Someone Going Home Late

An entrepreneurial and engineering genius, Leroy Hill left his mark on 20th century aviation. But that was just the beginning. As a gifted Berkeley engineering graduate in the late teens, Hill succeeded in reengineering the famous 'Liberty Engine' of World War I to fit into the legendary fighter DH-4, or 'Flying Coffin'. In the late 1920s his passion for aviation brought him to a new marketplace as twelve-year president of Air Associates - that remarkable aviation catalog of everything from plane parts and repairs to whole aircraft. Later, in World War II, he founded the company that manufactured and distributed all the hose-clamps for the popular P-51 Mustang Fighter. A true entrepreneur, Leroy Hill was involved in sixty different companies either designing new technologies or marketing improved versions of the old. Politically, he was a lifelong anti-union activist working in the most unionized industries in the nation. Though he marched lockstep with no one, Hill remained to the end of his life a hardbitten opponent of big government who championed many conservative movements of his day. From Leroy Hill's substantial archives, including his voluminous diaries, author Craig Miner has distilled the heady public and private dynamics of an extraordinary life.