Delford Smith, a rags-to-riches entrepreneur who reportedly bought his mother a home when he was 11, founded a worldwide aviation business and later purchased Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose” for a museum he built in McMinnville, Ore., has died. He was 84.
Smith died at home Friday of natural causes, said Andrew Anderson, a funeral director in McMinnville.
Smith’s Evergreen International Airlines filed for bankruptcy last December. His Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum remains open, with Hughes’ colossal wooden plane a centerpiece that draws as many as 150,000 visitors a year.
Flown only once – and then just for a minute in 1947 – the Spruce Goose was hidden from public view for decades. Though it was conceived by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser as the biggest-ever military transport plane, Hughes designed and built the over-budget, long-delayed, widely derided behemoth. By 1992, when Smith and his son Michael King Smith acquired it, the Spruce Goose was a struggling Disney attraction next to the Queen Mary in Long Beach, Calif.
The Smiths had the massive plane disassembled and loaded into dozens of trucks for the move north. The wings, fuselage and tail were shipped up the West Coast by barge – a process avidly followed throughout Oregon, where the plane, six times larger than others of its day, became a quirky source of local pride.