Othmar D. May

In the spring of 1915 a twenty-year-old draftsman from central Pennsylvania set out for Alaska. The federal government was driving a railroad north through the territory's wilderness — the line that would become the Alaska Railroad — and it was hiring men who could read and make a drawing. Othmar Daniel May had taught himself exactly that skill by mail, and he meant to go use it at the far edge of the continent.

He never arrived. His route carried him through Buffalo, New York, and Buffalo, just then, was turning into one of the unlikely capitals of a brand-new industry: the building of airplanes. On June 15, 1915, instead of continuing north, May took a job in a Buffalo drafting room — and he would spend the next half-century inside the business of building flight, from a wood-and-wire biplane tested on a cow pasture to the cost ledgers for the first airplane to break the sound barrier. The accident of a travel route placed an ordinary, capable man at the exact hinge of an extraordinary story. This is that life, and the century it moved through.

The family that produced a Buffalo draftsman began, so far as the written record goes, with a cabinetmaker. In 1744 a master craftsman named Johann Adam May billed the town of Neudenau for his work in wood. He had arrived some years earlier — his first child was born there in 1740 — but the documents that survive do not say where he came from before that. The line runs backward into Neudenau and then stops. It is the kind of clean edge that archival research produces more often than it produces answers, and it is worth stating plainly rather than filling in.

The town he came to was a small walled place on the river Jagst, seventeen kilometers north of Heilbronn, and it was not in Germany, because there was no Germany. Neudenau belonged to the Archbishop-Electors of Mainz, among the seven princes who elected the Holy Roman Emperor; spiritual authority over it lay separately with the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg. It was an Amtsstadt, an administrative seat, with a magistrate installed in the castle holding judicial and executive power over Neudenau and two neighboring villages. A man who set up as a master craftsman there was placing himself inside a structure of guild rights, town citizenship, and electoral jurisdiction that would have been unrecognizable to his American descendants.

It was also a town still recovering. The wars of the seventeenth century had emptied it; a count in 1668 found 558 inhabitants. By about 1700 Neudenau had revived enough that substantial burgher houses were going up again, and the eighteenth century under Mainz brought a modest flowering. Its living came from farming, from craft, and from wine — the slopes above the Jagst are vineyard country and have been for centuries. When the sons of Johann Adam and Maria Eva bought vineyards in the country immediately around the town, they were buying into the local economy in the most ordinary way available to them.

There is a coincidence in the record worth pausing on. For twenty-three years the parish had been unable to replace its crumbling medieval church, deadlocked in a legal fight with the collegiate foundation at Wimpfen over which party was obliged to pay for what — settled at last by dividing the liability, nave to the parish, chancel to the foundation. Plans were submitted between 1739 and 1741, the commission went to the builder Georg Philipp Wenger, and the new baroque church of St. Laurentius was completed in 1742 around the old forty-four-meter Gothic tower. It was not reconsecrated until 1748. The interior — altars, pulpit, galleries, joinery — was procured over the years in between.

Which is to say that in 1744 the town of Neudenau was fitting out a brand-new church, and in 1744 the town of Neudenau paid a master cabinetmaker named Johann Adam May. The surviving bill, as it has been described so far, does not name the work, and the connection is inference rather than proof. But a joiner of that rank, in that town, in that year, is unlikely to have been working on much else. If it holds, the family's first appearance in the historical record and the building that still stands at the center of Neudenau are the same event — and the woodwork his descendants were shown in 2026 may be, in some part, his own.

He is not merely a name on a bill. The parish books put him in the room. In November 1745 the register records the baptism of Carolus, lawful son of Johann Adam May and Maria Eva — the fixed point that anchors the whole descent. Twenty-one years later, in January 1766, his son Franz Bernhard married Franziska Altenschäffer, and the marriage entry names the witnesses: an alderman called Bernard Bauer, and Adamus May, Civis hujas, Adam May, citizen of this town. The founder of the American line stood at his son's wedding and was written into the book, and the book is still on the shelf.

The same volume may well hold the bride's birth. On 8 February 1745 the register enters a Maria Francisca, lawful daughter of Johann Adolph Altenschäffer and Magdalena — the same father named as the bride's twenty-one years later, and twenty-one is an ordinary age for a first marriage in this town. It is not proof; Neudenau families ran to many daughters and the register is full of Marias. But of the candidates on the page she is much the likeliest, and she and Carl May were baptized into the same year.

Through the generations that followed, the Mays stayed. They married Neudenau families, they were baptized and buried in the same parish, and they worked with their hands. In November 1774 the register records a Martin, lawful son of Franz May and Franziska Altenschäffer, born in the evening and baptized the next day. By his generation's end the craft had shifted from wood to iron. Martin's son Timotheus, born in 1821, was a nailsmith, and the parish clerk wrote the trade into the record without ceremony: Bürger und Nagelschmied, citizen and nailsmith.

Timotheus married Genovea Nonnenmacher, and it was their household that finally left. Their son Joseph Martin was born at three in the morning on 7 February 1862 and baptized two days later — the last of the line to be entered in the Neudenau books. In 1871 his sister Wilhelmina crossed to the United States with a cousin, Karl May. The following year Timotheus and Genovea followed with the rest of the family, the ten-year-old Joseph Martin among them: the man who would become Othmar's father. They left a town that had been ruled by an archbishop within living memory, had passed to the counts of Leiningen in 1803 when Mainz was secularized, and had been Badisch only since 1806. The Atlantic crossing is the hinge of the whole story: everything before it happened within a few miles of one small German town, and everything after it happened in America.

Othmar May was born on October 12, 1895, in Lock Haven, Clinton County, Pennsylvania, into a large German-American Catholic family headed by Martin May. When he was eight the family moved to nearby Avis, a small railroad town on the West Branch of the Susquehanna, where he went to the public school and played in the Avis City Band beside his brothers.

The America of his boyhood was the most dynamic industrial society on earth and one of the most unequal. It was the country of the Second Industrial Revolution — steel, oil, electricity, railroads — and of the immigrants who built it. Germans were the largest single immigrant group in nineteenth-century America, and German-American families like the Mays formed the backbone of the skilled trades: the machinists, toolmakers, patternmakers, and draftsmen whose precision work made mass production possible. It was a world that prized the man who could make a clean, buildable drawing, and that offered him real upward mobility if he could. Young Othmar would climb exactly that ladder, rung by rung.

He climbed it the hard way, through the heavy trades. At sixteen he left Avis for Buffalo and a machinist apprenticeship at the Buffalo Gasoline Motor Company — an early maker of the gasoline engines then transforming boats, farms, and the first automobiles — at $4.50 a week. Nine months in, family duty called him home: as he put it, "my sister's family moved to Long Island to work with the Curtiss Company." It is an easy line to skip past, but it matters enormously. Aviation had already entered the May family through a sister's marriage, years before Othmar himself touched an airplane. The brother-in-law who went to work for Glenn Curtiss on Long Island would reappear in the record as a mechanic at Curtiss's Garden City plant and, later, in the pioneering world of the U.S. airmail. The thread that would pull Othmar into aviation had been spun before he ever noticed it.

Back in Avis, May took the kind of education the era handed to ambitious working-class boys: he went to work for the New York Central Railroad. The railroads were the largest and most advanced industrial enterprises in the country, and their shops were rough technical academies. He worked nights in the car shops, swinging a steam hammer in the blacksmith shop, then moved to the machine shop on the day shift — twelve hours a day, six days a week, for sixteen cents an hour. At eighteen he quit to run a pool room his father had taken over when its owner stopped paying rent.

And in those years he did the thing that lifted him out of the shop floor: he taught himself mechanical drafting by mail, through the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The school was one of the quiet engines of American social mobility in this era — a mail-order university that, for a few dollars a month, taught drafting, engineering, and the mechanical trades to hundreds of thousands of working men who could never have left their jobs to sit in a classroom. It was self-improvement as a mass industry, and it worked: after two years of correspondence lessons, May had a marketable, white-collar-adjacent skill. Certificate in hand, he pointed himself toward the biggest construction project on the continent's frontier and set off for Alaska to draft for the railroads being built there.

The world, meanwhile, had caught fire. In the summer of 1914 the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo touched off the First World War, and within months the European powers were locked in industrial slaughter on a scale no one had imagined. The United States would remain officially neutral until 1917, but neutrality did not mean detachment: American factories began filling enormous Allied orders for everything from rifles to shells to — newest and most glamorous of all — flying machines. The war's appetite for aircraft was about to reach a young draftsman passing through Buffalo on his way north.

To understand the rest of Othmar May's life, it helps to understand Buffalo — because the city itself is half the story.

In 1915, Buffalo was one of the great American cities, the eighth-largest in the country at the turn of the century, the "Queen City of the Great Lakes." Its wealth came from its position: it sat where the Erie Canal met Lake Erie, the hinge between the agricultural West and the industrial East. For nearly a century, the grain of the American heartland had flowed into Buffalo's harbor to be stored, milled, and trans-shipped — the grain elevator itself had been invented there in 1843 — and the city had grown rich as the world's greatest grain port and a milling center to rival Minneapolis.

By the time May arrived, Buffalo had reinvented itself as a manufacturing powerhouse. The decisive event had come in 1896, when the Adams hydroelectric station at Niagara Falls began transmitting alternating-current power to Buffalo twenty-six miles away — one of the first long-distance power transmissions in history, the system that proved Tesla and Westinghouse's AC and electrified the industrial age. Cheap, abundant Niagara power earned Buffalo the nickname "the City of Light" and drew electrochemical and electrometallurgical industries to its edges. In 1901 the city showed itself off to the world at the Pan-American Exposition, a fairground blazing with electric bulbs — remembered now mostly because it was there that President William McKinley was shot. Lackawanna Steel built one of the nation's largest steel plants just south of the city; the railroads — Othmar's own New York Central among them — made Buffalo one of the busiest rail hubs on the continent; and a deep, varied pool of skilled labor, heavily German and Polish, filled its shops.

That labor pool is precisely why the airplane came to Buffalo. Glenn Curtiss's aircraft works had been born in the tiny Finger Lakes village of Hammondsport, but a village could not supply the thousands of skilled hands a wartime production program demanded. Buffalo could. It had the machinists and toolmakers, the factory buildings, the rail and water transport, and the materials. So in late 1915 Curtiss came to Buffalo — and a city built on grain and steel and electricity added a fourth great industry, one that would define it for the next half-century and that would, within a few decades, make Buffalo one of the most important aircraft-manufacturing centers in the United States.

The man whose company May was about to join was one of the founders of American aviation, and his story is worth telling, because it explains the strange, embattled industry Othmar stepped into.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss had begun as a bicycle and then motorcycle builder, and in 1907 he rode a motorcycle of his own making to 136 miles an hour — for a few years, the fastest human being on earth. That same year he joined Alexander Graham Bell's Aerial Experiment Association, and within months he was flying. In 1908 his "June Bug" made the first official, pre-announced public flight in the United States; by 1910 he had won the Scientific American Trophy outright and flown from Albany to New York City; and he went on to pioneer the flying boat, the seaplane the U.S. Navy adopted. By the eve of the World War, Curtiss was the most important aircraft manufacturer in the country.

But American aviation in these years was nearly strangled in its cradle — not by technical limits but by lawyers. The Wright brothers held broad patents on the very idea of controlled flight, and they sued aggressively to enforce them, with Curtiss as their chief target. The litigation dragged on for years and froze investment and innovation across the whole young industry; while Europe raced ahead building thousands of military aircraft, America's airplane makers were busy suing one another. The deadlock broke only under the pressure of war: in 1917, with the United States about to enter the conflict and desperate for aircraft, the government pushed the manufacturers into a patent pool — the Manufacturers Aircraft Association cross-licensing agreement — that finally let everyone build freely. That was the contentious, improvised, suddenly-booming industry Othmar May walked into in 1915, near the bottom of the drafting-room ladder, just as it was about to explode.

On June 15, 1915, instead of continuing on to Alaska, May took a job as a detail draftsman at the Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor Corporation, in rented space on the third floor of the old Thomas Motor Company plant on Niagara Street — the very building, as he liked to note, where the round-the-world "Thomas Flyer" automobile had been made. It was his first work in a drafting room; he was, by his count, "the fourth man hired," handed the small jobs and the tracing of large drawings, with the rare privilege of working beside Glenn Curtiss and his chief engineer Henry Kleckler. Within days the force grew to thirty men and more, then about forty, on what May called a "rush order" — eight in the morning until ten or eleven at night, all meals furnished, the crew marching to Mrs. Kelly's boarding house near Ferry Street for dinner.

What they were building was the Model R, produced as the R-2 — the first airplane built in Buffalo — under an order of fifty for the Imperial Government of Russia. There is a symmetry here that would take three decades to complete: May's career opened building airplanes for the Russia of the Tsar, and would close, at Bell, building fighters for the Russia of Stalin. By mid-September the first machine was ready. The crew hauled it down River Road, past the city line, to a 1,500-foot cow pasture they knew as the Cherry Farm — "now occupied by the Chevrolet Plant" — and there, about 6:30 one September evening in 1915, the first airplane built in Buffalo flew for some fifteen minutes. A newspaper photograph of that very R-2 survives in his papers — likely the only image of it. The drafting room then moved to a house at the foot of Churchill Street, across from the Cutler Desk Company, that was soon folded into the rising factory.

History intruded directly on the work. The fifty R-2s were finished by the fall of 1916 and shipped by steamer toward Russia — but, as May recorded, "when the first shipment of thirty-seven were on high sea, the revolution took place and the ships were turned over to France." The Russian Revolution of 1917, one of the century's hinge events, had reached all the way down to a Buffalo shipping manifest. The R-2 was followed by R-3s and R-4s for Britain and the U.S. Army, and by the airplane that became the era's icon — the Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny," the trainer that taught a generation of Americans to fly. May moved off the drafting board into the Production Order Department, learning the unglamorous discipline that would define him: knowing where every part and every pound of raw material was, and what it cost.

In April 1917 the United States entered the war, and the trickle of aircraft orders became a flood. Congress voted what was then a staggering sum — hundreds of millions of dollars — to build an American air force from almost nothing. By the spring of 1917 May had risen to Chief Production Order Clerk at the South Elmwood plant, responsible for the V-2 (or "VX") aero engines, figuring raw-material requirements and keeping the records the company lived by. His works manager, G. W. Rice, thought him so essential that when May was drafted in 1917, Rice wrote the president of Curtiss pleading for an industrial exemption: "the loss of Mr. May will cripple our organization the worst." The deferment was granted, and May kept the letter for the rest of his life.

The American air effort was, in truth, a national embarrassment — and May had a front-row seat to why. The country poured money into aviation but produced shockingly few combat-worthy aircraft, and a postwar scandal would investigate where it all went. The most notorious failure touched May's own plant: the attempt to build the British Bristol Fighter in Buffalo using the heavy American Liberty engine, the standardized power plant the U.S. had bet its air program on. The Liberty was far heavier than the British engine; bolted into the Bristol with extra fuel and armament and no structural redesign, the result was deadly. Curtiss's own engineers warned it would not fly safely, and, as May recorded plainly, "they and Curtiss lost some good test pilots" before the program was killed. Enormous Army orders — for Bristols, Spads, DeHavilands, Capronis — were placed, partly built, and then, when the Armistice came on November 11, 1918, cancelled almost overnight.

The autumn of 1918 was a season of catastrophe far beyond the factory. Even as the war reached its bloody climax, the deadliest pandemic in modern history — the 1918 influenza — was sweeping the world, killing more people than the war itself and hundreds of thousands of Americans. Into that terrible autumn fell the family's deepest wound. May's brother, Private Martin J. May of Avis — Battery B, Sixth Field Artillery, who had enlisted in June 1917 and reached France that November — was killed in action on November 6, 1918, five days before the guns fell silent. He was twenty-five. The American Legion post in Avis still bears his name: the Martin May Post.

For the survivors, peace meant collapse. The aircraft contracts that had built Buffalo's boom vanished with the Armistice, and on May 1, 1919, Othmar May was laid off. A Curtiss executive praised his "resourcefulness, tact, energy and attention to duty... in the abnormal and trying period of forced production." That summer a colleague sent "the final check for the Curtiss bonus," noting that "the big battle at Buffalo" was over. It was — and so, for the moment, was the industry. But 1919 held one bright thread: on August 12, at All Saints Church in Buffalo, Othmar married Ruth Remmes, who had herself worked at Curtiss in 1916.

A 1918 photograph of that flag-raising at the Curtiss Austin Street plant — the earliest known picture of Ruth — shows her, before their marriage, helping raise the colors at the very works where the flying boats were built. Theirs was, in a small way, an aircraft-industry marriage, made on the floor of a brand-new business.

The years right after the war very nearly killed American aviation. With military orders gone and no civil market to replace them, the great plants went dark and the industry's workforce scattered. The country was flooded with war-surplus Jennys selling for a few hundred dollars apiece — which made new aircraft almost impossible to sell, but also seeded the barnstorming era, when out-of-work former military pilots bought surplus planes and barnstormed from town to town giving rides and performing stunts, keeping flight alive in the public imagination even as the manufacturing business cratered. A sharp national recession in 1920–21 deepened the pain.

May rode the downturn from job to job, and his path through these once-blank years can now be traced. In 1920 he moved to Saginaw, Michigan, to draft for the Germain Brothers Company, a maker of piano backs and core stock. He did not stay long: family illness — "your mother's condition," as the company's 1921 letter put it — drew him back to Buffalo, where Germain Brothers "reluctantly" accepted his resignation. Back home at 907 Tonawanda Street, he drafted for the McKinnon Dash Company, a maker of automobile radiators, and gathered references from former Curtiss colleagues now scattered across local industry.

He also did one last service for the company that had let him go. In 1920–21 he supplied a sworn affidavit and detailed records for Curtiss's claim against the government over the cancelled V-2 engine contracts — the kind of contract-cancellation dispute that consumed the postwar aircraft business. The New York firm handling the case (the practice of former governor Charles S. Whitman) thanked him, and May noted on the file that "Curtiss received an award of $684,000 on this report." He had helped win a small fortune for his old employer — and, in doing it, had mastered exactly how government contracts, cost claims, and material records fit together. That hard-won expertise would sit dormant for nearly twenty years, and then become the most valuable thing he owned.

In 1923, May went into business for himself, founding the O. D. May Manufacturing Company at 1548 Broadway in Buffalo. The firm built commercial refrigeration — heavy-duty meat and delicatessen display cases of porcelain-on-steel and stainless steel — and the store fronts and fixtures to go with them. Photographs from the business survive: views of his own shop, a storefront it built, and an installed case in the "Burnburgers" meat market.

It was a shrewd field to enter, and it placed him squarely inside one of the great consumer transformations of the 1920s. The decade was the moment electricity moved from the factory into daily commercial life, and mechanical refrigeration began displacing the ice trade that had cooled American food for a century. A butcher or grocer who wanted to compete in the booming, electrified 1920s needed a modern, electrically cooled display case — and Othmar May built them. He had stepped out of aviation and into the Roaring Twenties consumer economy at precisely the right moment.

Then the moment ended. The stock-market crash of October 1929 opened the Great Depression, the worst economic catastrophe in American history, and small custom manufacturers were exactly the kind of business that did not survive it. May's did. A surviving spec sheet boasts "our experience of 12 years," and a clipping shows a storefront his firm built as late as 1939. To keep a small shop alive from 1923 through 1939 — across the crash and the bleakest years that followed — was a real achievement of stubbornness and skill. Through it all, he and Ruth raised four sons: Carl, John, James, and Richard.

Outside his shop, aviation had grown from a stunt into an industry — and Buffalo had stayed at the center of it. The Air Mail Act of 1925 and the Air Commerce Act of 1926 put the federal government behind commercial flight; Charles Lindbergh's solo Atlantic crossing in May 1927 set off a national aviation mania and a wave of investment; the airlines took shape; and the all-metal monoplane began replacing wood and wire, a revolution that would culminate in the Douglas DC-3 of 1935. In Buffalo, Consolidated Aircraft built flying boats in the old Curtiss Elmwood plant, and in 1928 a young executive named Lawrence Bell joined it there. When Consolidated decamped for San Diego in 1935, Bell chose to stay in Buffalo and, with the engineer Bob Woods, founded Bell Aircraft. The city's aviation lineage — Curtiss, then Consolidated, then Bell — ran unbroken. And as the 1930s darkened and the world slid back toward war, that lineage, and Othmar May's twenty-year-old skills, were about to be needed again.

In 1939 — the year Germany's invasion of Poland began the Second World War — Othmar May went back to airplanes. He joined Bell Aircraft as it geared up for a conflict the United States had not yet entered, bringing the rare and exactly-needed thing: a man who already understood, from the last war, how to cost and control aircraft production at scale. Under Bell's director of production, Max Stupar, he took charge of the Estimating Department as Chief Cost Estimator.

It is worth pausing on what that meant, because cost estimating and production control were the unglamorous backbone of the entire wartime miracle. Anyone can romanticize the test pilots and the designers; almost no one remembers that you cannot mass-produce a ten-thousand-part machine without men who can break it down, price every piece, schedule every part, and account for every pound of strategic material. That was May's craft, and at Bell he raised it to a system. By his own account — and Bell's own company magazine, which profiled his department under the title "Plane Figures" — he devised a method of breaking an entire aircraft down, roughly six months before it reached the shop, into a parts list pricing each of its ~9,000 components, a "100% breakdown" that the government had to approve before work could begin. He chaired the government-authorized Spare Part Selection Board, which decided which spares went to which "echelon" of the supply chain, and he believed the method was later adopted industry-wide. Dated photographs of his departments survive — the Estimating Office in 1942, Production Control and Planning in 1943, Tool and Manufacturing Supervision in 1944 — a year-by-year record of his climb through the wartime plant.

The scale of what he was helping to manage is almost impossible to convey. Between 1940 and 1945 the United States built roughly 300,000 military aircraft — the literal substance of President Roosevelt's "Arsenal of Democracy," the productive avalanche that buried the Axis. The factories that built them transformed American society: with the men at war, women poured into the aircraft plants in unprecedented numbers — the real "Rosie the Riveter" — in a workforce revolution Buffalo felt as keenly as anywhere. May's own wife, after all, had been a Curtiss plant worker a war earlier.

Bell's contribution ran through May's cost sheets. He estimated the P-39 Airacobra and the P-63 Kingcobra — unconventional fighters, with the engine mounted behind the pilot and a cannon firing through the propeller hub — which were shipped by the thousands to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease, where Soviet pilots prized them. So the circle closed: from the Imperial Russian R-2 of 1915 to the Soviet Airacobra of 1943, Russia bracketed his career. He estimated two aircraft that changed the history of flight: the XP-59A Airacomet, America's first jet, flown in secret in the California desert in October 1942 with engines derived from Britain's Whittle turbojet; and the Bell X-1, which on October 14, 1947, became the first airplane to break the sound barrier. On a clipping celebrating both, May wrote, with justified pride, "I estimated the cost of these long before they flew."

He rose to Assistant Director of Production and served as Bell's representative on the Aircraft War Production Council, through which the East Coast's manufacturers coordinated the war effort. In February 1944, after an internal fight, he was relieved of the assistant-director post — "it was a good fight as long as it lasted," he signed his resignation memo — but stayed on as a "Control Manager," and that autumn went south to Bell's vast Marietta, Georgia plant to take charge of B-29 modification. The B-29 Superfortress was the most advanced and expensive weapons program of the war, the long-range bomber that would carry the strategic air campaign — and ultimately the atomic missions — against Japan; keeping its airframes updated as combat experience poured in was a huge logistical undertaking, and May ran a piece of it. His own annotated production chart records the work and his departure: "Left Dec. 23," 1944.

The war reached deep into his household, too. At their Kenmore home the family lived on ration books — and all four of his sons put on a uniform: while Othmar cost-estimated bombers at Bell, his son Carl flew as crew on a B-26 Marauder, his sons John and James both served in the Navy, and his son Richard would later serve in the Marines. The father built the airplanes of the Arsenal of Democracy; the sons went to fight the war they helped supply.

When the war ended in 1945, the aircraft boom collapsed as suddenly as it had in 1919, and once again May moved on — this time to material control in the Design Division of the Buffalo Forge Company, a venerable Buffalo maker of fans, pumps, and industrial machinery, where the disciplines that had priced fighter planes now tracked heavy equipment. He worked there about eighteen years and retired on November 1, 1963 — a date fixed by the photograph of his Buffalo Forge supervisors gathered for his send-off, and by the affectionate hand-drawn "19th hole" golf card they made him.

For Othmar and Ruth, these were good and settled years. They had raised their family in the northern suburbs — Kenmore and the Town of Tonawanda — and now, with the war’s long hours behind him and the children grown, May eased into the steadier rhythm of the Buffalo Forge drafting rooms and, on weekends, the golf he loved. His working life had by then traced almost the entire arc of American industrial aviation — from the wood-and-wire R-2 he had helped build as a young draftsman to the rocket-powered X-1 whose costs he had estimated — half a century of flight measured out in a single man’s career. Few men anywhere had seen so much of it from the inside.

In retirement, Othmar May became something rarer than another retired executive: a witness. By the 1960s, the pioneer era of aviation was passing out of living memory, and a small movement of museums and historical societies was racing to capture it before its first generation died. May was a perfect source — a man who had been in the room, near the bottom of the ladder, when the first airplane was built in Buffalo.

In 1963 he attended the dedication of the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport and donated his Curtiss badge and engineering pin. He joined the American Aviation Historical Society and the OX-5 Club — the fraternity of aviation's earliest workers and fliers — and corresponded with the historians who had begun to understand that the people who remembered the beginning would not be around much longer. The most consequential of those letters came in July 1974, when Merrill Stickler, the Curtiss Museum's curator, urged him to set his memories down. May answered within days — his penciled note reads "Ans. 7/29/74 — sent 2 Group Pictures, story of Curtiss Bflo." — and the "story" he enclosed is the four-page memoir, "The Birth of the Buffalo Aircraft Industry," that anchors his archive. He sent a copy to James J. Sloan, managing editor of the American Aviation Historical Society, who retained it and called it "a whole new vista of the Curtiss operations... not well set forth any place." He was, by then, one of the last people on earth who could write it.

His private life in these years comes through warmly in the record. In 1969 his sons hosted a fiftieth-wedding-anniversary celebration for Othmar and Ruth — a renewal of vows and a dinner, "no gifts please" — by which time the couple counted thirty-four grandchildren. Into his eighties he remained an avid golfer with the Brighton Park Senior Golfers (a column once noted "O. D. May, age 80, score 96") and a bit of a civic gadfly, lobbying the Town of Tonawanda Board to let senior golfers tee off earlier in the day: "after paying taxes for 40 years," he argued, "the men should have little privileges like this."

The surviving record does not give Othmar May's date of death; the latest dated material comes from the mid-1970s, when he was around eighty and still writing letters, still golfing, still correcting historians. In 2000 his name was inscribed, commemoratively, on the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Wall of Honor — a fitting, if posthumous, acknowledgment for a man who had been present at the creation.

He was never famous. He designed no airplane that bears his name; he sits in none of the histories beside Curtiss and Bell. But his life is, in a sense, more representative than theirs — and more revealing. The story of American flight is usually told through its geniuses and its heroes, but airplanes are not built by geniuses alone. They are built by tens of thousands of skilled, anonymous people — the draftsmen and estimators and material-control men — who turn heroic ideas into manufactured objects, who absorb the brutal boom-and-bust whiplash of the business, and who carry a hard-won competence quietly from one war to the next. Othmar May was one of those people, and his life lets us see the whole century of it from the working floor.

It turns, in the end, on a single accident of travel. A young man with a correspondence-school drafting certificate, bound for a railroad job at the edge of the continent, stopped in Buffalo at the exact moment a new industry was being born there — and stayed to help build it, through two world wars, a near-extinction, a depression, and the dawn of the jet age. From a cow-pasture test flight in 1915 to the cost ledgers for the airplane that broke the sound barrier, Othmar D. May spent his life at the working heart of how the United States learned to build flight. And when it was nearly all over, he did the last and most generous thing a witness can do: he wrote it down, so that the rest of us — his great-grandson among us — could find him.

In April of 2026 a great-granddaughter of Othmar May wrote to the Catholic diocese in Germany to ask whether anything survived concerning a nailmaker named Timotheus. The diocese passed the letter to Elisabeth Strasser of the Neudenau historical association, and Frau Strasser wrote back. A visit was arranged — nominally to read documents, and perhaps, if it could be managed, to meet any Mays still living in the town.

There were a good many. Over two days at the end of June, four American descendants — Sharon and her husband Steve, Maryjane, and their friend Michele Knapp — were fed lunch in Elisabeth's home, then taken to the Schloss for coffee and cake with more than a dozen members of the May family. A walking tour followed, through the streets of a town that turns out to be full of May houses, some of them still occupied. Dinner was at a restaurant run by the Nonnenmacher family: the surname Timotheus married into in the 1840s, still in Neudenau, still setting the table.

The second morning they walked through two of the town's churches and found May craftsmanship in both — the woodwork of a trade that began with a cabinetmaker billing the town in 1744 and is still standing where he left it. Then the cemetery, laid out in 1780 when the old graveyard around the parish church ran out of room, and where the family's dead have gone ever since. Then back to the Schloss, where the registers themselves were brought out and opened on the table: the baptism of Carl in 1745, the marriage of Franz Bernhard in 1766 with old Adam May signed as witness, the birth of Joseph Martin in 1862. Three of the four come out of a single binding, Band II, which runs from 1652 to 1803 and holds the town's births, marriages and deaths together. Six generations, in the hand of the clerks who wrote them down as they happened. More remains to be translated — the contracts for the organ cabinetry, the deeds to the houses, the record of how these families made their livings. It should be ready before long.

What the two days made plain is that the emigration of 1872 was a fork, not an ending. One branch went to Pennsylvania and produced a draftsman who helped build the first airplane made in Buffalo. The other stayed, farmed and worked the same streets, sent its sons to the Grand Duke's regiment at Karlsruhe, and lost two of them in the war that killed Othmar's own brother in France — then lost two more, a generation later, in the next one.

Othmar May's four sons gave him and Ruth thirty-four grandchildren. The draftsman who stopped in Buffalo on his way to Alaska never saw Neudenau. Six generations upstream and four generations down, the town remembered the family anyway.