Spark [Sheldon_Sidney]_The_Other_Side_of_Midnight(BookSe | Seite 182

CATHERINE
Washington-Paris: 1946
13
At nine o’clock on Monday morning Larry Douglas reported to the chief pilot, Captain
Hal Sakowitz, at the Pan American office at LaGuardia Airport in New York. As Larry
walked in the door, Sakowitz picked up the transcript of Larry’s service record that he had
been studying and shoved it into a desk drawer.
Captain Sakowitz was a compact, rugged-looking man with a seamed, weather-
beaten face and the largest hands that Larry had ever seen. Sakowitz was one of the real
veterans of aviation. He had started out in the days of traveling air circuses, had flown
single-engine airmail planes for the Government and had been an airline pilot for twenty
years and Pan American’s chief pilot for the past five years.
“Glad to have you with us, Douglas,” he said.
“Glad to be here,” Larry replied.
“Eager to get into a plane again?”
“Who needs a plane?” grinned Larry. “Just point me into the wind, and I’ll take off.”
Sakowitz indicated a chair. “Sit down. I like to get acquainted with you boys who
come in here to take over my job.”
Larry laughed. “You noticed.”
“Oh, I don’t blame any of you. You’re all hotshot pilots, you have great combat
records, you come in here and think ‘if that schmuck Sakowitz can be Chief Pilot, they
oughta make me Chairman of the Board.’ None of you guys plan to stay navigators very
long. It’s just a stepping stone to pilot. Well, that’s fine. That’s the way it should be.”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” Larry said.
“But there’s one thing you have to know out front. We all belong to a union, Douglas,
and promotions are strictly by seniority.”
“I understand.”
“The only thing you might not understand is that these are damn good jobs and there
are more people coming in than there are leaving. That slows up the rate of promotion.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Larry replied.
Sakowitz’s secretary brought in coffee and Danish pastries and the two men spent the
next hour talking and getting acquainted. Sakowitz’s manner was friendly and affable, and
many of his questions were seemingly irrelevant and trivial, but when Larry left to go to