Clayton Brukner—whose name is one of the more obscure in Ohio commerce—was responsible for one of most admired small aircraft in the world: WACO planes. His company built close to five thousand aircraft between the 1920s and the early 1950s, all in the small city of Troy in Miami County. Brukner built aircraft for barnstormers, airmail pilots, bootleggers, foreign dictators, American millionaires, the United States Army, and scores of ordinary pilots.
“Ask Any Pilot” became the WACO Company’s slogan in the 1930s, and, indeed, it seemed everyone who flew knew of the planes and their reputation for being reliable, fast, and affordable. The personality of the man behind the planes was as multifaceted as his clientele. Over the years, he was described as fun-loving and somber, tight-fisted and generous, aloof and just one of the men on the factory floor.
Brukner’s one constant was that he loved to build airplanes that the public loved to buy. Collectors across the country still refurbish and fly the sturdy, brightly-colored original WACOs. The aircraft’s allure is so strong that a company in Michigan builds replicas of the original planes to sell to wealthy pilots.
“Brukner was a genius,” said Don Willis, a retired aeronautical engineer who volunteers at the WACO Historical Society’s (WHS) museum in Troy. “He was eccentric but a genius.” Like many of America’s self-made millionaires of the early twentieth century, Brukner started out with very little. He was born in 1896 in rural Nebraska, where his father operated a general store and brickyard. As the new century began, his family moved East, looking for opportunities in more populated areas. After World War I, Brukner ended up in Ohio, drawn by the possibility of a life in aviation in a state that would forever be linked to civilization’s mastery of the skies.
Clayton Brukner in the 1940s. (Courtesy WACO Historical Society, Troy)
But Brukner didn’t just want to fly planes; he wanted to build them. He wanted his planes to be the most efficient, fastest, most reliable, most coveted aircraft on the planet. He and his best friend, Elwood “Sam” Junkin, were going to build the planes together. “Sam and Clayt’s relationship reminds me of Orville and Wilbur Wright. Sam designed the planes, and Clayt built them,” said Valentine Dahlem, a retired aeronautical engineer for the United States Air Force and a WHS archivist, in a 2013 interview.
The pair met before the Great War in a schoolhouse in Battle Creek, Michigan. Sam Junkin, a confident teenager with big plans and a weak heart, at first thought classmate Clayt Brukner was a “conceited ass,” Junkin’s wife once wrote. But once Junkin overlooked Brukner’s perfect marcel hairstyle, he discovered they shared a strong interest in flying. The young men became friends, and after graduating from high school in 1915, they pursued their passion together.
“Sam’s father had taken him to see an air show in Chicago, and the bug bit him,” Brukner once told WACO historian Raymond H. Brandley. “We both were interested in learning to fly, so we pooled our money so one of us could take a four-hour flying course.” The course cost $400; the two made about a total of $28 a week at their factory jobs. They tossed a coin to see who would take the class. Junkin won.
Brukner had no hard feelings, however. When Junkin became dangerously ill in 1917 due to his heart problems, Brukner cared for him around the clock until he recovered. During the war, Brukner served as an infantryman in the army. Junkin, exempt from military service due to his health, inspected aircraft for an East Coast manufacturer.
After the war, the pals reconnected in Buffalo, where they began trying to build an aquaplane, using surplus parts from aircraft used in the war. There they met up with two acquaintances: Charlie Meyers, an American who had served with the Royal Air Force during the war, and his brother-in-law George “Buck” Weaver. Before the war, Weaver had flown in exhibition shows with some of the great early pilots, including Mattie Laird and Katherine Stinson. When the United States joined the war, Weaver joined the army and became a flying instructor, serving first at McCook Field in Dayton and later at Richfield Aviation Field in Waco, Texas.
The four men began discussing how to join forces to build aircraft. At the time, Meyers, Weaver, and Weaver’s wife—Hattie Meyers Weaver—were living and working in Lorain. Brukner and Junkin joined them in Ohio in 1919, along with Harold C. Deuther, a friend from back East. The three newcomers formed the DBJ Aeroplane Company that fall and began trying to build a plane. After just a few months, however, Deuther decided to move back to New York.
Meyers and Weaver began to work more closely with Brukner and Junkin. It was the beginning of a tangle of business and personal relationships that over the next five years would take as many dips and turns as the most reckless barnstormer. During that period, the group’s relations foreshadowed those of many rock and roll bands of the 1960s. They changed their group’s name frequently. Individuals intermittently drifted off for solo gigs, then returned to the fold. Egos clashed: credit was claimed and blame assigned by conflicting camps. Hangers-on came and went. There were tragic accidents, forbidden love, and death.
By 1920, Buck and Hattie Weaver and their young son, Buck Jr., were renting a summer cottage and landing field from farmer Harry Woodruff outside Lorain. There the four men began working on a plane that would carry passengers more safely during barnstorming exhibitions. Similar endeavors were taking place in new hangars, old sheds, and frame barns throughout the country. In the 1920s, aviation was a homegrown enterprise. If the Wright Brothers could conceive the first successful airplane in a Dayton bicycle shop, couldn’t anyone become the next giant of flight?
Due to his barnstorming fame, Weaver had the best chance of attracting investors. When the partners incorporated the business in 1920, it was named the Weaver Aircraft Company. Their plane would be called a WACO, an acronym of the company and a nod to Weaver’s days at the Texas airfield. While some entrepreneurs had wealthy backers, these four men had only each other and an assortment of relatives who occasionally appeared to help them. They were so poor that it was a struggle to keep themselves fed. When they swept up their shop at night, they carefully collected cigarette butts to cull tobacco to roll the next day’s smokes. At one point, Brukner and Junkin bunked in an old barn loft, where rats scrambled over them as they tried to sleep.
Their first prototype, developed primarily by Weaver and Junkin, was nicknamed “the Cootie.” The single-seat monoplane was built with a lightweight wooden frame, covered by mahogany plywood, and powered by a two-cylinder engine. Some of the parts were surplus, some were new, and some were constructed in the shop. The Cootie was insubstantial and unstable, but it was a learning tool. Self-taught engineers could only learn what worked, and what didn’t, from their most recent designs. Only in real time could one see how the plane handled on takeoff, in the air, and during landing. No one expected the process to be easy, or safe. Crashes were inevitable. Weaver, the group’s test pilot, had to make a forced landing while testing a plane. Although he survived, his injuries were severe. After a prolonged convalescence, he continued working on the WACO, but he was never really well again.
The WACO 4 became the partners’ first full-size biplane. Like the Cootie, it was built of naturally finished mahogany plywood. Its fabric wings were coated in a weatherproof dope, then varnished; there was no hint of the colorful paints and stains that later became WACO hallmarks. The focus was on safety and efficiency and room for passengers: folks who would pay for the thrill of riding along with a daredevil pilot. The Model 4 featured a rear cockpit for the pilot and a front cockpit with three passenger seats, in a clover-leaf design. The company took this model to the public to raise money. Weaver flew, and Brukner was the wing-walker.
While Meyers and the Weavers went off again to earn living expenses, Brukner and Junkin found a better factory space in Medina. They gained the support of A. I. Root, the man who founded the Root Bee Supply Company, and his son-in-law, Howard Calvert. The business moved to Medina in the summer of 1921, at which point work began on the WACO 5. The planes were exhibited at the first Detroit Aviation Exposition in April 1922 and received some notice there.
Tragically, Calvert and his wife, Elvira, died in the 1923 crash of their WACO 5 at Stow Field near Kent. But accidents, setbacks, and fatalities were all part of the process. They were obstacles to overcome, and the men were committed to success. Already, the fledgling company was beginning practices that would make it an industry leader. It designed for a specific need (enabling passengers to ride with barnstormers), and it publicized its planes wisely (exhibiting in Detroit).
Bruckner provided much of the momentum. Weaver, still unwell after the 1920 forced landing, left the team numerous times over the next two years to find work to support Hattie and little Buck. Meyers felt increasingly edged out by the others. Junkin continued to work closely on new WACOs, but he had distractions: he had become smitten with the vivacious Hattie Weaver, and his growing attraction to her was an unwelcome complication. Now, even when the men were in the same town, they no longer lived under the same roof.
The straight arrow of the group, Brukner began taking more responsibility for day-to-day operations. He didn’t smoke, chew, drink, or step out with the ladies. WACO planes were his life. Weaver taught him how to fly in the summer of 1922. He learned fast and soloed by fall.
Brukner was in Troy in the spring of 1923 to check out a manufacturing site when he met Alden Sampson II, a young man who had just come into trust-fund money and was looking for a business venture. Troy, a town of about seventy-five hundred souls, had some industry but was trying to attract more. A city councilman who was working with the Troy Business Men’s Association (TBMA) reported to council that the association was lukewarm to downright apathetic about the issue. The TBMA was looking for financial support from the council to help it formulate a plan.
Given that aviation companies were the time’s most promising businesses and that Troy was a mere fifteen miles away from the United States Army Air Corps’ Wright Field, it seems officials would be actively searching for such a firm. Anything that concerned flight and airplanes regularly made front-page news across America. The Troy Daily News was keeping citizens updated, prominently publishing photographs and stories related to flight. Just that spring, Trojans learned that Italian premier Benito Mussolini was taking off from Milan in his private plane for a secret mission. He was rather ominously reported to be “greatly interested in aviation and watches eagerly the progress being made in the air.”
The Daily News carried many national stories of aviation as well. Up on Fox Island in a still-frozen Lake Michigan, pilots were making risky deliveries of food to ten marooned woodcutters who were said to be near starvation before a brave flyer discovered them. Down in Alabama, Troy native Wallace Pearson was recuperating from two broken legs as a result of a crash landing. His plane had been caught up in the wake of a cyclone, and he had narrowly managed to land it before it was drawn into the woods. Pearson’s three passengers also survived as a result of his skillful handling of the plane. On a much, much lighter note, one story included a photo of the Gingham Girls of Miami, Florida, performing a dance routine on the wing of a seaplane.
Airplanes were powerful; they were heroic; they were entertainment, and they hinted at national power. Airplanes were even getting top billing down at Troy’s Jewel Theater, where Tom Mix’s new movie, Do and Dare, was showing for ticket prices of 17 and 28 cents. The movie advertisement shows Mix hanging onto the lower wing of a biplane, apparently having just leapt off his horse to go airborne in pursuit of the bad guys. It was an apt metaphor for the public’s consciousness. Perhaps it was inevitable then that Alden Sampson’s mother and the trust-fund attorneys agreed to invest $20,000 in the company’s move to town.
Trojans first heard of the move in a brief March 28 front-page item. “Rumors are flying thick and fast that Troy has been selected as the home of the Advance Aircraft Company,” a Daily News writer reported. Bruckner and Junkin had bought out Buck Weaver’s share of the company for $1,000 and taken his name out of the business. The new name recognized the partners’ fathers: Brukner’s had been associated with the Advance Thrasher Company in Nebraska, where Clayt had been born, and Junkin’s had worked for the Advance-Rumley Company in Battle Creek.
The new name seemed appropriate for practical reasons as well, since aircraft were the future. The new facilities were where the Pioneer Pole and Shaft Company had made parts for horse-drawn carriages—the future was supplanting the past with a vengeance. Hattie wrote in her memoir that Brukner became the “bookkeeper, champion welder, jack of all trades,” and test pilot. Weaver and Brukner flew out to an air race in St. Louis in October 1923, where Weaver, now an employee, demonstrated the plane, to favorable reactions.
But no great venture proceeds without setbacks. Weaver died in July 1924 in Illinois, where he had gone for a job. Hattie was convinced that his death was related to lingering complications of the 1920 accident. Sampson, who had pledged to work at the airplane factory, soon lost interest and dropped out, along with his financial backers. Brukner and Junkin bought Sampson’s shares. They were on their own again, but in a better position than before.
As Junkin and Brukner continued to make improved designs at their small factory, townspeople in Troy began to see more and more planes taking off and landing, literally in the streets at times, particularly on Walker Street. Sometimes, farmers agreed to let the planes use their fields. One—with whom whom Brukner soon parted ways—charged $2 per takeoff.
Folks were fascinated by the planes. The concept of municipal airports was just catching on, so most of the action took place in fields, which meant rural and small-town people were as apt as their city counterparts to take a ride in the skies. Dale Francis, a onetime editor of the Troy Daily News, remembered moving to town as a boy in 1926 and being electrified by the regular sight of planes flying. Until then, he had only seen one aircraft in person. “It was hardly more than a speck in the sky that we watched until it disappeared,” Francis wrote in 1978. “In Troy, you could not only see planes every day but see them going through intricate maneuvers, looping the loop, falling like a leaf in the wind, diving, ascending.”
After a long week of working in the factory and test-flying, Junkin and Brukner spent Sundays taking locals for short rides in their two-seater biplane, for a fee of $2 per passenger, which was important in keeping the company going. Brukner and Junkin shared lodgings in town and took many of their meals at the Dog House Restaurant on Market Street.
After Weaver’s death, Junkin stayed in touch with Hattie, who was living with relatives. In 1925, they married, and she and Buck Jr. moved back to Troy. Hattie soon became pregnant. Brukner’s elderly father came for a visit, staying with the Junkin family. The Advance Aircraft Company was still a family affair but the dynamics had changed.
Most important to Brukner, the WACOs were beginning to be noticed—and to sell. The WACO 7 and WACO 8 were shown at the Dayton Air Races in the fall of 1924, but didn’t race. Brukner was already concentrating on setting up a sales network and lining up distributors. In 1925, the WACO 9 competed in the first Ford Reliability Good Will Tour. This was the period’s premier air show, started by Henry Ford, who was expanding his empire from automobiles to aircraft.
Air tours were intended to familiarize the public with flying and to foster the development of faster, better planes. Races, precision flying events, and barnstorming shows were part of the fun. The tours boosted reputations and attracted business for manufacturers such as Advance Aircraft. The WACO 9 achieved a perfect score in its class at the 1925 show, an honor shared by another popular plane, Walter Beech’s Travel Air.
That year, Advance sold forty-seven WACOs. It was more than a modest success. With only a few hundred planes flying North American skies, Advance was getting into position to become an aviation leader. Production was in full swing at the plant in Troy, but tragedy loomed.
In the fall of 1926, Bruckner’s father, still living in Troy, died unexpectedly and Junkin, who had suffered from a weak heart since childhood, became ill. Brukner took time from production to drive a very pregnant Hattie to visit Junkin in a Dayton hospital, where he died just ten days after Brukner’s father. Brukner was devastated. Without his old pal by his side, he couldn’t imagine continuing the business. But Meyers and another employee, Ed Green, urged him to keep going. Meyers jumped on the chance to be more involved in aircraft design; he and Green began to work on the design for a Model 10.
Soon after Junkin’s death, Hattie had their baby, whom she named Janet. Brukner bought the remainder of Hattie’s interest in the business for a generous price. She hung on in Troy for a while, but she felt like she was no longer needed or wanted. Eventually, she moved on. “The company had gone ahead by leaps and bounds,” Hattie wrote in her memoir. “The WACO 9s had propelled the company to a place in the industry that made the orders for the new WACO 10 so enormous they were having difficulty filling them.” Advance sold a staggering 164 aircraft in 1926, and the most popular WACO of all time had yet to be designed.
Because of Brukner’s stubbornness, that plane almost didn’t see creation. Sam Junkin had been Clayt’s best friend and the only person who he really collaborated with well. After his death, Charlie Meyers—then WACO’s test pilot and demonstrator—proposed a new plane, which Brukner absolutely did not want to build.
He wanted to build airplanes for Everyman: ordinary pilots who would fly for their own pleasure on personal trips, businessmen who would use the WACOs to transport mail, cargo, and passengers. “He wanted to make WACO’s reputation as a builder of safe, reliable planes that were affordable,” Dahlem said. “Charlie wanted to build high-performance racers.” Meyers, who had come up through the barnstorming circuit, knew the pull of speed. With numerous aircraft manufacturers opening across the country, there would be more competition for planes that could fly farther and faster and perform more precisely.
“Movie stars and journalists were beginning to buy planes, and they wanted something fast and powerful,” Dahlem said. Meyers came up with the WACO Taperwing, basically a WACO 10 with a few important modifications. The wings were tapered, similar to those on new fighter planes then being built for the army and navy. But what made the Taperwing a standout was its powerful engine: a 220 horsepower Wright Whirlwind radial engine. “When they put that engine in the Taperwing, they couldn’t hold that plane down,” Dahlem said. “Brukner went into production kicking and screaming, but that plane built WACO’s reputation for high-performance planes. It carried the company through the Depression.”
The Taperwing had a top speed of 135 miles per hour, which made it in demand for aerobatic exhibitions, closed-course air races, and crosscountry air derbies. That’s where the money was in the late 1920s, and competitive flyers began turning to WACOs. Meyers, however, was so disgusted with Brukner’s lack of trust and enthusiasm that he broke with him for good, leaving Troy to work for Great Lakes Aircraft in Chicago. Brukner, who was uncomfortable with customers and loathed selling, knew he had to come up with a test pilot who was outgoing, well-known, and convincing.
He chose well. Freddie Lund—“Fearless Freddie” as he was known on the air show circuit—was one of the most daring and popular stunt pilots of the day. Lund, a dazzling aerialist with the long-running Ivan Gates Flying Circus, had flown planes in several movies. As Lund began promoting WACOs, his wife, Betty, also a pilot, set up housekeeping in Troy.
With business booming, Brukner either had to build new facilities in Troy or move elsewhere. Civic leaders put together almost $19,000 to entice him to stay in town. He bought 120 acres on the southwest side of town and started work on a $150,000 factory and airfield in 1928. When the company incorporated that year, its minority stockholders included a number of aviation luminaries, including Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace. Brukner retained 50 percent of the stock.
As president, Brukner devoted his life to WACO. Invention was a passion, not just a business for him. He never married. He had few close friends. “The hours he put in at the factory were amazing,” Don Willis said. Charles Moffitt, a service manager at WACO for many years, described Brukner as a “gadgeteer,” in a 1979 interview he had with Dick Fraiser, the first WHS president. “At WACO, his main interest was the plant. He didn’t care about guys like me. The office was nothing. He considered the office overhead,” Moffitt said. “He liked the men in the plant and he liked to work out in the plant. He’d go out there anytime … welding, [operating] a lathe, or running a drill press, or fixing the wiring, working on the plumbing. It was his life.”
The designers would tell Brukner what sort of a part they needed and what the part had to do. He would think of the best solution, then build the prototype. The piece next went to a draftsman, who’d make a drawing of the part so it could be produced. There seemed no end to Brukner’s ability to tinker and create.
By 1929, WACO was the “undisputed leader in its field,” wrote aviation historian Walter J. Bayne. The Troy factory had built more than nineteen hundred planes by that time. Brukner formally changed the company’s name to WACO Aircraft in 1929 to help solidify the brand. The planes became known for performance and reliability, but they had something more: a flash of sporty glamour that made them look as though they’d be fun to fly. When the company introduced its first cabin cruiser, it was not the only such biplane on the market, but “none were as pretty” as the WACO, Bayne wrote.
Enthusiasts often compare planes to racehorses, and the descriptions of the classic WACOs fit that analogy perfectly. With glossy, saturated bright blues, chrome yellow, scarlets, and blacks, a flight line of WACOs easily conjures up visions of horses and jockeys sporting their colors at a big race. It was another marketing strategy that paid off, and it also helped to make WACOs one of the most collectible aircraft ever.
“Unlike most of the aircraft of the time, the WACO was dressed up at the factory with things that normally cost extra,” Bayne wrote of one model that is on display at the Smithsonian, “including such eye catchers as wheel pants or the sexy close-fitting cowl, which had sporty, streamlined bumps over the rocker arm fittings.” Brukner wanted to prove to customers that not only did nothing fly like a WACO, but nothing on the market looked exactly like it either.
Another of Brukner’s strategies was selling his planes in other countries, particularly to foreign governments. Amazingly, in 1929, China became one of the first governments to purchase WACOs; the government of the Canton Province purchased five three-passenger biplanes in late March or early April, and the planes were scheduled to be delivered by late May. A few other provinces also bought U.S. planes from other companies, including Ryan-Mahoney that year, primarily for airmail and passenger services.
Several planes, fitted for machine guns, were sold to various military figures in Central and South America during the turbulent 1920s and 1930s, when coups and counter-coups were almost the order of the day. WACO built more than forty planes for the Brazilian government. In 1932, rebel forces targeted for destruction a shipment of five WACOs en route from Rio de Janeiro to the northeastern front lines.
The rebels were attempting to bring down the ruling dictatorship in favor of a constitutional government. The government planned to use the WACOs to keep the constitutionalists under control. A freight train was tranporting the planes to the front. Twenty sticks of dynamite, allegedly planted by the rebels, were found tied to a piece of timber, connected to the rails under a culvert. According to an Associated Press report, the device was set to explode at the instant the train passed over the spot. An unnamed railway employee spotted the explosives and alerted his boss, who reported the plot to the government officials, who came in and neutralized the device several hours before the train was scheduled to pass. The story indicated the chaotic nature of Brazilian affairs, noting that the WACOs, although delivered intact, would not increase the government’s strength. Just as the Ohio-built planes were being delivered, a group of government fliers had deserted to the rebel forces, taking six other airplanes with them.
Whatever side was planning to use the planes, Brukner would have been ready to supply them. He had been quick to see the possibilities of international sales, although some of the credit for that push belongs to Lee Brutus, WACO’s vice president, who became the company’s public face. An engineer himself, Brutus was as outgoing as Brukner was reserved. He excelled at working with distributors and private clients. By 1931, Brukner had also hired Francis Arcier, an Englishman known for his outstanding aircraft designs. As chief engineer, Arcier hired several other engineers, who together designed many of the most popular WACOs in the company’s history.
While some WACOs were being sent abroad, others had owners waiting anxiously for them in Troy. Pilots eager to get their new planes checked into the Hotel Lollis to await delivery. Customers received their planes in the order in which they had registered at the hotel; according to Brukner, some pilots paid as much as $900 to jump line.
Perhaps the most glamorous flier who came to Troy to pick up a plane was Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, who rolled into town in 1933, accompanied by her very proper male secretary. Drummond-Hay was one of those beautiful, bright, slightly scandalous “foreigners” that the American public adored. In 1920, at twenty-five, she married Lord Robert Drummond-Hay, fifty years her senior. When he died six years into the marriage, Lady Grace became a journalist.
She first wrote for the British press, primarily about aviation and specifically about zeppelins. In 1929, she become an international celebrity as the only female passenger aboard the Graf zeppelin as it made its way around the world—the first global flight. The Hearst newspaper syndicate, which sponsored the Graf’s journey, hired Drummond-Hay to report on the flight from aboard the craft. The thought of a woman undertaking such a dangerous trip shocked and thrilled the public.
Her presence on the Graf was a novelty, and her reports of the flight centered on the frivolous: reporting on the comfortable quarters in the huge airship and the luxurious meals featuring green turtle soup, squabs, and strawberries and cream. When she returned to New York City intact, having filed reports all along the way, she was welcomed as if she were the biggest film star in the world. But as Drummond-Hay continued to travel the world, she began to cover major news stories in a more professional manner. While she often traveled with another married Hearst journalist, Karl Henry von Wiegand, who was her occasional lover, she also pursued serious interests. She became interested in aviation as a flier, and she earned her license.
In March 1933, Drummond-Hay was in Berlin to conduct a one-on-one interview with Herman Goering, the “most feared man in Germany today,” she wrote. Goering had only recently been named head of Hitler’s secret police, but he was already vowing to “exterminate this pest [Communists], root and branch, ruthlessly.” He also made it clear in the interview that he had no use for Jews, whom he said could never be trusted to become German nationalists.
Troy must have been a pleasant respite for her after Germany’s ominous atmosphere. She spent several days at the factory watching her WACO being built, while the secretaries and factory workers eagerly watched the celebrity client whenever they had the chance. A catastrophe threatened one day, however, when Lady Grace errantly walked into the men’s restroom at the plant. A gaggle of nearby secretaries—mortified by the impropriety of the situation and awed by her ladyship—feared to enter the restroom to correct her mistake. Instead, they maintained watch outside until the lady exited, apparently unfazed by whatever accommodations she had found. When her cabin-model WACO was completed, she jumped into it and flew to New York City. There the plane was placed on the deck of a steamship to travel to England. Drummond-Hay also made news in 1933 by being the only female passenger on the triumphant maiden voyage of another new zeppelin: the Hindenberg.
No record has been found of Brukner’s reaction to Drummond-Hay’s visit. If he did speak with her it was probably about the construction and features of her new plane. For him, life was more about the building of the WACOs, rather than the clients that bought them.
Charlie Moffitt, however, vividly remembered certain customers.
Prior to 1933, many bootleggers chose WACO open cockpit models to transport hooch. “Used to take them up in Michigan and along the Canadian border to fly liquor,” Moffitt said. “Those fellows had money. They’d come in for service and they always paid in cash. They’d have a wad of bills and peel it out to you.” The WACO employees didn’t know at first what they were doing with the planes, he said, but when the WACOs returned for service, they noticed their serial numbers had been sawed off, and they drew their own conclusions.
Another set of clients Moffitt remembered were all members of one family: the Du Ponts, one of the most prominent and richest dynasties in America. The patriarch was a French American chemist who in the early 1800s began manufacturing gun powder in Delaware. The business branched out into dynamite and, later, chemicals of all sorts. WACO, according to Moffitt, sold planes to multiple branches of the family.
“They were people who thought nothing about buying $5,000 of radio equipment, but they’d argue with me for fifteen minutes about the price of a door latch,” he said. One day, Felix du Pont, great-great-grandson of the company’s founder, was in Troy to get his plane serviced. He noticed that an improved door latch had been built since one of his relatives had purchased his plane. He inquired about buying one for his relative but really had to mull it over when he learned the new latch cost fifty-five cents. Felix—who later became cofounder of the predecessor of U.S. Airways—finally decided to let the other fellow buy the piece himself. “That’s the way they were,” Moffitt said. “Beautiful people. But thrifty, you know?”
Brukner also believed in thrift. Maybe it was the memory of bunking in a rat-plagued hayloft, or maybe just a sense of personal responsibility, but he was generally careful with money. At the end of the workday, he’d walk around the shop floor, collecting stray nuts and bolts in a battered keg to take back to the farm for his own inventions. He insisted that any supplies he took home be charged to his account, Moffitt recalled.
By 1934, WACO employed more than 175 people full-time. Brukner had been prudent in purchasing enough land to house his whole operation together. Factories and shops, hangars, landing fields, and an administration building were in one complex. Workers made about forty-five cents an hour, or about $18 for a five-day workweek.
Factory employees were required to ride in a WACO at least once a year. “They told us, “You build ’em, you fly ’em,” former employee Willard Kingham said in an article published shortly after Brukner’s death in 1977. “He knew the first name of everyone in the shop,” said Harry Reck, another retiree.
Stories about Brukner abound in Troy, a city he endowed with good things for fifty years. Troy’s cooperation with Brukner paid off for the city, as well. A hospital wing, scholarships, charitable donations, parks, and a highly regarded nature center are a few of his legacies. He never forgot the community’s help in getting the business firmly planted, and he looked for ways to repay the debt. Civic responsibility was practically a religion to him. The locals lionized him, during his life and afterward.
All of this makes conflicting stories about his personality more tantalizing. Don Willis shared a tale passed on by a prominent Troy citizen who, as a boy, had done some work for Brukner. The boy had been hired to mow the magnate’s large lawn for two dollars. After completing the long, hot job, he waited for Brukner to return home to be paid. But Brukner wasn’t satisfied with the cutting job, and he declined to pay until the job was done properly. The boy returned the next day to improve his work and receive his pay. Once again, Brukner wasn’t satisfied. After trying again and being rebuffed, the boy gave up.
Gretchen Hawk of the WACO museum shared another story, told by a museum visitor one day in 2013. The man said that his grandfather had worked at WACO and had an interesting encounter with the boss soon after starting work there. He was walking to work in the rain one day when a gentleman in a fine car stopped and offered him a ride. He asked the man where he could drop him. Upon learning that the man worked at WACO, the gentleman asked him how he liked it there.
“Oh, it’s all right,” the worker said, “but they sure could pay a little more.” He thanked the gentleman for the ride, and went in to work. The next day, he and the other factory workers learned that a government inspection was scheduled. When he saw the inspector accompanied by the gentleman who had given him a ride, he had a sinking feeling. A coworker quickly confirmed that the gentleman was indeed Brukner. He braced himself for a reprimand—or worse—over his impudence of the previous day. But nothing happened that day. In fact, nothing happened until he received his next paycheck, when he saw with surprise that he—and presumably the other workers—had received a raise.
As for the boss, he didn’t overspend on personal habits. Fine cars seemed to have been Brukner’s one gift to himself. Early on, when WACO was becoming successful, he bought a robin’s-egg blue Cord, which he later replaced with a roomy Chrysler Airflow. In 1929, he purchased an old family farm about one mile south of the WACO complex. His bachelor brother Clem managed the farm, where he raised dogs and Arabian horses. Brukner’s other large land purchase was 146 acres of woodland five miles west of town, in 1934. The land was his personal sanctuary. He didn’t hunt or fish; he just walked and observed, enjoying the beauty of nature.
Whether at the farm or the plant, Brukner was always busy: planning, tinkering, inventing. This usually took place behind the scenes. He didn’t interact much with routine customers. But one day he was called into service to take a prospective customer out for a test flight. Freddie Lund was long gone by this time—killed in a fiery crash while racing a Taperwing in a closed-course race in Lexington, Kentucky, in the fall of 1931. On this particular day when a test pilot was needed, no other demonstration pilots were available. The customers, two brothers from Cleveland, were getting impatient, so Moffitt went to Brukner’s office to ask what to do.
“I’ll do it. It’s my airplane,” Brukner said, abruptly rising from his chair to walk to the landing field. Moffitt was stunned that the boss was going to deal with customers. He also had to be concerned that Brukner was going up in the company’s new WACO Model N. It was no secret that engineering and construction fascinated Brukner much more than actual flying. He seldom flew. According to research by Fred O. Kobernuss, another WACO historian, between 1929 and 1933 Brukner averaged about only two and a half hours in the sky monthly. After that, he flew even more infrequently, although he maintained a pilot’s license until the 1950s.
Moffitt watched anxiously as Brukner silently climbed into the cockpit with one of the brothers. Takeoff was good. The flight, although brief, went smoothly. Then Brukner came in to land. Moffitt’s eyes popped when he realized that the boss had forgotten to set down the landing flaps, which essentially function as brakes.
“He brought that thing in and hit the ground… . He must have been going one hundred miles per hour,” Moffitt said. Normally, the plane could land “on a postage stamp,” but without the flaps down, the sales manager wondered if the Model N was ever going to stop. “[Brukner] was clear out at the back fence before he got that thing turned around. He got out of the airplane, never said a word, and took off for the office.”
“‘Hey,’ asked the passenger, emerging from the N, ‘did he need that much room to get that thing in there?’” Without revealing to the brothers who their test pilot was, Moffitt convinced them that the plane could be landed in a normal space, at a reduced speed. He made the sale, and he and Brukner never discussed the incident.
Another group that made Brukner uncomfortable was beauracrats. “There was always a tension between him and the government types,” Willis said. “Clayt was never philosophically in tune with them.” The tension was largely because he had trouble acquiescing to anyone else’s demands when it came to building his aircraft. He didn’t have a university degree, didn’t hobnob with politicians in Washington or party with the millionaires who bought his planes. But he knew about airplane construction, and he knew that when a WACO left the factory in Troy, it had been built correctly. If a postproduction problem was discovered, he made it right. For example, when a problem was discovered with the 1935 Custom Model WACO after the craft had been delivered to distributors, WACO sent workers all over the country to fix it.
Obviously, Brukner had experience working with foreign governments: various Central and South American governments had bought numerous aircraft from him. In 1935, a WACO named Friend of Iran flew off to the Mideast to be used in locating ruins of ancient Persian cities. In the 1930s, the United States Army and Navy had both ordered WACOs to be used as trainers. Brukner and his crew could build a plane with any required specifications, and do it to the buyer’s satisfaction, but Brukner didn’t want to have to justify how the planes were built—he didn’t want a lot of red tape from bureaucrats whose sole construction experience was assembling a bike for their kid on Christmas morning.
So when World War II came along, it offered WACO its greatest potential commercial success, but it also presented Brukner with his greatest challenge. Germany and the Axis powers had increased the use of transport gliders to move troops and cargo. The Allies saw a similar need for gliders to make deliveries in occupied Europe. Congress authorized United States Army Air Corps commanding general Henry “Hap” Arnold—whom the Wright brothers had reportedly instructed in flying—to begin a transport glider program.
WACO was already heavily involved in wartime production, as were most aviation industries. The Troy factory was building training planes for student use in the Civilian Pilot Training Program. With most of the nation’s commercial pilots pressed into military service, private pilots and nonflyers had to be trained to take over the country’s day-to-day flight needs.
By September 1940, WACO was operating seven days a week to turn out three aircraft a day. Management was hustling to find and train new employees. By the end of 1942, the need for trainers abated. But then WACO announced the glider program; the company had produced a few hundred small gliders in the 1930s, but the transport gliders were a whole different species. Depending on the model, the gliders would need to transport thirteen soldiers and all their equipment; a quarterton Jeep; a 75 mm Howitzer cannon; or any other combination of weaponry, food, and medical supplies.
Vice President Brutus had left WACO at the beginning of the war to become head of Luscombe Aircraft Company, a bigger operation. But Arcier was still on board as chief engineer. He and his fellow designers came up with a glider that they thoroughly tested at Wright Field before General Arnold accepted it. WACO soon began building the gilders, as did fifteen other companies, who all used WACO’s design.
The war drastically changed the atmosphere at the company. Up through the 1930s, WACO had never employed more than two hundred workers, and that was only during peak times. The small-town, family feeling that characterized the early days with Buck and Hattie Weaver, Sam Junkin, and Charlie Meyers had remained even as the company grew. Dale Francis remembered endless hours of just hanging around the plant after school and during the summer in the late 1920s and early 1930s, watching planes being made, two or three at a time. Industrial espionage and grueling assembly lines weren’t concerns in Troy. “You could sit quietly to one side and watch, and no one minded,” Francis wrote. Occasionally, one of the workmen would throw a scrap of fuselage wood to a youngster as a souvenir.
With the new glider program, however, quiet days turned into around-the-clock shifts of intensive labor. Almost two thousand employees were soon at work. That brought something that Brukner had deliberately avoided his entire professional life: a unionized shop. WACO had the reputation of being a pretty good place to work—as long as you didn’t openly defy the boss. Charlie Moffitt recalled how in aviation’s honeymoon phase of the 1920s, men had actually volunteered to work at the factory for free, just to be a part of the new industry. Brukner never allowed that, but he did appreciate how dedicated his employees were, and he came to expect it.
“There was never a problem about people working overtime or helping out,” Moffitt said. “They were so engrossed in what they were doing that it was a pleasure for them.” But with a huge government contract and a record number of employees, unionization became a fact. “Clayt hated the union,” Dahlem said. “He felt that everyone who worked there was like him: they were there because they loved the work. That company was like his wife. Suddenly, he was forced to sit in the corner and watch some shop steward take over? Who the hell was that? He went crazy.”
But no matter how he detested the union, he had to put up with it. The business was too important to the company, and the gliders proved vital to the Allies winning in Europe. An estimated 19,903 gliders were produced during the war, all of WACO design, and 999 of them built at the Troy shop. In addition to the United States Army Air Corps and United States Navy, the gliders were used by the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force. One of the most evocative images of the D-Day invasion is of the huge gliders carrying troops, supplies, and medical personal into enemy territory.
Regardless of the WACO glider’s use in the war effort, Brukner’s attitude toward the union remained the same. When the contract finally expired in 1946, WACO maintained that the majority of its employees did not want union representation. With the war won, the government contract finished, and the number of employees greatly reduced, the union push lost steam. “Clayt said that he would rather close the plant than put up with the union, and he would have done it,” Dahlem said.
WACO suddenly had much greater postwar problems than just the labor union threat. Trainers, gliders, and spare parts for both had kept business humming during the war, but those needs were gone. WACO’s net sales for 1944 and 1945 were greater than $25.3 million, according to Dahlem’s research. That level of sales would not be reached again. Brukner and his top officers decided to concentrate their efforts on developing and building a new type of plane. Where the majority of WACOs were constructed of wood, the new Aristocraft four-passenger, cabin model would have metal wings and a steel fuselage. The plane’s landing gear and locations of the engine and drive shaft were considered unconventional.
After a great deal of time and work, the Aristocraft was deemed a bust, one no one wanted to take credit for. The fiasco seemed to sour Brukner on aircraft construction. WACO continued to build replacement parts for its earlier models, and some new planes were built, but the days of producing legendary aircraft were done. During the Korean War, the company manufactured bomb dollies, but by 1959, all production had ceased.
Brukner, meanwhile, was becoming more involved in some of his other inventions, which he had been working on for years. He had always invented and built, even when not in the plant. In the 1920s, he built his own car to drive between work and his farm. An automated log splitter was one of his proudest—and best-selling—inventions. A therapeutic sunlamp that he designed was patented in Canada.
Brukner had to be working with his hands to be happy. Even as a member of the local Stouder Memorial Hospital board, he was happier with his sleeves rolled up and a wrench in his hand than in a boardroom. When the hospital boiler broke down one day, Brukner simply went down into the basement and fixed the problem himself rather than having a plumber called in, recalled Don Willis. Brukner was in his seventies when work started on the Brukner Nature Center, but he still climbed on a bulldozer and cleared part of the land he had purchased back in 1934. The marcel waves were long gone, but his desire to create was just as strong.
Brukner’s brother, Clem, died in 1976. Brukner continued living at the farm, where a housekeeper kept life running smoothly. While most people considered him a rather dour, aloof man, the housekeeper’s daughter remembered him making little gadgets for her and telling her jokes, Dahlem said.
Brukner died on December 26, 1977, just one week after his eighty-first birthday, in a hospital room in Kettering, surrounded by blueprints for yet more inventions. In the Troy Daily News, Dale Francis eulogized him as one of the community’s most benevolent citizens.
Troy had has several other important industries over the years, he wrote, but “Waco was our connection with the world. It brought fabulous people to Troy… . But most of all it brought pride to the community.” As Willis said, “Everyone in aviation who knew Clayton Brukner respected what he did with WACO.”
Just ask any WACO pilot.
