His name was Leif Sverdrup, but apparently his friends called him Jack. At least my politician Dad called him that, and somehow he managed to wangle me a seat on the big man’s corporate plane on my way back to Holy Cross after semester break in 1962.
Jack Sverdrup was now the CEO of Sverdrup & Parcel, a civil engineering company that ranked among St. Louis’ largest firms. In addition, he was a member, in fact the most powerful member, of Civic Progress, the group of local business leaders who “ran the City” in that era. But even more significantly, he was General Sverdrup, a two-star Brigadier General and Director of Engineering in the Pacific in WWII, serving under Douglas McArthur, a “genuine” American hero.
So, here I was, a 20-year-old, on the Sverdrup corporate plane on a trip from St. Louis to New York. The plane was a converted DC3, a propeller job with a top air speed of 200 MPH, and thus the trip was a long one, almost 6 hours as I recall. The reason for the trip was that General Jack was taking a group of his colleagues—several other two-stars and at least one three-star—to the annual Birthday Party celebration for General McArthur which Jack hosted every year at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. And what a ride it was!
Two stories illustrate the kind of man Jack Sverdrup was. The first, pretty much accepted as true because so many important men of the era confirmed it, was the tale of the gathering of Civic Progress where the fate of the “new” baseball stadium was being decided. According to those who were there, the General chaired the meeting, and once it was determined how much money was needed as equity to fund what became Busch Stadium, he declared that they would not leave the room until the money was raised. He first declared his own intentions and amount, and then, one by one, he called upon the men around the table (they were all men) and “told” each one how much he or his company would pledge. No one dared to disagree, and sure enough, by the end of the meeting, they had pledges in hand for the entire amount.
The second story was one from earlier in the day of my fateful flight. It was tradition that a plane carrying a U.S. General would bear an insignia on the side with the number of stars of the general, and of course the higher the ranking, the higher the number of stars. Since there was a three-star general scheduled to make the flight, someone dared to suggest to General Sverdrup that the plane should bear a three-star insignia that day. Sverdrup huffed, “This is my goddamn plane, and it’ll bear my insignia.” I don’t know what happened to that poor man who made the suggestion, but certainly his stock dropped on Sverdrup’s exchange. And our plane bore two stars.
The passenger list wasn’t limited to generals. For instance, the publisher of the Globe Democrat, Duncan Baumann and his wife were on board. And I’m sure there were others. But the agenda and the conversation were dominated by the military men. And there was no doubt about the tone of the dialogue. After all, these were Mac’s Boys. They loved Mac, and so they hated Harry Truman, the civilian who fired their hero over a policy disagreement during the Korean War. While Douglas MacArthur was not the model for the maniacal General Jack Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant anti-war movie Dr. Strangelove (that was the incredibly hawkish lunatic, Curtis LeMay), nonetheless given his way he would have launched our country into a land war against Communist China that could easily have escalated into WWIII and a nuclear holocaust. And some historians believe that a number of high-ranking military men (including undoubtedly some of my flight-mates that day) came as close to launching a military coup as has ever happened in our history when Truman overruled and then fired General Mac.
Listening to the conversation on the DC3 that day, I not only bought into those historians’ belief, but I was wondering whether they still might do it, 10 years after the event. Wow, I never heard such vitriol about an American President. I was raised in a conservative pro-military family, was a child of the ‘50’s, not the ‘60’s and hadn’t begun my political conversion yet, but even at that I was getting a bit uncomfortable.
Until it happened that General Jack and the Baumanns started looking for a fourth to play bridge. Now I was in my element. After all, I practically majored in the game at Holy Cross. So, quietly but confidently I offered to play. And consequently I was across the table from the mighty General when he began telling stories of the Pacific.
He told a few, but only one that sticks in my memory in any detail, and it was a beauty. It seems that there was a particular island that the Americans had held, and Sverdrup had been responsible for designing and constructing the airfield. But now, the Japanese were counterattacking, and it was clear that they were going to re-occupy the island. Except for the airfield, the loss of the island was not critical. However, if the U.S. could not destroy the airfield, the Japanese could use it as crucial supply link. So, General Sverdrup was given the task—destroy the airport after the Americans had used it to get all of our people and equipment out, but before the Japanese arrived. That left almost no time, and the big problem—how to escape from the island by plane when you’ve destroyed the runway?
By this time, most of the people on the plane surrounded the bridge table, waiting for the climax of the story. And Sverdrup did not disappoint. “We left just a short stretch of runway, not enough for the Japanese to use for aircraft of any size. And then we found this native who had a big bolo knife. We tied the small plane to a tree with heavy rope; instructed the native to cut the rope when we signalled, and then we revved the plane to the maximum level, straining against the rope, and gave the signal. The native wielded the bolo; and the plane lifted off just before the end of the runway and just as the Japanese landing craft arrived on the opposite beach.” You could hear the collective sigh. “Two hearts”, he said, and we continued on our way.
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