Background
Clement Melville Keys was born on April 7, 1876 in Chatsworth, Ontario, Canada, the son of George and Jessie Margaret Evans Keys.
entrepreneur Financier journalist
Clement Melville Keys was born on April 7, 1876 in Chatsworth, Ontario, Canada, the son of George and Jessie Margaret Evans Keys.
Keys received the Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1897.
Keys taught history and classics at Ridley College, St. Catherines, Ontario, for three years. In 1901 he moved to New York and became a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, rising to railroad editor two years later. In 1906 Keys became financial editor of the magazine World's Work. He held this post for five years and then formed an investor's service, C. M. Keys and Company, which soon afterward became an investment banking house. When John N. Willys acquired control of the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company in 1917, he hired Keys to take charge of finances. Willys was forced out when the automotive empire he was trying to create collapsed in the depression of 1920-1921, but Keys stayed on to become president of the company and in fact bought Willys' holdings for less than four dollars a share. In 1924 Keys became an American citizen.
Keys's interest in aviation was predominantly organizational and financial. In 1928 he created a holding company, North American Aviation, to combine various aircraft manufacturing companies and airlines in which he had an interest. His was one of several such combinations organized at this time, stimulated by the bull market and by the growing interest in commercial aviation fostered by the air-mail contract system begun by the Kelly Air Mail Act of 1925. As part of his operations Keys effected the historic merger of the two greatest pioneering names in American aviation by uniting Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor with the Wright Aeronautical Corporation as Curtiss-Wright in 1929.
Keys also developed an interest in air transport and included some airline companies in the North American structure, the most important being Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), the principal ancestor of Trans World Airlines. TAT began as combined air-rail service between New York and Los Angeles. Passengers went by rail overnight from New York to a specially built station at the Columbus, Ohio, airport, then flew to Waynoka, Oklahoma, made another overnight rail trip to Clovis, New Mexico, then flew the rest of the way. The system was supposed to provide both safety, since it avoided night flights, and dependability, but it was cumbersome and expensive, and after two years it was abandoned. Instead, under pressure from Postmaster General Walter F. Brown, TAT was merged with Western Air Express as Transcontinental and Western Air. The new company began all-air service between New York and Los Angeles in 1930.
Keys promoted another important airline, National Air Transport, but lost it under circumstances that suggest--in conjunction with the air-rail experiment--that while aviation was a field in which he could exercise his financial skills, he had little foresight regarding the prospects for air transport. In 1928 National Air Transport secured the lucrative mail route between New York and Chicago, but Keys refused to add passenger service even though NAT offered a natural extension of the Chicago-San Francisco service begun by William E. Boeing in 1927 and absorbed a year later by United Aircraft and Transport. The result was a contest for control of NAT that Keys lost because stockholders who could outvote him chose to accept United's offer of merger rather than compete with a more powerful rival. United absorbed NAT in 1930.
North American also had substantial stock holdings in Pitcairn Aviation (later Eastern Airlines), Sperry Gyroscope, and Douglas Aircraft, but Keys's financial legerdemain was not proof against the Great Depression. North American stock was given a par value of five dollars a share in 1932 and written down to one dollar a few months later, compared with the initial offering price of $12. 50. By 1933, after a constant shifting of holdings, Curtiss-Wright and Douglas were out altogether and the largest single interest in North American was General Motors. By then Keys was out also.
He resigned as chairman of the board of North American Aviation on December 31, 1931, and within the next year withdrew from all his aviation interests, ostensibly on grounds of ill health. He was therefore not involved in the subsequent dissolution of North American as a holding company, in conformity with the provision of the Air Mail Act of 1934 (requiring the separation of aircraft manufacturing and air transport companies), or in the reorganizing of several weak manufacturing firms into a new North American Aviation Company. Keys remained in semiretirement for ten years.
In 1942 he established C. M. Keys Aircraft Service, Inc. , in New York City, a firm providing financial services to the aircraft industry, especially in the securing and negotiation of military contracts. He was also chairman of the board of the Mackenzie Muffler Company of Youngstown, Ohio, and a subsidiary, the Buffalo Pressed Steel Company. In addition, he was a director of the Carl G. Fisher Corporation, makers of lighting equipment for motor vehicles, and the Montauk Beach Company, an association of property owners to protect private beach property.
In 1905 Keys married Florence E. Hayes; they had two daughters. His second wife was Indiola Arnold Reilly; they had no children.
