Bill Strohmeier and His Cubs
By Richard L. Collins
December 2006
 I have known Bill (William D.) Strohmeier for a long time. I think of him mostly as an advertising and public relations executive. He had the Piper account for over 25 years and also did work for Narco, Airbus, FlightSafety and Safe Flight, to name a few. There’s a lot more there,though, and when I was reviewing Bill’s early days in aviation I couldn’t help but compare what he was doing as a young pilot with what today’s young pilots are doing. Some, but not many, might be having as much fun and yes, adventure, as Bill had in the years soon after he soloed on May 16, 1935, in the 17th E-2 (37-hp) Cub ever built.
Bill helped form the Amherst College flying club and encouraged other schools to do the same. Many in the Northeast did and the year Bill soloed, 1935, they had an air meet which Amherst won. The formation of those clubs led to the establishment of a national college flying group that became the seed for today’s National Intercollegiate Flying Association. Bill was the first president of the group.
He gained some notoriety from this activity, which was noted by Taylor Aircraft, then builder of the Cub. They made him a salesman offer he couldn’t refuse: $15 a week plus $30 more for all airplane and living expenses. So, when he was barely 20 years old, he was an airplane salesman on the road with his name on the side of a new 37-hp Cub. Taylor became Piper and Bill Stroh- meier covered the U. S., as far west as Texas and Montana, selling those Cubs. Then he came back to the factory to be the sales promotion manager, handling public relations as well.
Bill’s next activity resulted in the largest unit sale of airplanes to a single entity ever made by Piper. How many salesmen can say they were part of a 6,000 airplane deal?
In the summer of 1941 the Army (but not Congress) was getting ready for action. A series of maneuvers were held in Tennessee and New Mexico, and then they did a really big operation in Louisiana. The Army had some big round-engine airplanes that had been developed to support ground operations, but many thought existing light airplanes could do a better job for a lot less money. So, Piper, Aeronca and Taylorcraft sent pilots and 14 airplanes to the maneuvers, to demonstrate to the military that light airplanes could do great work as artillery spotters and liaison vehicles. The airplanes had to be able to operate from unprepared areas, close to the ground units they served. They were a supplement to what the Army then called “Bantam blitz buggies,” which later became “Jeeps.” The light airplanes, all with 65 hp and with wind-driven generators to facilitate com radios, were called “Grasshoppers.”
Bill was one of the Piper J-3 pilots and wrote about his experience in the November 1941 issue of Air Facts magazine. I’ll summarize his observations here.
The Louisiana maneuvers were the most extensive and were challenging to the Grasshopper pilots because Louisiana was not a state of wide open spaces from which you could select suitable landing sites.
In the maneuvers, the troops were divided into red (which they wouldn’t have used in later years) and blue armies and each army got seven Grasshoppers. The airplanes were camouflaged and marked with the colors of the appropriate army. Once the simulated war started, the drill was for the Grasshoppers to be available as close to headquarters as possible. An officer was carried on most flights that were for the purpose of reconnaissance or liaison with other units. Artillery spotting was also a role for the Grasshoppers.
The most commonly used landing areas were roads, though when no road was available a landing area could be prepared in short order. The standard dimension was 100 feet wide and 400 feet long—for a 65-hp Cub with two people in it. Most of the time the Grasshopper pilots slept in tents, like the troops, and they wore the uniform of an officer with a green brassard on the left arm bearing a silhouette of a grasshopper. At one point, though, a few of them were bivouacked in a school building and used the football field as their runway.
 A quote from Bill’s story: “Boiling it all down, we thought nothing of landing in places where a year ago I would have hesitated attempting even if it was zero-zero and I was running out of gas.”
Despite the obvious hazards of landing on roads and flying heavily loaded airplanes out of short strips, the only damage done to Grasshoppers was to the landing gear of four airplanes, and none of those were out of service for more than a half a day. Some of the Army’s bigger and more powerful airplanes left the field of battle on a truck. Actually, the Grasshoppers had less span than the larger, specially designed Army airplanes, so they had a leg up on road operations where the cut of the road through the trees was only slightly wider than the span of a Cub. Thirty-five feet and three inches works a lot better than 50 feet and 11 inches (the span of one of the bigger airplanes) for close work.
The slow cruising speed of the airplanes didn’t matter so much. The distances flown were usually 10 or 15 miles, and when compared with one of those Bantam blitz buggies operating on unprepared surfaces, a Cub was practically supersonic. One day Bill was assigned to fly an umpire in the maneuvers on an inspection trip. They were flying out of what they called a “One Thousand Inch Machine Gun Range.” It was 1,000 inches wide and 800 feet long, down in the tall Louisiana pine trees.
As they were preparing to depart, the officer allowed that he had learned to fly in a Stearman in the Philippines and had a private license, though he had never flown a Cub.
After takeoff, Bill offered the controls to the officer and he flew his rounds, using pilotage navigation to check on various locations. When they returned to the strip in the woods, Bill was prepared to take over because a gusty crosswind had developed. The officer was doing so well that Bill allowed him to complete the approach and landing. “He handled it beautifully without any help. I wasn’t surprised in future years to see where he wound up.” The officer was Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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