“Most war films used actual newsreel combat footage in their aerial sequences. But movies like Twelve o’Clock High and its many successors required substantial ground fleets of actual airplanes for use as backdrops in scenes set on the runway flight lines. A cliche in films of the period was the scene in which the wing commander stands at the railing of the control tower, counting the number of bombers returning from the day’s raid on Berlin or Schweinfurt or the Channel ports. These scenes could not be reconstructed out of wartime news footage; they had to be filmed on the spot, with real airplanes which actually flew. It was Air Corps Associates which provided these warplanes.
“Craycroft restored (and test-flew) the B-29s that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he gave us-in several films-the Japanese air fleet that bombed Pearl Harbor (most of these being U. S. Navy surplus planes mocked up to resemble the silhouettes of Zeros); he made possible the movie scenes in which John Wayne and Robert Ryan fought the Japanese in the Pacific, in which countless Hollywood stars bombed Germany, and in which other stars fought dogfights with the Luftwaffe, the Italian Air Force and the Imperial Japanese Air Fleet.
“By the early nineteen sixties it was routine for Craycroft and Ryterband to accept a special rush order for a squadron of B-24 Liberators to be painted up with the markings of a specific World War Two unit (real or fictitious), and to actually fly the planes across the Atlantic and deliver them to the moviemakers’ locations in England or Spain.
“In his early forties Craycroft was a success. On paper he was a millionaire. But his wealth consisted entirely of stock certificates in Air Corps Associates. His standard of living was meager. He had never married; he lived in a modest apartment in Sherman Oaks, hardly a ten-minute drive from the company’s immense hangar-field in Burbank. His personal car was a war-surplus Jeep, made by Ford in nineteen forty-two; he had paid eighty-five dollars for it at an Army auction and had rebuilt it himself. He owned two business suits and, it is said, one necktie. His fingernails were invariably black with petroleum grease and grime. When not on purchasing expeditions to Kingman or ferry-delivery flights to film locations, he appears to have spent seven days a week working in the hangars of the Burbank facility. All evidence indicates he had little interest in money for its own sake; his work was his life. He neither swam nor played golf nor drank more than one or two drinks a week. He had no known romantic relationships, either heterosexual or homosexual. His social activities were minimal, confined to occasional dinners with his sister and brother-in-law and the unavoidable business lunches and dinners, the number of which he kept to an absolute minimum. He is not known to have had any close friends other than Charles Ryterband. He had not been in touch with his eldest sister, who still lived in Ohio, since the late nineteen forties.
“Interviewed recently by the FBI, an aircraft mechanic who was employed by Craycroft at Air Corps Associates during the period between nineteen fifty-five and nineteen fifty-eight had this to say:
“‘I guess most of us guys who devote our lives to airplanes are a little screwy. But most of us aren’t that screwy. I mean, I was married then, I had the first kid and the other one on the way, I had a bowling league, and we’d go to Disneyland or down to the beach on the weekends. We had plenty of friends, God knows. I mean we’re normal, you know? But Harold, he was something else. I mean, for openers nobody ever called him Hank or Hal or Old Buddy. He didn’t like “Mr. Craycroft” at all, even if he did own the whole shebang. But he’d only answer to “Harold.” No nickname. Now everybody in the airplane racket has a nickname. My name’s Joseph but half the guys I work with don’t know that; I’m Shorty, that’s all, on account of I’m so tall. Old Mr. Ryterband, we all called him Charlie.
“‘You know what it was about Harold? I’ll tell you how he always struck me. He never looked his age, you know. I guess he must have been around forty when I worked for him but he could have been twenty-eight, thirty. He was always kind of gangly and he had that shock of dark hair that he was always shoving back out of his face. He’d got kind of farsighted, I guess, and he had to wear glasses to do close-up work or reading. He had these great big black-frame eyeglasses that kept slipping down his nose. You’d see him working on an engine torn apart on the bench, and he’d be pushing his hair back, pushing his glasses up on his nose, and biting his lower lip-his teeth were a little buck. Actually he wasn’t bad-looking at all. He got mistaken for Gregory Peck a couple of times, only his jaw was a little small and he had those big upper teeth. But he always struck me like one of those introverted kids you always knew in high school-the ones that never had the nerve to date girls, they were always wrapped up in their toy chemistry sets and their microscope slides and their butterfly collections. You know what I mean? He wasn’t queer or anything. He was just sort of a teenage kid that never outgrew the stage of being fascinated with brainy toys. I bet you when he was fourteen he had an Erector Set.’
“Craycroft hadn’t had an Erector Set at fourteen, of course; by the time he was fourteen he’d dropped out of school and was learning to fly. But the characterization seems apt-as accurate as anything the detectives have been able to learn about Craycroft up to this time. He had a single-minded and virtually adolescent devotion to the mechanics of flight and the romance of aviation.
“This, mainly, is why it has been difficult to ‘get a handle’ on Craycroft’s psychology. It has been impossible to interview his friends because he had no friends in the usual sense. Employees, business associates, and fellow airmen have been interviewed but their answers have been limited to the sphere in which they knew Craycroft: the professional sphere. He lived for his work, and apart from it he seems to have had no life at all. Nothing about him, really, has been added to what was written in his early Army file reports. He was a mechanical genius, dedicated and devoted to the one passion of his life-the airplane.”
But evidently he’d made himself very successful. He was doing what he enjoyed doing, and making a great deal of money from it. How does that jibe with the obvious sudden desperation that led him to this incredible crime?
Well, it wasn’t all that sudden. And the success didn’t last you know.
(Reading) “By the early nineteen sixties the Hollywood fashion for war movies was waning. Apparently it was Ryterband who first saw the signs of change. Shrewdly Ryterband began to put subtle pressures on his brother-in-law to diversify the operations of the company. In time-by about nineteen sixty-three-Craycroft had been brought around to Ryterband’s way of thinking. By then ACA had a force of two hundred and forty-five planes, nearly all of them airworthy-and most of them, ironically, stored in mothballs because the movie market was drying up; nobody was making World War Two films anymore.
“It was Ryterband’s inspiration to go into the used-airplane business. Ryterband was by no means a marketing genius, but he had the intelligence to persuade Craycroft to hire a small staff of sales personnel, four former Air Force fliers who had flown both in the U.S. forces and in mercenary forces overseas, and who had a large number of business and foreign contacts among them.
“There had never been much of a business in surplus bombers. Progress in aircraft design had rendered them obsolete as military planes. And for civilian use-as cargo planes or passenger transports-they were ill-designed; they had not been built for comfort, economy, or spaciousness. The B-17 bomber, for example, was a huge airplane for its day: a wingspan of more than one hundred feet, standing nearly twenty feet high, weighing eighteen tons empty, capable of carrying another fourteen tons of fuel and cargo at a maximum speed well in excess of three hundred miles per hour (cruising speed two hundred and twenty-five) to a service ceiling of thirty-five thousand feet. It had a range, with three tons of bombs aboard, of two thousand miles.