Existing comment:
Tom Bomar, the Chamber of Commerce's aviation expert, kept after Fleet for the next several years, even while Fleet managed to drag Los Angeles into a bidding war with San Diego. Long Beach offered Consolidated more than twenty-two acres of land free next to its municipal airport, which delighted Bomar, who claimed that that property was always under water during winter, and it was five miles from the ocean, meaning that the company would still have to haul its planes overland to the sea before they could be flight or water-tested. Fleet made no decision on the matter until May 1933, when he received one last impassioned plea from San Diego Harbor Commissioner Emil Klicka, who somehow convinced the manufacturer on the spot to choose San Diego. The company entered into a lease with the city for seventy acres of choice property adjacent to Lindbergh Field and the bay at a price that Fleet could not afford to refuse: one thousand dollars per year for fifty years.
According to the San Diego Aerospace Museum, "In the spring of 1935, in a move unprecedented in industry, he transferred his entire Consolidated operation in 157 freight cars of machinery and materials as well as employees and families to the newly constructed factory in San Diego." Fleet kept his move a secret from the Buffalo community until only a few months before his new $300,000 custom-designed plant on the waterfront opened for business in September 1935.
Fleet had nothing but praise for the Chamber and the harbor department, whose hard work had won his confidence. The Chamber now announced a renaissance in community interest, thanks to the arrival of Consolidated -- "the first major industrial plant ever to be located in this city."
When Fleet wanted a $500,000 load to defray the cost of moving, San Diego's congressional representative George Burnham (who was himself a director of the Chamber of Commerce) helped to arrange it with the Federal Housing Administration. |