Samuel F. Pryor, Pioneer Aviation Industrialist

Samuel F. Pryor will be buried Saturday in a graveyard near the remote Maui village of Hana that he and his longtime friend Charles A. Lindbergh cleared by hand many years ago.

Pryor, a pioneer aviation industrialist who began serving American Presidents when Herbert Hoover was in office and who helped arrange the financing that sent Lindbergh across the Atlantic in 1927, was 87 when he died Wednesday.

He had lived in relative seclusion in Hawaii, visiting with Lindbergh’s widow who lives nearby, since retiring as executive vice president of Pan American World Airways in the early 1960s.

Until Lindbergh’s death in 1974, he and the famed aviator had worked to preserve the plants and wildlife in the remote valley the former business associates had chosen for their retirement.

Developed World Routes

Pryor, who until recently made daily visits to both his wife’s and Lindbergh’s grave, was lured into aviation from the steel industry in 1940 by a Yale classmate, Juan Trippe, Pan Am’s founder. He was placed in charge of developing worldwide routes that during World War II became air corridors for military brass and American spies. That same year he managed the East Coast portion of Wendell Willkie’s unsuccessful presidential campaign.

During the war he also directed the building of 56 secret airfields in North Africa and Latin America and was later awarded the Legion of Merit by President Harry S. Truman. He also was given the Harman Trophy for service to aviation.

Paradise Found

In a 1979 interview with the Associated Press, Pryor told why he and Lindbergh had restored a rundown church and cleared the land for a small cemetery that both men agreed would be their final resting place.

“He said he wanted his ‘eternal sleep’ here because of the Hindu proverb I had inscribed near the gate of my home. It says, ‘If there is a heaven on Earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.’ ”

Pryor is survived by three sons, Samuel III, Lawrence and Taylor A. Pryor; two daughters, Mary Taylor Thomas and Frances Hawes; 16 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.