Interview conducted on March 16, 1999.
Final transcript
The interview describes career of Claude League, a ticket and reservations agent and manager for TWA (Trans World Airlines) from 1930 to 1973; early work with his brother as an air traffic controller at Lambert Field, St. Louis, Missouri; riding in an aerial show in a Curtiss JN-4 Jenny in 1926; hiring by TWA in St. Louis in 1930; duties and experiences in a consolidated ticket office; decision to transfer to the San Francisco office in 1938; his work in ticketing, reservations, communications, and promotion; detailed description of 1937 terminal building at San Francisco Airport; military service beginning in 1940 as a unit operations manager for the Army Air Corps, stationed in Melbourne, Australia; brief encounter with Harold Gatty while in Melbourne; return to civilian life and work with TWA in St. Louis in 1945; challenges of finding work after the war; TWA ticket offices he opened in New Orleans and Seattle; riding in a prototype model of the Boeing 707 while working in Seattle; transfer to the San Jose office in 1962 to market the company to early Silicon Valley pioneers; changes in aviation in general and in the Bay Area specifically between the 1930s and the 1960s; thoughts about TWA as a company and about Charles Lindbergh, Carl Icahn, and Howard Hughes.
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