Robert William; Macaroni Mogul Had Eclectic Interests

“I put this off all my life.”

So reads the self-written epitaph of the unusual man who was a gofer for Lucky Lindy, a publicist for Bette Davis, a student of aerodynamics, a cameraman who pioneered helicopter photography, a golf doctor, a macaroni mogul and a mortgage lender.

Robert William, who headed the Western United States’ largest pasta manufacturing company for 30 years, died Dec. 7 of leukemia and pneumonia at his home in Hancock Park. He was 86.

In 1948, William bought tiny, bankrupt Miller Macaroni in East Los Angeles and stayed, as he put it, “seven awful years, and I looked at bankruptcy every day.” But the popular, multifaceted entrepreneur was elected president of the macaroni manufacturers association--in his words, “because I was the least dangerous competitor.”

Well-liked and well-known, he was sought out by giant Pillsbury in 1955 when it wanted to sell its respected Globe A-1 Macaroni Co. at Venice and Robertson boulevards in Culver City.

“With Globe A-1’s good name and the same drudgery [employed at Miller] we added 767 new accounts in the first year,” he told The Times in 1978. “We were last in a six-horse race, and we went to first--and stayed there.”

Under William’s guidance, the company, later known as Western Globe Products, pioneered packaged soy-based meals with pasta like Pot-A-Stew in 1974, which could feed a family of five for 69 cents, and Hamburger Booster.

Always careful to explain that macaroni was a generic term for any shape or size of pasta, William turned the company into a major manufacturer well before he sold it to Borden Foods Co. in 1986 for, he always said modestly but meaningfully, “cash.”

He went on to found and run what he termed “a lot simpler” little mortgage company, KRM in Brentwood.

But William would have had a colorful life even if he had never built a successful business.

Born well-to-do in New York City to a political philosopher-dentist, William became enamored of flying when he was 6 and his father paid a pilot $5 to take him aloft for three minutes. Ignoring his schoolbooks afterward, the boy was content to curl up with 19th century studies of, say, the aerodynamics of dragonflies.

So when Charles A. Lindbergh picked up his monoplane in San Diego, flew it to St. Louis and landed at New York’s Curtiss Field in preparation for his attempt at crossing the Atlantic solo, the 13-year-old William was at Curtiss waiting. The boy, who instinctively decided that dark-horse Lindbergh would outlast his two competitors for the $25,000 prize, talked to his hero, handed him tools, and fetched raisin bread throughout the week’s preparation.

“The other aviators were all so tough and Lindbergh was so gentle,” William recalled for The Times in 1981. “They all had dirty containers of beer or coffee, but all he drank was milk.”

Watching the Takeoff

William rode his bicycle 30 miles in the dark to watch Lindbergh take off, after hearing the pilot’s decision to go for it in the wee hours of May 20, 1927. The hurried bike ride took William four hours, but he was there when Lindbergh lifted off. The boy seized a 10-inch-long eye bolt that had been used to tie down the plane, and proudly displayed it the rest of his life--long after Lindbergh’s 33 1/2-hour trip made him a world figure.

Years later, William tried to make his own father another historic man--because of a book that Dr. Maurice William wrote and self-published in 1921 called “The Social Refutation of the Marxian Economic Interpretation of History.” Both father and son prized various references crediting the book with turning Sun Yat-sen, founder of the National Republic of China on Taiwan, away from Marxism and toward democracy. Sun, the revolutionary who helped overthrow the last of the Chinese imperial dynasties in the early 20th century, remains one of the few Chinese figures still revered by both Chinese Communists and Nationalists.

Because Dr. William devoted more time to politics than to dentistry, the family lost its strong financial position and its Dutch Colonial mansion. Young Robert William switched from private to public school and worked to put himself through Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

And the job young William landed to make money for college set him off on another lifetime pursuit: a quest for the “perfect golf swing.” The job was teaching golf at a resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains. Finding a knack for diagnosing a golfer’s fault and correcting it in “a 10-second lesson,” William was forever dubbed “The Golf Doctor.”

He befriended Jack Nicklaus and other pro golfers and on June 8, 1976, noted in his diary of the 50-year search for that special swing: “Eureka, I’ve found it. The point of the right shoulder is the key.”

William even coined a name for the swing: STP for “Swing This Point.” It added 18 yards on average to his drives after age 60, he told a Times sportswriter in 1981, adding: “Swing That Point does three things: It guides the swing, times the swing and powers the swing.”

Robert William’s meandering career began with Hollywood publicity--albeit in New York--because one of the Warner brothers was a dental patient of his father. So after college, Robert became a studio publicist, meeting, handling and promoting such stars as Davis, Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney and Pat O’Brien when they visited New York. He was Davis’ personal publicist for two years and eventually moved to Los Angeles.

Never too far from aviation, William trained Army Air Corps cadets in Chino during World War II, working particularly with helicopters. He also began taking photographs from airborne helicopters, earning a $250 assignment from Howard Hughes, whom William met in the movie business, to record the one and only flight of Hughes’ famed Spruce Goose at Long Beach Harbor in 1947.

Developing a motion picture camera mount, William pioneered aerial cinematography with his helicopter company shortly after World War II.

Widowed since 1980, William is survived by five children and six grandchildren.