Airport Holdout, 79, Retreats to Hangar Nook

Roger Keeney, who has run Acme Aircraft Co. at Torrance Municipal Airport since 1945, on Thursday moved a splintered wooden propeller and some ancient airplane manuals out of a small stucco building the city plans to tear down.

His aircraft scales and other equipment had been moved earlier. All that was left was a telephone, a bare desk and two model airplane mobiles. Soon they would be gone, too.

With resignation and more than a little nostalgia, the 79-year-old Keeney, whose firm once occupied 2 1/2 acres and had 50 employees repairing and refurbishing aircraft, has given up his struggle to keep operating out of his office, now sandwiched between new city-built hangars.

“I just hit a stone wall and I’m bouncing off it,” said Keeney, whose operation over years was reduced to weighing aircraft, a procedure required by federal aviation regulations.

“I had no choice. The city owns the property and the city wanted the property, and my lease had expired.”

Torrance and Keeney have been at odds since 1987, when the city put him on a month-to-month lease and told him he eventually would have to make way for 74 hangars as the airport was redeveloped.

All but two of the hangars have been built for some time. The city lost patience with Keeney, refused to accept his rent checks and sued to evict him more than a year ago.

Keeney paid $4,670.64 in back rent Monday and agreed to move out. Still to be settled is whether he must also pay for demolishing the office building and a small shed.

If he wants to stay at the airport, the city told Keeney, he must either build himself a new facility or merge with another airport business.

The cost of building is prohibitive for a small operation, he said, and while he seems easygoing, Keeney is not the type to share his secrets with a competitor. “I will not show them,” he said.

The inventive Keeney may have found a third way.

When the city began its campaign to oust him, Keeney said, he increasingly took his business on the road. He would fly or drive with his scales to other airports to weigh planes, he said.

“I weigh very few of them here,” he said. “Someone calls. I say, ‘I’ll come.’ I tack something on for travel.”

All he needs at the Torrance airport is a desk, some files, a telephone and storage space for the scales. Everything but the telephone has been installed in a loft built into one of two hangars that he rents for his two Cessnas.

Because leases at the airport specify that hangars are to be used only for aircraft storage, Keeney was reluctant to call his new setup an office.

“Not really,” he said, “because the city says I can’t have an office.”

With a grin, he said all that is here “is a free-standing card table. . . . I don’t want to retire. It’s too much fun here.”

William Quale, Torrance assistant city attorney, laughed when he heard Keeney’s description of the loft space.

“Hangars are for storing aircraft,” he said. “I hesitate to comment on that.”