Old Missoula

Ernie Brace and the sale of Johnson Flying Service – 1975

Sale of Johnson Flying Service Is Complete

By John Stromnes – Missoulian Staff Writer

After 20 months of litigation, the formal announcement of the sale of Missoula’s Johnson Flying Service was made Wednesday by Jack Hughes, president of the airline, and Robert R. Johnson, 83-year-old veteran pilot who started the firm in Missoula 52 years ago.

Assets and liabilities, including the firm’s valuable supplemental air carrier license, were purchased by Evergreen Helicopters, Inc., McMinnville, Ore. Sale price was $1 million cash, company officials said.

Operations of the Missoula-based flying service, known since 1974 as Johnson International Airlines, will be transferred to a new corporation, Evergreen of Montana. No Missoula employes presently with the firm will be terminated, company officials said.

However, the nonscheduled carrier service operation that uses Lockheed Electra prop-jets is being transferred to another Evergreen corporation in Arizona, Hughes said. The Electras haven’t been based in Missoula since last year.

Named president of Evergreen of Montana was Ernie Brace, a veteran pilot who has been associated with Evergreen Helicopters since 1974. Brace formerly was operations manager for Evergreen Helicopters and general manager of the McMinnville base. Hughes, formerly Johnson’s chief pilot, will assume duties as chairman of the board of the Montana operation.

“We’ve bottomed out and we’re going up now” Brace told The Missoulian Wednesday.

Delay of sale approval by the Civil Aeronautics Board was “one of the things that really hurt us over the last 18 months,” he added.

From being prime contractor for numerous Forest Service flight operations throughout the western United States and employing more than 100 people, Johnson International has reduced its work force to about 40 in recent months. The largest aircraft based in Missoula will be a DC-3.

However, plans for expanding the helicopter operation at Johnson-Bell Field are in the works, Brace said.

Johnson, who has been trying to sell the flying service since 1967, said he is satisfied with the purchase arrangement, including transfer of some operations to Arizona.

“I’d have been more happy if that damn CAB had got off its butt earlier,” Johnson said Wednesday.

While company officials awaited approval of the sale from the CAB, the company’s management was “in limbo,” according to Hughes and Brace. Evergreen could help the Montana company financially but could not give management assistance until final CAB approval.

Johnson and Evergreen had to apply to the CAB because the flying service holds one of the nation’s 13 permanent supplemental airline certificates.

The Forest Service prime contract was lost last April to Christler Flying Service, Thermopolis, Wyo. It was the first time in more than 40 years the Missoula firm didn’t get the contract.

Layoffs and labor disputes have plagued the company since then. Seasonal pilots usually hired for the Forest Service contract could not be rehired this summer.

A management dispute surfaced last April when Hughes replaced former Johnson President Morton S. Beyey as president of the airline. Beyer’s “philosophy was different than ours,” a company spokesman said then.

Beyer reportedly favored keeping the main headquarters of the supplemental air carrier in Missoula and went so far as to propose expanding hangar facilities at Johnson Bell Field to house the large charter aircraft. He said Johnson would sign a long-term lease with the airport if the hangars were supplied.

The hangar proposal will not be pursued, Brace said, since Electras will not be based in Missoula. The air service’s maintenance facility at Johnson-Bell Field will continue to service all Evergreen aircraft in the area, he added.

“The facility we have now is plenty big for the operations we have now,” Brace said.

Johnson will remain active with Evergreen of Montana while he is in Missoula, officials said. The former barnstormer, who pioneered Montana’s back country in numerous types of aircraft, will vacation in Hawaii this winter but will return in the spring.

“I’m going to work here for awhile as a peon,” Johnson said.

According to Brace, the new company will bid on Forest Service contracts, agricultural spraying and small charter work as well as “utility” contracts. Employes are currently flying in Senegal on a “utility” agricultural contract.

Another contract for power line construction in Colstrip is being fulfilled.

“We’ll pursue every Forest Service contract there is,” Brace said.

“Evergreen (of Oregon) has a terrific marketing setup,” Hughes said. “Rather than a seasonal operation it will be a 12-month operation.”

Evergreen Helicopters is the “umbrella” company for three flying services throughout the nation, including Evergreen Air of Montana, Evergreen Helicopters of Alaska and Evergreen International in Marana, Ariz. The corporations are wholly owned by Del Smith of McMinnville, Ore.

The sale of Evergreen followed three other attempts to sell the airline. In 1966, Executive Jet Aviation, Columbus, Ohio, offered $1,750,000 for an 80 per cent interest. Three years later U.S. Steel Corp. offered more than $2 million for the firm. Both sales failed to gain CAB approval. A proposal to buy the firm by Richard “Bud” Rude, Spanaway, Wash., made in December 1973 fell through because of financial reasons. The proposal never was submitted to the CAB.

Johnson Flying Service was incorporated in 1929 for $14,000, with Johnson, himself, controlling $6,900 in shares.

The new president of Evergreen of Montana has a biography that reads like a sequence from Terry and the Pirates.

He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1947 and was commissioned as a Marine pilot in 1951. He flew fighters in Korea and transports and helicopters after the war.

After leaving the Marine Corps as a captain, he was a test pilot for North American Aviation. In 1964 he went to Thailand, employed by the Agency for International Development (AID) as an “advisor” to Thai border patrol police. As a civilian pilot he was captured in 1965 by regular units of the North Vietnamese Army and imprisoned for seven years and 10 months.

Word of his capture was not released by the North Vietnamese and he was assumed missing in action, perhaps dead. His first wife remarried two years after his capture.

Brace was one of the last prisoners of war released in March 1973. After his return to the United States he spent a year recuperating in the San Diego Naval Hospital. He went to work for Evergreen in January 1974.

He has four sons, one in the Air Force Academy in Colorado, and a 13-year-old boy who will live with Brace and his present wife, Nancey, in Missoula.

 

The above article appeared in The Missoulian on November 6, 1975.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/350043610/?terms=%22Morton%2BBeyer%22

 

Ernie Brace did not live in Missoula for long. He was the subject of a column by a Missoulian writer, Mike McInally, who wrote about him in 1989:

Civilian POW gets his story in print at last

“The most important thing about good writing is to find a cracking good story,” says Charles Hood, “and this struck me as a cracking good story.”

Hood, dean of the University of Montana journalism school, is describing how he got involved in helping to write, “A Code to Keep,” a book by former Missoula resident Ernest Brace.

The book is the true story of Brace, who was captured by the Pathet Lao while flying secret missions to Laos as part of a CIA operation during the Vietnam War. Brace, imprisoned in North Vietnam and eventually in the Hanoi Hilton, became America’s longest-held “civilian” prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Hood says he met Brace in the mid-‘70s. Then working at the Missoulian, Hood had written a series of stories on Laotian guerilla general Vang Pao, who had moved into the Bitterroot.

Shortly afterward, Hood says, he met Brace – then employed by Evergreen Aviation in Missoula – for lunch. Brace asked for help in writing a book about his captivity.

Hood agreed, although not because he sympathized with Brace’s politics. “This guy and I are as far apart politically as you get,” Hood said, but the lure of the “cracking good story” proved irresistible.

Hood and Brace wrote a first draft as a third-person account and shopped around for a publisher. They found no takers. Years later, after “Platoon” became a movie hit, Brace – sensing a renewed interest in the Vietnam War era – reworked the book into a first-person narrative and resubmitted it to publishers. St. Martin’s Press bought the book, although by this time Hood’s name had been taken off it.

That doesn’t bother Hood: “It’s really his book,” he said. (Brace does give credit to Hood in an acknowledgment at the book’s beginning.) And Hood still has a 50 percent share in the book, although it’s not likely to make either Brace or Hood wealthy.

Brace lived in Missoula from 1976 to 1979, and now serves in Beijing, China, as a vice president of Sikorsky Aircraft.

 

The above excerpt appeared in The Missoulian on January 6, 1989.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/351638719/?terms=%22Brace%22%2Bevergreen

 

Ernie Brace died Klamath Falls, Or. in 2014. Described as undergoing the longest imprisonment of any civilian American, he was a cell-mate of John McCain while held at the Hanoi Hilton. McCain and Brace communicated by tapping code through the wall to each other while incarcerated. The two finally met at a White House dinner in 1973. McCain wrote a forward for Brace’s book, ‘A Code To Keep’ where he called Brace “a true American hero.”