$1-a-Year Dean

Husky Oliver Lafayette Parks, onetime crack Chevrolet salesman, got the flying bug in 1926. He took ten hours of flight instruction, started his own school the next year at St. Louis Municipal Airport with himself as the entire faculty. A few weeks later he cracked up, lost his left eye and ended his flying instructor's career.

But Lafe Parks stuck to his school, hobbling out from the hospital on crutches to quell a mutiny of the dozen students, who wanted their money back. Persuasive Parks, a better talker than he had been a pilot, talked them out of it.

Then he talked a group of St. Louis businessmen into financing his expansion, to a new Parks Airport across the river from St. Louis at Cahokia, Ill. He signed up 400 students after some whirlwind publicity. By the early thirties, he smartly anticipated a glut of pilots, shifted the emphasis to aviation engineering. Today Parks students still learn to fly, at the 113-acre campus-airport, but spend most of their 2 1/2-year course (for a B.S. degree) on the ground. In World War II Parks trained 24,000 A.A.F. flyers at five schools.

In 1927 Lafe Parks became a Catholic, has energetically performed good works for the St. Louis archdiocese ever since. Though no graduate, Parks raised $2,000,000 for St. Louis (Catholic) University. Last week Parks, 47, now Midwest distributor for Ercoupe planes, presented his $3,000,000 Parks Air College lock, stock & barrel to St. Louis University. Then he traded in his president's title for a $1-a-year job as dean of the university's new college of aviation.

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