Time Machine: Planes and automobiles

Paul Shaw started working in Cedar Rapids as an automobile mechanic in 1919 at W.H. Morse & Co., a dealer in Essex automobiles. He moved to Hutchings Motor Co., the Cedar Rapids Buick dealership, as a salesman in 1922 and to Borschel Motor in 1924.

After learning to fly in 1921, Shaw spent his off hours as a barnstorming pilot.

Cars and airplanes would define the rest of Shaw's long life - though that life was almost cut short in 1926 when he crashed his Jenny World War I surplus airplane in a field near Olin in Jones County. He walked away.

Shaw had bought the plane from Francis Stimson, who, in 1923, had bought the plane and learned to fly it from a man he knew as 'Slim” Lindbergh - but whom history knows as Charles Lindbergh.

In a Gazette interview in 1979, Shaw recalled flying the Jenny. As a barnstormer, he said, he learned how to miss cows 'while making at least one crash landing a day. As a matter of fact, I made most of those crash landings in the very first plane that Lindbergh ever owned. ... God knows how many times Lindy must have crash-landed the thing before I got it.”

After the 1926 crash, the plane's pieces were retrieved and stored in Ernest LeClere's barn near Coggon until research showed that it had indeed belonged to Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. The plane now resides in a New York museum.

FLYING AND TRAINING

Shaw's love of flying led to service as a Linn County deputy-in-the-sky in the 1920s, where he conducted manhunts from his cockpit after bank robberies.

Shaw married in 1928 and decided to start Shaw Aircraft Co. Dan Hunter was already firmly established at the Cedar Rapids airport, so Shaw quit his job at Borschel and took his wife and his fledgling company to Iowa City, where he became the Iowa City Airport's first fixed-base operator - basically, the business that handles fueling, maintenance and hangars for non-commercial planes.

Iowa City was celebrating its centennial in 1939 when Shaw and Lain Guthrie began training new pilots for the Civilian Pilot Training program.

Twenty students from the University of Iowa showed up at the airport in November for the first course sponsored by the Civil Aeronautics Authority. The government used the private training to come up to speed with European pilot training programs during World War II. Shaw trained more than 2,000 students during the war.

Fliers who completed the full course would be snatched up by the Army, Navy or commercial organizations.

Shaw resigned as head of the Iowa City civilian squad on May 13, 1942.

C.R. hangar fire

In January 1943, Shaw bought two cross-country Stinson Reliance planes that had escaped the fire that destroyed Hunter's operations at the Cedar Rapids airport. One of the planes had been stored at Muscatine and the other was pulled out of the hangar just before the fire got to it.

The fire started when a spark from a welding torch landed on the wing of a plane. The plane was immediately enveloped in flames, and six more planes in the shop caught fire. Airport workers quickly closed the doors of the nearby hangar in a fruitless effort to protect the planes inside from fire.

Fire Chief E.P. Kohout said if the employees had concentrated immediately on moving the planes out of the hangar, most of them could have been saved. Instead, the workers - understandably - had focused on making sure no one was left in the machine shop.

The chief ordered the hangar doors be opened to get out as many planes as possible. Three planes, and the fuselage of a fourth, were wheeled out before the rest of the planes caught fire.

The flames destroyed the machine shop, hangar and 29 planes.

While the ruins were still smoking, Hunter, business manager Leo Damge and Dr. Alfred M. Meyer, coordinator of the war training service, said plans were underway to keep the war training program going. More than 70 students continued their ground school training until new planes could be obtained.

The cross-country trainees stationed in Cedar Rapids moved to the Iowa City Airport.

from planes to cords

Shaw retired from his flying service in 1952 to concentrate on his hobby - cars. He owned two unusual cars: A 1936 Cord convertible and a 1937 Cord sedan. The last Cords were built in 1937 by Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Co.

Shaw bought a 1936 Cord in 1943 for $325. In 1952, it was valued at $5,000.

Shaw took his cars to Auburn, Ind., once a year to a Cord parts and repair plant for servicing.

'They do a wonderful servicing job,” Shaw said, 'and they do it reasonably. I don't think the upkeep on my Cords runs any higher than repairs on popular makes.”

The January 1952 edition of Iowa Transit, a University of Iowa College of Engineering publication, called the Cord 'the martyr of an industry.” Many features of the 1937 Cord were incorporated in later cars.

The Cord eliminated the drive shaft hump through the middle of the car, had a fingertip gear shift and front-wheel drive.

The front-wheel drive feature allowed drivers to have better control, so it was used in racing cars at the Indianapolis Speedway.

The Cord was expensive, selling for $2,000 to $3,000, a premium price during the Depression. That may have been the reason why it flopped. The company, which made its first car in 1936, produced 3,000 cars before it went out of business in 1937.

Powered by a 175-horsepower Lycoming engine, the Cord held the American stock car speed record of 107.66 mph from 1937 until it was broken by an Austin Healey in 1953.

(The current speed record was set in October 2007 by Russ Wicks in a Dodge Charger - 244.9 mph.)

Paul Shaw, businessman, barnstormer and car collector, died in October 1992 at the age of 96.