I’d have to say both. Everybody was concerned about both. It was Hobson’s choice.
Valkenburg (Cont’d)
Did the Federal Reserve Bank respond with alacrity to your approach?
I don’t know if you could say that.
What could you say?
They got stricken with a damn near terminal case of bureaucracy over there. They always do if there’s anything that smells like a crisis.
And?
I got put on hold.
And then?
In the first place they couldn’t seem to find anybody that was willing to admit he was authorized to talk to anyone about anything. It was about ten after twelve when I made the call, and they’re all civil servants down there. Ergo they were all out to lunch.
And in the second place?
Well, look, in a nutshell what it came down to was this: The federal government gives money away all the time, but they do it after there’s been a Congressional appropriation and a policy authorization from some Cabinet agency, right? Now here we’re talking about five million dollars in cash, and the Fed is the only place in town that happens to stock that particular model, and what it boiled down to was that they didn’t have signatures in quintuplicate authorizing the release of said item.
What did you do about it?
Me? I’m a vice-president of a private bank. I don’t swing much weight at the Fed. I knew one guy down there, I play handball with him, he’s a deputy administrator in the disposal office. But he was out to lunch. The rest of them heard my story, suddenly they no spick English. At first they wouldn’t even tell me where my friend was having lunch. Finally I got the name of the restaurant and put through a call. He came on the line and listened to my yarn and then he just breathed hard for a few minutes. I didn’t want to interrupt that. Then he said he’d run straight back to his office and call me back from there.
What time was it then?
It must have been after twelve thirty by the time I got him at the restaurant, and it was maybe ten minutes to one when he called me back from the Fed.
But there was no progress?
Not right away, no. It was still the bugaboo of authorization. Everybody was out to lunch and everybody at the head office in Washington was out to lunch too.
You must have been a little angry by then.
I didn’t have any doubt at all that this guy was perfectly willing to spray bombs all over the city if we didn’t come up with the money.
Why were you convinced of that?
Because I figured if I were crazy enough to pull a stunt like that, I sure as hell wouldn’t be bluffing.
You mentioned that your friend at the Federal Reserve Bank was a deputy administrator in the disposal office. Can you tell me what that means?
It’s where they destroy old money.
You mean worn-out dollar bills, that sort of thing?
Yes. You’ve probably seen bank tellers separating out the badly worn bills and putting them in separate bundles in their cash drawers. At the end of the day those bills are gathered up by each bank and set aside for collection by the Federal Reserve. The Fed takes the responsibility of disposing of them. They collect the used bills from the banks, and they either issue credits for them or they exchange them for brand-new bills, depending on the individual bank’s cashflow situation at the moment. There’s a lot of red tape, of course. It wouldn’t be a federal office without that. They have to make a record of the serial number of every bill before they destroy it. Then they have all sorts of checks and balances-people watching people watching people-to make sure nobody rips off a wad of old twenties on the way to the incinerator. It’s a complicated operation. But it does mean there’s a lot of money in the vaults at the disposal office-that’s the incinerator office. The new bills, ready for dispersal to the banks, are kept in vaults adjacent to the disposal vaults. So between the two sets of vaults you have the heaviest concentration of small-denomination banknotes in the city.
Don’t some of the big banks have large supplies of cash? Your bank, for example, the Merchants Trust, doesn’t it have dozens of branches around the city? Wouldn’t there be a large aggregate of cash among them?
Sure. But it’s scattered all over. We’ve got forty-six branch offices in the five boroughs of New York. Every branch office has a vault and x number of tellers’ cages. Do you have any idea how long it would take to round up all that money and get it delivered to one central point? Christ, the guy had given us a deadline-we had less than three hours to come up with the money. More like two hours at that point. We were sitting on a goddamn time bomb-literally.
Channing
Full name, for the record, please?
Owen B. Channing.
Your title and position?
Chief of the heavy bomber section, aircraft history division, the Air Force Museum, Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio. I’m a civilian employed by the United States Air Force with a civil-service rating of GS-11.
You’ve had an opportunity to examine some of the evidence in this case, isn’t that right, Mr. Channing?
Yes.
Specifically you’ve had interviews arranged for you with some of the witnesses, Mr. Harris and Mr. Woods particularly, and you’ve seen Mr. Harris’ television-tape photographs of the bomber?
Yes, that’s right.
You also had dealings with Craycroft and Ryterband a few years ago, didn’t you?
Yes. Rather briefly. I knew Harold Craycroft by reputation, of course-everybody in my generation of air-war buffs knew about him.
What can you tell me about him that might be of use to us? We already know a good deal of his personal history.
I don’t know if I could be of much assistance there, Mr. Skinner. I only met him once, and it was quite a short meeting. I enjoyed the opportunity to meet him, of course-I’d heard so much about him. He didn’t seem very strange, I must say. Certainly there was no indication he might be demented.
Can you reconstruct that meeting for us?
I’ll try. Nothing terribly memorable happened. His company, Aeroflight, had made arrangements to donate two aircraft to our museum.
When was that?
The arrangements had been made toward the end of nineteen seventy-one. We took delivery of the planes in January, nineteen seventy-two.
Go on, please.
The planes were flown to Dayton by tour men from Aeroflight. Craycroft was the pilot of one plane, and a man named Tree flew the other one. Their copilots were Aeroflight employees. I inspected the planes, signed the delivery papers, and had dinner at a local steak house with one of my assistants and the four Aeroflight men. I didn’t really get an opportunity to speak with Craycroft alone-it was a group of six of us and the conversation rambled quite a bit, as you might imagine. You don’t get much of an impression of individuals in circumstances like that, not unless they’re extraordinarily striking people.
Craycroft wasn’t particularly striking, then?
Not unusual, no. He was quite good-looking, of course, but his personality seemed rather withdrawn-retiring, you might say. He didn’t talk very much except when the subject came around to engineering technicalities. That seemed to bring him alive a bit more.
Then he seemed subdued at that time?
No, I wouldn’t say that at all-not if you mean it in the sense of depression. I think he was naturally a quiet person, that’s all. An introvert. Mr. Tree did most of the talking, as I recall-he’s rather ebullient. Once in a while the conversation would come around to some of the famous legends about Craycroft during the war, and at those points Craycroft would smile as if he was very pleased to be so well remembered. But it was a shy kind of smile, and he only talked sparingly about the war days. Mostly about the weaknesses that had been built into the aircraft designs, and the corrective redesigns he’d created. He wasn’t boastful about it. I got the impression it had always puzzled him that the original designers hadn’t seen their mistakes. Things were so obvious to Craycroft that he seemed baffled when other people couldn’t see them as clearly as he could. I’ve heard him called a genius, but if so he certainly didn’t display any of the arrogance you might expect. He wasn’t contemptuous of anyone; he was just puzzled by lesser minds.