A Century of Bumbling

On the afternoon of the last interview, Crawford said something that I did not understand at the time: "You know, there was a time when we had working in Cleveland the men who would later create the greatest aircraft companies in the world. The problem was, the fools running the city did not understand what they had and lost it."

In 1917, not everyone in Cleveland was a fool. Certainly not Alva T. Bradley, the owner of the Cleveland Indians and one of the town's prominent businessmen.

World War I raged in Europe, and a former Cleveland mayor, Newton D. Baker, served as President Woodrow Wilson's secretary of war. When the country declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917, local manufacturers anticipated huge government contracts.

With Baker directing the war effort, Cleveland was perfectly positioned for government business. There was, however, one important piece missing from the city's manufacturing capabilities. By 1917, the airplane offered not only a new form of warfare, but transportation as well. Visionaries foresaw the dawning of a vast new industry.

One man who held this vision was Glenn L. Martin, who was making airplanes in California. Bradley convinced investors to raise $2.5 million and lured Martin to Cleveland to build an aircraft plant at East 162nd Street and St. Clair Avenue.

Martin attracted talented young engineers, pioneers in the fledgling aircraft industry, to design and build the country's first bomber. Among them were Donald Douglas, Larry Bell, and Dutch Kindleberger. They would go on to start companies that are known today as McDonnell Douglas, Bell Helicopter, and Rockwell International.

The Martin team produced 20 bombers. The war ended, however, before the government could order more planes. Cleveland financiers, thinking it unlikely that immediate profits could be made in aviation, wanted their investment returned. They saw little future for aircraft during peacetime.

Martin was undaunted. He began to lobby cities around the country to build airports and prepare for the day when passengers and mail would fly. He worked particularly hard in Cleveland to convince city officials to build an airport on Brookpark Road. Along with City Manager William R. Hopkins, he helped create what would become the largest and best airport in the world, the first to have a control tower, radio communication, and lights for night landings.

Meanwhile, the Martin Company was able to secure additional government business, but it was having problems with costs. The airfield on the company's site was too small, so airplanes had to be crated and shipped to the East Coast, rather than flown, at an additional cost of $800 per plane.

When Martin asked the city for land at the new airport to build a factory, he was turned down. When he sought investors to expand operations, he had to go elsewhere.

Hampered by his facilities and frustrated by the city and its bankers, Martin was lured to Baltimore, where he was able to obtain land and save on transportation costs. "Glenn L. Martin was driven out of Cleveland because the bankers thought he was a screwball," an industrialist was quoted in The Cleveland Press at the time.

In Baltimore, Martin expanded his operation, developed new aviation technology, and was well prepared for the next war. More important, Martin benefited from new technology developed during the war, which would carry the company forward in peacetime. The business eventually became known as Martin-Marietta and would employ 50,000 people.

Cleveland thrived in World War II, too. Its steel made tanks, ships, and guns. But steel was the status quo of technology, and the city clung to it in the postwar era, the way it did to its neighborhoods and festivals.

Eventually, the loss of the Martin Company -- and the aviation pioneers who worked there -- would mean the loss of America's largest aerospace corporations and the hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs they provided. It would be a severe blow to Cleveland, a city destined to keep returning to basic industries with ever-dimming futures.

---

To the outsider, the NASA Glenn Research Center is a peculiar and mysterious place. Public officials and civic leaders take pride in pointing to its technological capabilities -- without having the slightest idea of what takes place within its secure confines.

During World War II, it tested engines and fuels, enabling the B-29 to fly high above desperate Japanese defenders and drop atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the 1950s, engineers were developing a new era of propulsion involving rockets and the fuels that drove them.

Hardly anyone paid attention to the lone jet that soared over Lake Erie in those days. One of its engines was fueled with liquid hydrogen. No fisherman observing the black B-57 could have known that the experiment would make history.

In 1958, in the midst of the cold war, the Russians put a satellite into orbit, stunning an America whose confidence in its technological achievement had been unchallenged. The perception of rockets and missiles raining down from space on a defenseless nation put the country on edge.