Target Manhattan

He certainly was. I counted myself very fortunate to have a beau like Charles. He was in his late twenties then, of course, and he’d come down the street in his open Cord roadster as dashing as you please. The young people admired him tremendously.

He worked in Anchorage with your brother until the begi

Yes. Then naturally the both of them went charging right off to enlist in the Army, right after Pearl Harbor. In Alaska at that time, of course, they weren’t sure but what the Japanese would invade Anchorage at any moment. It was much closer to Tokyo than any other American city, you know.

But Mr. Ryterband was rejected by the Army.

As a child he’d had rheumatic fever and very bad asthma. That was why his parents had moved to Southern California-for Charles’ health. By the time he grew up he wasn’t sickly at all, of course, he was the healthiest man I ever knew-never sick a day in his life. But of course he still had scars in him from the rheumatic fever and the Army wouldn’t accept him. Later on of course, in the last years of the war, they were accepting anybody who could walk into the recruiting office under his own power, but by that time Charles was doing very vital war work even though he was a civilian, and both he and the draft board felt the same way-that he was far more useful where he was than he’d have been in a uniform. Charles wasn’t a coward, Mr. Ski

Yes, ma’am. Now, in nineteen forty-two Mr. Cray croft went off into the Army, but Mr. Ryterband remained in Anchorage and continued to operate their partnership.

That’s correct. Actually by about the middle of nineteen forty-two the company had become what I called a quasi-military organization. Charles wasn’t in the Army of course, but he was providing all ma

Well, I saw him in nineteen forty-three, of course.

After the end of the campaign in the Aleutians?

Yes. He was transferred to an air base in Nebraska to train army air mechanics-the ground crews.

You still resided in Cinci

Yes, sir. My sister had gone to work in a war plant, but I was still teaching. We still had to educate our young people, you know, war or no war.

Do you think any important changes had taken place in your brother’s personality as a result of his experiences in the war in Alaska?

Well, I’d have to think… Yes, I think you could say he’d become more impatient.

In what ways?

Well, you’d have to have known him, really. You’d have to understand the way he was.

That’s what I’m trying to do, Mrs. Ryterband, and perhaps with your help we’ll be able to get closer to it.

Harold was always kind. He was thoughtful toward my sister and me. But he wasn’t the sort of man who ever brought little gifts for you or remembered your birthday. My goodness, he rarely remembered his own birthday. Things like that were of very little importance to him-none at all, in fact. My brother wasn’t given to ceremony. And he didn’t-oh, dear, it’s very difficult to explain just what I mean…

Take your time, Mrs. Ryterband.

Yes, sir, I’m trying my best.

You said he’d become impatient.

With people. He’d always been indifferent to people. Not unkind, you know. Not rude to them. But Harold wasn’t what you could call a social animal. I’d have to admit he was a single-minded man-very wrapped up in his work.

Obsessed with it, would you say?

To a point, yes. But not in a cruel way. I remember more than once in the shop in Cinci

Then what was the nature of this “impatience with people”?

I think after he’d been in the Army awhile he developed a great dislike of the men in authority. The brass hats. He resented being placed under the command of people who didn’t know half as much as he knew about airplanes.

That’s hardly an unusual situation in the military.

It isn’t unusual anywhere in life, Mr. Ski

By “the men in power” do you mean his immediate superiors or the men who made the important strategic decisions?

His immediate superiors. No, Harold wasn’t an armchair strategist. He didn’t think in those terms, you see. He was a man who’d been given a job to do. What made him angry was that his superiors prevented him from doing that job.

Because of their stupidity.

Yes. I believe Harold developed an abiding hatred of authority during that time. He began to regard it as axiomatic that men in authority were incompetent.

I daresay if you used that as a guiding principle, you’d be right more often than wrong.

Yes, sir. Because men in positions of authority are usually men who have devoted their lives to the skills they need to acquire authority, rather than the skills of administration and technical competence.

That’s a rather keen observation, Mrs. Ryterband.

It was one of the things Harold used to say.

Then your brother did devote thought to things other than mechanics?

Well, he wasn’t a machine. He had a mind. A good mind. There were things he took very little interest in-politics, religion, social things-but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t aware of them.

Yes, ma’am. Now, your brother developed a large reputation during the latter part of the war in Europe, and after the war he and Mr. Ryterband set up a lightplane factory, isn’t that right?

It was in California. We moved to Palo Alto in November of nineteen forty-five. Charles and I had been married just a year.

What had your husband been doing, professionally, during that year?

Well, you see, the war effort had petered out in Alaska by the end of nineteen forty-three, and there wasn’t sufficient work to keep the company going in Anchorage. Charles had closed down the facility in the middle of nineteen forty-four and returned to Ohio. He was a very loyal American and he’d decided that he ought to offer his services to one of the aircraft companies for the duration of the war. He secured an important position with Northrop in Hawthorne, California. That was how we came to be in California-we moved out there right after the wedding. He worked mainly on the P-61 fighter, the Black Widow. But right after the war-in fact it was before the war actually ended-Northrop was given a government contract to develop the F-89, the Scorpion. It was the first all-weather jet fighter. It used Allison jet engines, and my husband was not interested in those, so we left Hawthorne in November and joined my brother up in Palo Alto.