St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 67

Sept. 12, 1957 3 ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Aviation Turns Out to Honor Plumber Mechanic Ben Bell, Whose Career Paralleled History of Flying, Took Up New Job After Retiring On Broadway By Walter Winchell Sridge Deck By Florence Osborn (y THEY ly playwright William Saroyan'i ex-wife will wed a London drama critic. f. Rex Harrison'- ion Noel weds Swedish actress Beryl Fleetwood before 57 fades.

The former Mrs. Jack Webb (Dorothy Towne) Is so serious about Hugh fi. i i DEFENSIVE ruse engi-A neered by John O. Mc-Carty and ably abetted by his partner. Walter Deuel, was a brave try but failed to defeat South's six-heart contract," writes Thomas F.

Pur-cell, of Corning, N.Y., In presenting today's hand. North-South vulnerable. VAQI05 AKQ 4AK107 NORTH O'Brian she dates nobody else. Bobo Rockefeller's new gee-whiz is tall, dark Lothario last-named Divine. Alf Vander-bilts daughter' Wendy, probably this year's No.

1 deb, wants to be a bride before coming out. The Patrice Coffin of S. Dartmouth, who filed for divorce, Is Damon Run-yon's ex-wife. Shades of Diamond Jim Brady! A rlngsider at the Latin Quarter flung $100 bills at the showgirls. Kitty Roland caught the last cne.

Llndy's new cashier is Phil Davis, former blackface vaudeville star. If you plan on being a 1 1 Deuel K843 tK2 953 QJ93 McCarty 410762 J37642 454 SOUTH WALTER WINCHELL UELt RECEIVES SOME HELP IN CUniNS BIRTHDAY CAKE FROM HIS DAUGHTER, MRS. O. E. HELMICH, CENTER, AND HIS WIFE.

WATCHING IN BACKGROUND, FROM LEFT, ARE: PAUL A. VANCE, GEN. WENTWORTH GOSS AND MAJ. ROBERT CRAWFORD. comic be sure and take boxing tuition.

Two borschi circuit clowns were flattened by hecklers last week. One was Eddie White. Seven new Jan Joynts opened In the last three weeks. Six are expected to fold by Christmas. Bob Haymes's ex-wife, Eunice and CBS radio exec H.

Barnes fell in love all over again, In Yurrop. NX YANKEES LANDLORD Dan Topping and his wife. (Alice Lawson) are at war over settlement demands. She wants two million. Chums say he no got.

Chita Rivera of "West Side Story" and George Marcy of that show are fel 1 ill fltmm IW RECALLING THE EARLY DAYS OF AVIATION. EN IELL By Dickson Terry A LARGE and distinguished group of people gathered at the Missouri Athletic Club one night not long ago to attend a party given In honor of a 70-year-old plumber. The guests included a brigadier general, a number of colonels, and dozens of executive types, all with their wives. The guest of honor, a short man with a crew cut and an engagingly shy smile, was named Ben Bell. AQJ JO 862 The bidding: East South West North Pass Pass Pass 1 Pass IV Pass 4 Pass 4N.T.

Pass 5 Pass 6 Pass Pass Pass With the trump finesse wrong, declarer had 11 tricks one spade, five hearts, three diamonds and two clubs. Any plan he may have had of trying the spade finesse which would have succeeded for his twelfth trick was changed by a defensive false-card which suggested that the finesse would lose. So declarer switched to a try for a squeeze, which would work on whichever defender held the spade king along with the queen-jack of clubs, and this maneuver brought home the slam. West opened his singleton elghf of trumps and declarer went up with dummy's ace, hoping to drop the king singleton with East He continued a low heart, East took the king and West discarded the encouraging 10 of spades to give South the impression that if the spade king was missing, West held it East co-operated by returning the eight of spades and declarer jumped up with the ace and played for the chance of squeezing one opponent or the other. Declarer cashed the ace-king-queen of diamonds, discarding a club and a spade from the closed hand, and ran all but one heart, leaving this situation: North 9 AK10 East 4K QJ9 South 4Q 7 86 West 47 54 Now declarer led the seven of hearts, discarding a spade from the board; and East was squeezed.

If East threw the top spade, South would win the spade queen and the two top clubs; if East let go a club, declarer would run three club tricks. Either way, South made his six-heart contract, losing only to the king of trumps. The same squeeze will also operate on West if he holds the king of spades and the queen-jack of clubs. By a Poat-Dlipatcb Photographer. They are Mrs.

Richard Napier of St. Clair and Mrs. O. E. Helmich of St.

Louis. Well, you can imagine Ben's suprlse when he saw the people who had gathered there to pay tribute lo him as a man who had made quiet but very important con-ibution to aviation. AJ. ROBERT CRAWFORD had flown all the way from l'Alaska to sing an Army Air Force song he had composed. There was Chrity Magrath of the United States Air Force Museum at Fairborn, Don Lambert, to represent his father, the late A.

Bond Lambert, after whom Lambert Field was named, and who was a friend of Bell's too. Dan Robertson, younger brother of Bill and Frank Robertson, was there; and Brig. Gen. Wentworth Goss, and Paul A. Vance, commander of the United States Naval Reserve; and Joe Read from River Forest, 111., another mechanic of Bell's day.

He was the man who first put brakes on a plane. They laughed at him, Bell recalls. There was Oliver Parks, who founded Parks Air College, and Cliff Wassail, an old barnstorming buddy, and a lot of other people and their wives. There was an album containing autographed photos of President Eisenhower and a lot of top brass in the Air Force. There were autographed photos of Jimmy Doolittle, Eddie Rick-enbacker, Lindbergh and a lot of others whom Bell had known in nearly half a century of fooling around with airplanes.

It was quite a party, Ben said, as he puffed at his pipe, and then his telephone rang. "You got drain trouble?" he said. "Well now, what seems to be the matter?" BELL DESIGNED THIS AIRPLANE, HIS FIRST, ALONG ABOUT 1923. IT WAS PROBABLY THE FIRST PLANE WITH A COMPLETELY INCLOSED CABIN. ame, it was just that Bell was uway ahead of his' time.

He )uilt another plane too, a small, three-place job with a new wing curve which he had envisioned. There was a young pilot around then named Lindbergh, and Bell got him to test it. On the first flight it seemed to be superior in a lot of ways to most planes of the day. But Lindbergh wanted to take it up again and see what it did in spin. What it did in a spin was refuse to come out of it.

Lindbergh Jumped and the plane was demolished. Lindbergh and Bell became good friends, and Bell remembers well the day Lindbergh came into the Robertson boys' office and said he had a couple of thousand dollars saved, and if they would help him raise enough more to get the kind of plane he wanted, he thought he'd try for that $25,000 prize money by flying the Atlantic. "Funny -thing," says Bell, "but knowing Lindy the way I did, I know he never dreamed that even if he did make the flight, it would build up Into what it did. He was like the rest of us. It was all in a day's work.

He actually thought that if he could get about $8000 together he could get a iplane, make the trip, pay back what he owed and have the balance as a nice little stake for himself and soon the whole thing would be forgotten. I've often wondered if he would have done it if he'd known the magnitude of the thing." The thirties came and went and Bell saw new and better engines and planes. Then World War II came along, and he found himself teaching again, at a ground school started by Robertson Aircraft. When his health began to fail, he tried to retire, but he was called back to be an inspector of aircraft and gliders too far gone. Marilyn Monroe will make a song aioum soon.

Titled: "Marilyn Monroe and Friend." The friend will be Ella Fitzgerald. Peggy Craley, dancer In "Plain and Fancy," and Air Force Capt. Edgar Wheelock ended their marriage of 30 months. "Paris Blues" money man Bernard Kahn (active in Republican affairs) was asked to use his Influence to get an Israeli-French gal's temporary visa extended. He's doing better than that.

He's marrying her. Mona Crawford (former "Miss who divorced her millionaiire a year ago, is back readying a night club act. Cynthia Brooks, who made Life mag and headlines selling photos of herself via the mails (after a phone teaser campaign), becomes Mrs. Morris Levy on the 15th. The wedding will take place on his Long Island yacht.

SINATRA'S BIG YULETIDE tune will be "Mistletoe and Holly." It has a "Love and Marrige" swing. British glamour boy Peter Moore is that way about Joan Harrison, Alf Hitchcock's producer. Jonl James's new recording c'ick is "Day Dreaming." One of Jerome Kern's best. It flopped 16 years ago. "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs," William Inge's new play (with Kazan directing), will feature Carol Lynley, 15.

She gave up a $35 per hour modeling Job for the role. Telephone Visit By Ruth Millett IITOJMEN don have any telePhone manners any more" complains a reader. She says she used to be able to call up a friend and feel that the call was received with pleasure. She could have a nice telephone came back to St. Louis and looked up Capt.

Berry who, he had heard, was going to start a flying school. In 1916, when he was 67 years old, the veteran balloonist had learned to fly an airplane and was all hepped up for a new career. "I discovered," says Bell, "that all he had was an obsolete, dilapidated plane which had been all but home made in the first place." The Captain had already taken several spills while trying to get this plane off the ground. Bell told Capt. Berry he would go to work for him, but not with that plane.

So Berry acquired a cracked-up Cannuck, which was a Canadian version of the Cur-tiss Jenny. But the Berry flying school never got off the ground. Bell heard about Robertson Aircraft, owned by Bill and Frank Robertson, aviation pioneers and one-time employers of Lindbergh. They were operating in Forest Park, taking pie up in a Curtiss Jenny and buying surplus airplanes to rebuild and sell. When they needed more room they moved out of Forest Park and out to a wheat field which is now Lambert Field.

Experienced airplane mechanics were few and far between then, and they were more Ben was pleased as all get-out, but true to his nature, he really couldn't understand why anyone would want to give a party for him, and he couldn't understand why we wanted to write this story about him. Ben wasn't always a plumber. In fact, he has only been a plumber since he retired from aviation about eight years ago. Until that time he had been an aviation mechanic, and his career has pretty well paralleled the history of aviation itself, especially in St. Louis.

Ben's career spans the history of the airplane from jennies to jets. He was an associate of Charles Lindbergh (who tested a plane Ben designed and built) and he is known and respected by hundreds ol flyers and executives whose names are well known in aviation history. "But I don't know why they want to keep bringing all that MP again," says Ben who, since he retired from McDonnell Aircraft, has been a plumbing contractor in the little town of St. Clair, 50 miles southwest of St. Louis.

Ben happens to be in St. Clair because he liked the looks of the place when he and his wife were driving around one Sunday years ago. When he retired, he went there. He happens to be a plumbing contractor because, after living in St. Clair a year or two, he discovered they were badly In need of a plumber.

He had been a plumber's apprentice, many many years ago, before he ever saw an airplane. So now, with nothing to do, his life came full circle and he has wound up doing what he did 'at McDonnell Aircraft. And they were putting jet engines in planes when Bell finally con I We doth i It Rflfl laf BRSaff JliViaiM tfJhlB All Ai Murl I -St. visit and thereby cngnten her own stay-at-home day. But It's not like that any more, she says.

All she meets with these days when she dials a friend's vinced everybody he wanted to retire. Ben wasn't giving much thought to his approaching seventieth birthday. He agreed to come to St. Louis for a party his daughters wanted to give. iMWIIMbl Mltf JWW VlVI II 'riT" Controlled itmptralurt Xsip Family bundltt Svr'.

rmalndr HuRtd dry? number is Impatience, hurry and excuses for having to cut the talk short. than happy to hire Ben. been a plumber's apprentice, had put himself through three years of a private engineering school, and had worked as an electrical engineer for a large utility firm. HE was working on a power project in East St. Louis when World War I started, so he decided to be a flyer.

Having always been as he puts it, "a fanatic on anything that goes up in the air," he had already had a brief career as a balloonist. Capt. John Berry was floating around over St. Louis quite a bit in those days. The who died in 1931, was a pioneer balloonist who came to St.

Louis In 1898. There wasn't a lot of money In ballooning, so he ran a restaurant, and made flights on the side. He and some St. Louis men formed a company to build a dirigible But there was a misunderstanding and one of the partners shot Capt Berry in the leg. He sued, and with the money he was awarded, he bought a new gas balloon and won the first National Balloon race, held in Indianapolis in 1909, and became famous.

The balloon was named "The University City." Anyway, Bell had looked up Capt. Berry and had made a number of balloon flights with him. But he came to the conclusion that the balloon wasn't the answer. "In fact," Bell says now, "there's nothing to them. You ascend rather rapidly, then you reach a given height and you start floating.

You have no con- trol over your direction, and the balloon keeps turning around and around and, pretty soon it looks like the landscape is whirling around, so you decide to come You pull a rope which runs up through the gas bag to a valve at the top. This lets some of the gas out of the bag, and you come down again." Bell couldn't see much of a future for balloons, so he turned to the airplane. He tried to enlist in the Observation Squadron. He couldn't qualify as a prospective Air Corps pilot, but when they learned that he was an expert on internal combustion engines they snatched him up as a mechanical instructor. He spent the war teaching young flyers and mechanics what makes an internal combustion engine work, and in return the young pilots secretly taught him how to fly.

"I guess It's safe to tell that now," says BelL When the war was over, Bell "One friend says she On 'J Soothing, Healing Bell worked hard and he was happy, because there was noth To Minor Cm" wishes she had time to chat but that she was Just getting ready to leave the house to go marketing. An ing he liked better than working on airplanes. It was along about 1923 that Bell designed his first Mazuna Skla Cnu cam minor bunu, orapM, cbai. Lanohtad lo (often, m.di. oatedtohaaL Grand for hand.

HmmiMedicatedlYM CREAM airplane and what was probably other claims she Is watch the first completely inclosed RUTH MILLETT ing her favorite TV show cabin plane. first. WITH the air of a man who figures he might as well talk since a writer has come all that distance to see him, Ben puffed on his pipe and projected himself back nearly half a century. "In the. early days," he re THEY had cabin planes In those days, but the cabin tTCll a 1 11 i- i and can't bear to miss it.

The number of excuses for not visiting on the telephone is endless. And she asks plaintively, "What has happened to women that they don't have time to chat with a friend?" Most of them are probably Just too busy for long telephone conversations. Life no longer moves at a leisurely pace, even for was only for the passengers, Shhh and olhtr opportl may fce Ironed of extra charge, par place, $2' Cartful workmanihip, Send tvrything. Better and cheaper than homt laundering! 1 -day drive-in service delivery service RuiMlt TO 1-144 OTpl These Reclining fi i 'd Chair, Are Made 7 V'ifc. by Reputable Ejl J)l I Manufacturers fcCV FfCl The pilot's place was open.

The pilots wanted it that way. flected, "our main thought was "I thought that what aviation needed was aabin plane where women who are full-time homemakers. So for many of jUst to make flying safe. Most of us who worked on planes the pilot was inside," Bell re calls. "I talked to the Robert son boys, and they told me to go ahead.

Bell worked a long time, and came up with a small, five-place job, with the pilot inside just behind the motor. them the telephone in the home Is like a telephone in an office a labor-saving device. It is no longer a device for killing time by gossiping with first one friend(and then another. And the friend who is known to be a long-winded talker on the telephone is avoided sometimes as the reader points out even to the point of rudeness. It's rude to tell a friend you haven't time to talk to her because you can't miss a TV program.

And it's rude to be so abrupt or sound so harried that a telephone caller feels like an unwelcome guest. But today many a housewife Is as busy as an executive and becomes impatient with unnecessary interruptions. All I can suggest is that the caller tailor her conversations to the times. Make them brief and to the point "It had good visibility in all had a code; 'good enough' wasn't allowed. Either a job was done right or it was done wrong.

How the engines ran was our responsibility, and we respected the difference between a proper fit and' a forced fit. What I mean is, in an assembly of moving parts, when you force parts into place, which you can do, sooner or later you'll have malfunction. If you make them to fit and assemble them properly, they'll give you no trouble and right there is the keynote of aircraft mechanics." Bell got into airplanes by way of the balloon, but before that he had, after striking out on his own at the age of 16, directions, and bank and turn indicators on the instrument panels. There was only one thing wrong, the pilots wanted no part of it. They flew by the seat of their pants and the SALE of amplex "SURE FLASH" FLASH BULBS Carton af Na.

Regular $M2 wind on their faces. They claimed they couldn't tell whether they were slipping or BUT THEY ARE NOT CONTOUR CHAIRS drifting If they couldn't feel the wind on their faces." 69 Photoflaih Bulbi Evtry Bulb Guarantaid Of courst the cabin plane UiiUM Original Contour Chair Lounge in the World They'll Do It Every Time By jimmy Hatio ONLY 7 6A. 1 .312 I00S OLIVf This Modern, Full-Size FIREPLACE ten installed In 1DAY! AMhe Moyies By Myles Standlsh SAL MJXEO, who has been making a career out of playing teen-age rebels, comes up with another one in "DINO," at the FOX THEATER. This time he's on both the tough and the sensitive side as a kid who's done three years in reform school, and when he gets out at' the age of 17, thinks everybody's against him. Taking a sock at the nearest guy is his way of expressing his hurt feelingp.

His parents don't have much time for him, and his younger brother is trying to follow In his delinquent footsteps. Parole caseworker Brian Keith pitches in with the old patient pep-talks, but is getting nowhere on the love-thy-neighbor routine until Sal encounters the Love of a Good Woman (also aged 17). She is Susan Kohner, also a shy and Introverted chick, as evinced by her wearing glasses, but also pretty as evinced by her quickly removing the specs after one establishing shot. SaJ is convinced he is WANTED and saved until the next picture, when I suspect he will act surly and misunderstood all over again. Really, I hate to call a man through at Sal's tender years, but he IS getting sv little meaty around the jowls.

Pretty soon he'll have to start playing grown-up Marlon Brando, or at least young George Raft The co-feafure, "PORTLAND EXPOSE" is one of those quickie sensations which exposes nothing except the producer is hot after a fast buck to cash in on the headline of the recent Senate labor investigation. Naming no names, revealing no facts and apologizing all over the place to honest union men who assist in ferreting out the racketeers (origin unnamed) it is a trite melodramatic crime plot peopled by obscure actors. psS5 THEY" START OFFTHBRS. UKE A 0k yr.U'OLEtzK" 1 KIDDIE THEH THE I COUPLE OF DIPLOMATS fZZ, cIf: gooo I fiRS GET H.4PDER kJOST BEFORE THE MMDS-JUST COMES My iLr.rTr VWEONLyWAS I LET AWHE T4PS-SEE TVIAT-I OL' ONE-TWO- lFlOHT IS UN pcrr THEY JL- I SCORE WITfl NOW FOR fctV Vr EVER rl40 W4S 1 WHISTLE l4 LEFT LE5D- fJWCV FOOT- WITH THE I BUM'S THEyU A WATCH OUT WORK- ssKA DR4FT VCOLUPSET 3 PCS' cJUST 6EFORE THE iJjZ5 I jM ATHLETES rrMLc -m- is the shipping dept WAWiBSR'Sg SUNCW PUNCHES- jglTOWtTOlo St'T etueWOel During our September Special if you have an angular chair or lounge, trade it in on an original Contour. Your trade-in is your down payment.

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