C. Gilbert Taylor

Two of the best-known light airplanes in American history began on the same drawing board, and the man who drew them saw both slip out of his hands. Clarence Gilbert Taylor, known throughout aviation as C. G., was born in Rochester, New York, on September 8, 1898, the son of English immigrants. As a teenager he built a glider in the family attic and lowered the pieces out a window to assemble it. He learned engineering on the job and barnstormed in a Curtiss Jenny he had rebuilt to his own ideas.

In 1927 he and his younger brother Gordon went into the airplane business in Rochester, first as the Arrowing company and then as Taylor Brothers Aircraft. Their A-2 Chummy was a two-seat, side-by-side monoplane. On April 24, 1928, Gordon was killed demonstrating a Chummy at Ford Airport in Dearborn, Michigan, while Gilbert watched. He kept going, and in 1929 he accepted a factory and capital from Bradford, Pennsylvania, an oil town looking for new industry. At nearly $4,000, the Chummy sold poorly.

One Bradford stockholder, oilman William T. Piper, wanted a smaller airplane at half the price. Taylor designed the E-2, completed late in 1930 with a 20-horsepower Brownback Tiger Kitten engine that could barely lift it. Since a young tiger is a cub, the company's accountant, Gilbert Hadrel, suggested the name Cub. When the company failed in the Depression, Piper bought its assets for $761 and kept Taylor as president of the new Taylor Aircraft Company. With a 40-horsepower Continental, the E-2 Cub was certificated in 1931 and began to sell. In 1935 Piper had a young engineer, Walter Jamouneau, revise the design into what became the J-2. Taylor objected and fired Jamouneau, and Piper rehired him. Taylor sold his interest and left in December 1935. In 1937 the company became Piper Aircraft.

Taylor started again at once. His new Taylorcraft, a side-by-side cabin monoplane, was first built near Butler, Pennsylvania, and in July 1936 the city of Alliance, Ohio, gave him an empty factory rent-free. In the spring of 1937 William C. Young, formerly general manager of Goodyear-Zeppelin, joined him, and the firm became the Taylor-Young Airplane Company, with Taylor as president and the Model A as its product. After a 1938 reorganization it became the Taylorcraft Aviation Corporation, and during the Second World War it built roughly 2,000 L-2 Grasshopper liaison airplanes for the Army. By then Taylor had lost control of the company and sold his shares.

When Taylorcraft went bankrupt in 1946, its dealers bought the assets and asked Taylor to lead the new Taylorcraft, Inc., which moved to Conway, Pennsylvania, in 1948. His later designs never reached large production. In 1947 he wrote simply that "among our designs were the Taylor Cub and the Taylorcraft." He died in 1988 at 89.

Our 1937 Taylor-Young Model A, arriving this fall, comes from the Alliance company he founded after leaving Bradford, the company that became Taylorcraft. It marks the moment C. G. Taylor began building airplanes under his own name again.