Veteran Airline Executive Terrell Drinkwater Dies
Terrell Croft Drinkwater, the former Western Air Lines president who enlisted a champagne-drinking parrot to help build a financially troubled regional carrier into an international airline that boasted it was “the only way to fly,” died Saturday of pancreatic cancer in his West Los Angeles home.
Drinkwater, 76, was the longest serving chief executive in Western’s history, retiring after 22 years in 1970.
Under Drinkwater, an ebullient, pipe-puffing attorney who put champagne and flowers aboard Western flights, the line’s revenues went from $12 million in 1946 to $240 million in 1969 and the company’s routes increased from 4,800 miles to 25,000.
His son, Terry Drinkwater, is senior West Coast correspondent for CBS television news.
Drinkwater got into the airline business as an aeronautical law attorney in Denver. In 1942 he became a vice president of Continental Airlines while also serving the first of six terms as a director of the Air Transport Assn.
In 1944 he became a vice president of American Airlines but three years later resigned to accept the presidency of Western, which inspired his former colleagues to present him with a replica of a bone inscribed “Honorary Member No. 1 in the Bonehead Club.”
“They thought I was foolish to take over a bankrupt airline,” he recalled in a 1968 interview with The Times. “But I was born and raised in the West and was fed up with the East.”
At 38, he was the youngest president of a scheduled airline in the nation.
Shortly after he took over, he said in later years, he even had to sell some of the struggling airline’s stock of spare aircraft tires to competing airlines to meet a payroll, and sometimes he had to shift airplanes to hangars in Nevada, where taxes were lower than in California.
But he kept Western flying and two years after he took over, the line showed a profit.
He introduced filet mignon, champagne (at one point Western was the world’s biggest user of California champagne) and orchid corsages for women, hiring the advertising firm of Batton, Barton, Durstine & Osborn to persuade television viewers that Western offered comfort.
BBDO artists drew a pampered parrot, obviously stuffed with food and drink and puffing on a cigar, resting against the tail of a Western jet in flight, who enthused: “Western Airlines: the Only Way to Fly.”
Drinkwater added routes to cities in 12 western states, then expanded east of the Rockies and westward to Hawaii. Western, which first got off the ground in Los Angeles in 1926 as an air mail carrier with some passenger service to Salt Lake City, became an international carrier with flights to Mexico.
But success brought a host of competitive suitors. Drinkwater managed to stave off several takeover attempts before he was replaced as president after Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian acquired 28% of the airline’s stock. Drinkwater had opposed Kerkorian, favoring instead a merger with American Airlines.
In addition to his son, Drinkwater is survived by his wife, Helen, a daughter, Dorsey Stevenson, and four grandchildren. His ashes were to be scattered at sea today.
