When his factory burned down on March 17, 1937, William T. Piper Sr.'s reaction was typical of his optimistic nature.

An employee had called Piper while Piper was at the National Pacific Aircraft and Boat Show in Los Angeles to tell him that his aircraft plant in Bradford, Pa., had gone up in flames that morning.

Everything — materials, inventory, the building — was destroyed. A paltry 5% of the $200,000 loss was covered by insurance.

Piper didn't get angry. He didn't look for someone to blame. He didn't bemoan his circumstances. He didn't even start to worry.

Instead, Piper looked at the upside of the calamity.

"Anyway," he said, "we'll get some publicity out of it."

That face-forward approach helped Piper (1881-1970) become one of the country's foremost aviation pioneers.

His vision and confidence helped establish the light plane — especially the Piper Cub — as an industry standard and a crucial defense tool.

It also helped him build an initial $400 investment into a fortune valued at $30 million by the time of his death.

That $400 was the amount Piper used to buy stock in a failing aircraft maker, the Taylor Co., in 1929. The firm was in Bradford, where Piper lived and owned oil wells. Keen to keep the town thriving, he agreed to buy the stock to encourage others to invest in Bradford businesses.

Business Boost

Piper knew business, but he knew little about airplanes. Aware that he'd need expert advice, Piper kept original owner C.G. Taylor on as the company's president and gave him half-interest in it to ensure his loyalty. Piper made himself the company's treasurer so he'd know where the money was going.

The pair worked well for a time. They came out with the low-cost Piper Cub in 1931.

Although the plane struck a chord with its fans, the company wasn't making money.

By 1935, Piper wanted to build a cheaper model to attract more weekend pilots — but Taylor pushed to build larger, costlier planes.

Confident he was right, Piper bought out Taylor in 1936 and renamed the company Piper Aircraft.

Piper looked continually for his next opportunities. But he didn't wait for them to pop up. He created his own.

With the economy still in a slump, he kept the price of his planes down to attract buyers. He allowed dealers only a 20% profit and urged them to increase that through volume sales.

He also wanted to make sure that he — and his employees — knew how the product handled in order to answer customers' questions.

So at the age of 50, Piper began taking flying lessons. He also offered them to all employees for $1 an hour as a perk — and to make up for their low wages of 20 cents an hour, according to Devon Francis in "Mr. Piper and His Cubs."

Within a year, almost the entire staff was taking lessons.

Continual refinement of his planes was Piper's credo. "Let's see what we can do to improve the product," he said over and over to his chief engineer, Walter Jamouneau.

Piper had seats in the J-3 version of the Cub upholstered to make them more comfortable. In the same model, he tweaked the instrument panel, buried the control cables under the floor and made a winter enclosure over the seat a standard feature. Later models added hydraulic brakes and featured engines with expandable horsepower. Engines were constantly upgraded with each model.

Piper knew his Cubs also needed a signature to make his brand stick in people's minds. He made yellow the standard color for his planes, "because it was the most visible color in the sky, where the rule was 'see and be seen,' " Francis said.

Piper constantly came up with new ways to grab the public's attention. Initially he offered eight hours of flying lessons along with every Cub sold. Then he offered aviation writers free instructions as well.

Later, the company put pretty girls in the planes and flew them to publicize charitable events.

By 1939, Piper had become the world's largest aircraft maker.

Knowing that seeing is believing, Piper hired stunt pilots to show off the Cub's versatility at air shows around the country. One of the pilots, Mike Murphy, landed a Cub on a speeding car in Cleveland. Piper hired other pilots to fly nonstop up and down the East Coast — 2,390 miles — and had them refuel from speeding trucks on the ground.

Piper was no fan of long, drawn-out conferences. Action was his favorite mode. "We hold too many talk-talk meetings around here," he'd say, according to Francis. "Let's get out and do some selling."

And when war broke out in Europe on Sept. 1, 1939, Piper began trying to put his planes at the forefront of any U.S. war effort. He was laughed at by military brass, who thought his light planes had no business doing serious fighting. But Piper was nothing if not persistent.

Turning again to visual cues, he had his planes painted olive drab, as if they were already military issue. He scheduled demonstrations of the planes' abilities and hired John Morgan, founder of the National Ski Patrol with close ties to many top policymakers, to act as lobbyist for all the U.S. light-plane makers.

Together, Morgan and Piper courted the military. They offered flying lessons to light and bird colonels. Morgan organized a congressional flying club.

When a general dubbed the newly painted, olive-colored planes Grasshoppers because they flew so low to the ground, Piper had lapel pins with the nickname made and distributed, noted Edward Jablonski in "Man With Wings."

Then came the invasion of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. At Piper's suggestion, "civilian-owned Cubs were organized into a U.S. Army Air Forces auxiliary, the Civil Air Patrol," wrote Francis. And within months, the Army ordered the first 1,500 light planes for the war effort.

With their small size and easy maneuverability, the Cubs became the most lethal warplanes in the world.

Long And Small

Piper liked to think long term. When it became clear in 1944 that the war's end was near, he started pitching the government to build small-craft airports. After all, the returning pilots would likely still want to fly, and the low-cost Cubs could make that a possibility.

By 1947, however, hard times hit the small aircraft industry. A glut of planes left from the war and a lack of demand had airplane makers scrambling.

Piper knew when he needed to call in the cavalry. To keep the company from going under, he invited a turnaround man, William Shriver, to take over Piper Aircraft and get it back on track.Within two years, the company was back on track. Within three years, William Piper was back at the controls of Piper Aircraft.

He went on to produce updated models of his beloved Cub. In all, he produced more planes than any other airplane maker. Piper's son, Bill Jr., took over as president of the company in 1960. Eleven years after his death, Bill Sr. was elected to the Aviation Hall of Fame.

BY JOANNE VON ALROTH