Letters

摘要

"We Built This City" (Sept. 2018) mentioned Walter Beech, who formed Travel Air Manufacturing. I was reminded of a guy at the long-gone Livermore, California airport who had the hangar next to me in the 1950s. He was in the middle of restoring an old Travel Air biplane, serial number 6, that he had found in a bam in Idaho. The original Firestone tires on the airplane were rock hard after so many years, so he boxed up the broken remains and sent them off to Firestone with a tongue-in-cheek letter complaining how their tires just don't last anymore. He had pretty much forgotten about that until a year later when he received a package from Firestone with two brand new, proper vintage-style tires, and a letter saying they were sorry that the originals didn't last and hoped these replacements would be acceptable.