The story is prime Bill Lear.
The beefy, bespectacled inventor was in shirt-sleeves, thrashing out a
design problem with one of his Learjet engineers.
The engineer wanted something done one way. Lear wanted it done another.
The argument heated up until a boiling-mad Lear roared: “You put up 50
percent of the money, you make 50 percent of the decisions.”
They did it Bill Lear’s way. Of course.
“He was a bright, energetic, hard-working leader,” says Fran Jabara, a
former paid consultant to Lear and now director of Wichita State University’s
Center for Entrepreneurship.
“To some he was controversial, but to me he was a perfect example of an
entrepreneur. He had many ideas. Some worked, some didn’t,” Jabara said. “He
was always optimistic, sometimes unrealistically so, but most of the time he
was on target. He was fully committed to his projects.”
Bill Lear is best known for designing and building the Learjet – the
world’s first cheap, fast mass-produced business jet – at a factory he started
in Wichita in 1962. The company now is Gates Learjet Corp.
But Lear, who had only an eighth-grade education, also held more than 150
patents. He is credited with inventing the car radio, the eight-track stereo
tape player and cartridges, the autopilot for jet aircraft, the navigational
radio, and the radio direction-finder for general aviation aircraft.
To his admirers, Lear was a creative genius possessed of exceptional
business courage. To his enemies, he was a hot-headed dictator determined to
get his way.
“I found Bill to be very demanding but also a very warm person to work
for,” said Don Grommesh, vice president of research and engineering at Gates
Learjet, who began working for Lear in 1962. “He had a way about him that
caused people to get things done. I think that was one reason for the success
of Learjet.”
John Zimmerman, aviation writer for The Wichita Eagle and the Beacon
during the 1960s and now president of Aviation Data Service Inc. in Wichita,
said people in aviation would “like Bill one minute and hate the ground he
walked on the next......”
