I interviewed Floyd Bolin at his home in Alexandria, Minnesota, in May, 2003. He was 94 years old at the time, slight of build, ramrod straight, a little hard of hearing, and funny. I was a few minutes early when I arrived for the first of my two interview sessions with him. I rang the doorbell and got no answer. I knocked loudly and got no answer. The door was not locked so I opened it and called Floyd's name and got no answer. I stepped into the house a couple of steps, far enough to see Floyd in the living room, tipped back in his recliner, a blanket on his lap, his eyes closed, an alarm clock on the blanket. "Floyd," I said, "it's Tom Montag." Floyd opened his eyes, looked at me, looked at his alarm clock, and said, "Tom, you're a few minutes early. You'll have to go away and come back at 4:00 p.m." That's the sense of humor Floyd has, and that quick. My thanks to Ione Jensen and the Douglas County Historical Society for this transcription.
Floyd: The houses in the Noonan Addition were just being built. The landscaper was the one preparing the ground and getting the surveyors. They did make mistakes. They didn’t start high enough, so when I got through with my work, I didn’t have enough elevation for the last house to drain properly. I had to develop a saucer-shaped yard for that last house to drain out at one corner, to get under the curb instead of over. To get the water off of that lot. That was a mistake on the part of the original architectural setting of the high point level, to come out with enough drop for each house to hit that 7th Avenue. That became a problem for me when I was doing the finals, when the houses were actually being set there. There was no drop left.
Vagabond: You were basically in a hole.
Floyd: They had these levels for each house set and when they come down to the end there wasn’t enough drainage left for that last house. So I had to make a special to drain on the inside of what would be their property and go underneath and come out under the curb. It was a little technical problem, bothersome. It doesn’t drain in the winter-time when it freezes. It’s always been kind of a sore spot. So I worked on that all the way through the whole project.
Vagabond: So, you worked at Camp Carlos and then worked for Phil J. Noonan developing houses. So we’re in 1936-1937, then in 1939 you start the dairy?
Floyd: Okay. Things were through at the boys camp. When I was through with Phil Noonan, he didn’t have anything more for me to do. Anyway when he didn’t have anything more for me to do, I told Phil "I think I’m going to head for the Twin Cities and see what I can find there for work." I said "Would you be kind enough to write me some kind of a letter of recommendation." "Sure," he said. I’ve got that letter of recommendation here. I’ll have to find for you. It’s unbelievable what that man wrote for me. I was almost embarrassed, you know, with what he said in that letter, to live up to that.
Vagabond: Pretty high praise?
Floyd: I never used it though. I wish I could put my hands on it right now. It was embarrassing what he said. But I never did use it.
Vagabond: What did you do then between the end of your work with Noonan Addition and starting the dairy?
Floyd: Then I went to the Cities and got this job with Swedish Hospital and then to the Calhoun Beach Club. I took a course in aviation. I was going to head for aviation, you see. But I worked on these other projects in the day time when I went to school, night school. When I was through with the course at Dunwoody and I got the highest marks there and they gave me this free ride to Chicago and back. Then I went back to construction. I was working at the Calhoun Beach Club at the time, and all of a sudden there was a big ringer called up and somebody came and contacted me on the job and wanted me to come and take this call. Well, it was the Mohawk Aircraft Company calling for me to come to work for them. So that was my first job coming up with aircraft.
Vagabond: Where was Mohawk?
Floyd: They were a fledgling company and they had a beautiful aircraft design. Some guy that had limited finances but he had this beautiful idea of an executive type aircraft, not necessarily for the Jennies and stuff like that, that was for the ordinary pilot. But he had designed an executive type aircraft called the Mohawk Pinto. It turned out that our Bellanca here in town was designed somewhat after the Mohawk Pinto. That company started building that aircraft. Like many companies in those days the plane industry was tough.
They had a tragedy happen. That Mohawk Pinto was a beautiful aircraft, right today if you want to see how it looked, go and look at a Bellanca that is still being built out of Alexandria, that I was involved in later on. When they build a new aircraft and it’s put on the market, they have to go through tests. Speed Holmen, I don’t know if you know that name or not, his family was famous in those days. He was the test pilot for the Northwest United States here for aircraft being built. He was the guy that test flew them. It was quite a thing because you’d have to bail out if it don’t work. You see a test pilot in those days, testing these aircraft, one of the tests was to deliberately put it in a spin, are you familiar with that? Okay, an experienced pilot could get it out of a spin. If you get into a spin, it takes a professional, you usually go down and meet your Waterloo if you can’t get it out of that spin, you’re going down.
So this aircraft, the Pinto, as pretty as it was, it had some deficiency in its aerodynamics so when Speed put this into a deliberate spin, it wouldn’t come out. He always had altitude enough so you could bail out if you had to. He had to. So he bailed out, crashed the airplane. I had just started working, in fact, it was my very first day of getting my station to work at Mohawk Aircraft Company. When they notified me about the job at the aircraft company, I quit the construction company at Calhoun Beach Club and went to work for them. This was on a Tuesday morning and the foreman there got me positioned where I would be working and I got started in my position and I worked probably an hour or so and pretty soon the bells, buzzer went off. It was two or three different sounds that alerted everybody.
Out comes this guy dressed in a military attire; he was the guy that had founded the Mohawk Aircraft Company. He announced to us that he had sad news for us. He said when Holmen tested our aircraft yesterday, it failed coming out of a spin and he had to ditch it. So our Pinto is gone, our test plane. We’ll have to shut down for now. e are preparing to call you back as soon as we get everything squared around. Well, it never happened because they didn’t have the finances to re-establish themselves.
To be continued....
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