Page 26 - Volume 15 Number 11

“Popper” Beech
Takes Control
In only five years a Tennessee farm boy transformed Wichita’s Travel Air Manufacturing Company from humble beginnings into one of America’s leading builders of private, business and commercial airplanes.
by Edward H. Phillips
(Part One)
IN HISTORY
Born near Pulaski, Tennessee, Jan. 30, 1891, Walter Herschel Beech grew up on a farm but relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1911 to work as an automo- bile mechanic and chauffeur. (Edward H. Phillips Collection)
L ate October 1926 the Travel Air Manufacturing Company lost its chief engineer, Lloyd Carlton Stearman, who had resigned to start his own company in California. Worse yet, in January
1927 Travel Air’s president and pioneer aviator, Clyde Vernon Cessna, resigned after selling his shares of stock to three business owners in town. He planned to pursue his dream of designing and building a cabin monoplane with a full-cantilever wing, similar to that used on the famous Fokker monoplanes of the late 1920s.
24 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
NOVEMBER 2021