-over-heels in training airmen. After the war he went to the Army's research center at McCook Field (Dayton, Ohio) to help design a training plane and to straighten out the Army's tangled relations with manufacturers. He was the man to do both. He had made many friends, like "Hap" Arnold, now Major General in command of the Air Forces, and Major General Herbert Dargue, of the First Air Force, under whom he had trained.