Continental Airlines had glamour, movie stars, and one executive who refused to hand his employees to a corporate raider. This is what that decision cost him.
There was a time when flying Continental meant something. Movie stars in the cabin. Flight attendants in uniforms designed by a Hollywood actress. A tail painted gold, and a slogan to match: the Proud Bird with the Golden Tail. There was real swagger to it, back when an airline could be proud of itself and mean it.
This is the story of the man who ran that airline at the end of its good years, and what happened when a corporate raider decided he wanted it. His name was Alvin Feldman. He tried to keep about 11,000 people employed. He did the right thing, and the right thing did not win. If you want the deeper version, come with me into the headquarters at Los Angeles International Airport, because that is where it ends.
The good years
Continental belonged to Robert Six for the better part of four decades. He bought into a tiny outfit called Varney Speed Lines in the 1930s, renamed it, and grew it from a handful of single-engine planes into a real airline. In 1963 he moved the whole operation from Denver to Los Angeles, partly for the routes and partly because Six liked the social wattage of the place. He was married to Audrey Meadows, the actress from The Honeymooners, and Hollywood was good company.
The new headquarters sat at 7300 World Way West, right up against the runways at LAX. Mid-century modern architect Edward Grenzbach designed it: 100,000 square feet on 35 leased acres, built for about two million dollars. Out front stood a bronze canopy sculpture called Free Form of Future Flight, in the company colors of white, gold, and black. Six moved 335 staff out from Denver in the summer of 1963. Within a couple of years there were around 1,500 people working there.
It worked. The airline picked up a celebrity clientele, Henry Fonda and John Wayne among them. Audrey Meadows designed the flight attendants’ uniforms and the cabins of the 747 and the DC-10. The 1968 livery put a black Saul Bass “jetstream” on those golden tails, under two slogans that stuck for more than a decade: “The Airline That Pride Built,” and the one everybody remembers. For a while, the pride was earned.
Enter Feldman
Alvin Lindbergh Feldman was born in New York in 1927, and yes, the middle name was for Charles Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic that same year. He trained as a mechanical engineer at Cornell, spent seventeen years at Aerojet General, then ran Frontier Airlines for nine years and turned it into a well-run, profitable carrier. He backed his unions and he backed deregulation, which is a harder combination to pull off than it sounds.
In 1980 he left Frontier to run Continental, taking the top job from Six, who was 73 and thought highly of him. Feldman inherited a sick airline. Continental had never fully recovered from a long strike in 1976. It lost 13 million dollars in 1979, more than 20 million in 1980, and 34.7 million in just the first half of 1981. Deregulation had rewritten the rules, fuel was expensive, and the old cavalier way of running things did not survive the new math. On top of all of it, Feldman’s wife had died the year before.
His plan was a merger with Western Airlines, a clean fit with little overlap. The Civil Aeronautics Board had blocked a Western tie-up in 1979, then reversed itself and cleared it in the spring of 1981. The deal was nearly done.
The raid
That is when Frank Lorenzo moved. Lorenzo ran Texas International Airlines, and his parent company, Texas Air Corporation, had already made unfriendly runs at National Airlines and TWA. In one day of trading he grabbed 830,000 Continental shares half an hour before the close, and kept buying until he held 48.5 percent of the company. The Western merger died on the spot. Lorenzo ran the same play at airline after airline: buy the carrier, void the union contracts, move the profitable pieces to companies he controlled, and let the rest fail. Continental’s employees understood exactly what a Lorenzo takeover meant for their jobs, and they went to Feldman.
In April 1981, two Continental pilots, Paul Eckel and Charles Cheeld III, floated an idea: let the workers buy a controlling stake themselves, through an employee stock-ownership plan. The plan would issue millions of new shares and hand employees 51 percent of the company, dropping Lorenzo to 49. Roughly 11,000 employees would need a 185-million-dollar loan, arranged through nine banks led by Security Pacific National Bank and the First National Bank of Chicago. Feldman was skeptical at first. Then he threw everything behind it, because it was the last real way to keep the airline out of Lorenzo’s hands. Lorenzo challenged the plan’s legality immediately, and on August 6 the California Corporations Commission agreed with him: those new shares needed shareholder approval, which Texas Air could simply refuse to give.
The fight ran about six months, and it ground Feldman down. His friend Travis Reed, an aircraft broker, later told the story to Thomas Petzinger for the book Hard Landing: Feldman became consumed with stopping Lorenzo, and the two evening drinks he usually nursed grew to five stiff ones as the fight dragged on. Then, in early August, the whole thing came apart at once. President Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers on August 5. Four days later, with the industry in turmoil and Continental’s numbers looking worse than ever, the nine banks pulled their commitment. The loan was dead. Without it, so was the employee plan.
The office at LAX
On Sunday, August 9, 1981, Feldman worked for several hours with an aide in his office at the LAX headquarters. The two were preparing a press release for the next morning, the one announcing that the banks were gone and the takeover now looked inevitable. When the work was done, Feldman sat alone and wrote four letters: two to his attorneys, one to his three grown children in which he mentioned the death of their mother, and one to his secretary explaining what to do with the other three. Then he took his own life. He was 53.
The coroner recorded a man despondent over his wife’s death and the fight to save his company. Days earlier, the CAB had cleared Texas Air to take control of Continental. The board named George Warde to succeed him. Lorenzo issued a statement calling Feldman a man of “great honor and integrity.” Petzinger’s Hard Landing describes the burial near San Diego: members of Feldman’s summer fishing group carried the casket, and United Airlines president Dick Ferris, a friend from the deregulation fights, struck the lid with his fist and cried, “Damn you, Al. Why did you have to do this?”
The fight outlived him. In the days after his death, Eckel and hundreds of employees pledged their own money, pulled in the California Chamber of Commerce, and pushed a bill through the state legislature to waive the shareholder-approval requirement that had stopped them. The California Assembly passed it 56 to 20. By then the buyout was already crippled, because the banks were gone. And the takeover itself needed one last sign-off. That call belonged to President Reagan, who had the authority to block Texas Air’s move on Continental. He did not use it. On October 13, 1981, he let the deal go through. Lorenzo had his airline, and the employees had lost.
If you want to visit the spot, you cannot. The headquarters sat empty for years, and the building where Feldman died was torn down. Today there is nothing there to mark it, just pavement beside the LAX runways where the Proud Bird once kept its offices.
Why it matters
Feldman lost, and the men who beat him did not slow down.
In 1983, Lorenzo put Continental into Chapter 11 bankruptcy while the airline still held roughly 50 million dollars in cash, and used the filing to void its union contracts. A pilot earning 89,000 dollars was told the job now paid 43,000. When the pilots and machinists struck, he replaced them. Continental laid off a large majority of its people during that stretch. Then, in 1986, Lorenzo took over Eastern Air Lines and stripped its best assets over to Continental and other companies he controlled, selling the Eastern Shuttle to Donald Trump along the way. Eastern was liquidated in 1991. All of it was legal.
Carl Icahn ran the same play at TWA. He took control in 1985, completed a leveraged buyout in 1988, and sold the airline’s prized London routes to American Airlines for 445 million dollars. He personally cleared about 469 million on the deal, and left TWA carrying some 540 million in new debt. The airline went bankrupt and was eventually absorbed by American in 2001. The pattern was always the same. The value flowed up to the raider. The cost flowed down to the workers, the pensioners, and the people in the seats.
The hopeful turn
Here is the part worth remembering. The system did eventually push back, but only because working people made it.
Eastern’s employees were willing to lose their own jobs to force Lorenzo out of the industry, and they did. In 1994, the Department of Transportation declared Frank Lorenzo unfit to run an airline and refused to let him start a new one. He has been shut out of the business ever since. That was not the market correcting itself. That was pressure, applied by the people he had spent a decade running over.
The raiders who dodged that fate did fine. Icahn is a billionaire many times over, leading a charmed life, still cutting deals in his nineties, and still settling the occasional case with regulators. Alvin Feldman is remembered by the people who knew him as an honest man who would not sell out the workers who trusted him, and that reputation has outlasted the airline, the building, and most of the fortunes built on top of the wreckage.
And the people did not all scatter. When Lorenzo took Continental into bankruptcy in 1983 and cut wages in half, hundreds of workers walked. One of them was Paul Eckel, the pilot who had led the buyout fight. He went out and raised almost 20 million dollars, much of it from former Continental employees, and started his own airline. It was called Pride Air, and it is a story of its own.
So do not just feel sad about this one. Learn the names on both sides. The people who took these companies apart would rather be remembered as savvy than ruthless, and which word sticks is up to us. Aaron Bernstein’s Grounded: Frank Lorenzo and the Destruction of Eastern Airlines is a good place to start. And when workers at some airline you have never flown put their necks on the line the way Continental’s people did in 1981, pay attention. Feldman thought they were worth fighting for. Remembering he was right is the least the rest of us can do.
Note: This piece discusses suicide. If you are struggling, you can reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the U.S. by calling or texting 988.
Sources
- UPI Archives, “Continental chief dead in apparent suicide,” August 10, 1981
- UPI Archives, “Despondent airline exec called suicide victim,” August 10, 1981
- Wikipedia, “Alvin Feldman”
- TIME, “Office Tragedy,” August 24, 1981
- The Washington Post, “A Troubled Airline, An Apparent Suicide,” August 11, 1981
- Clio, “Continental Airlines General Office Building (1963–1982)”
- Wikipedia, “Continental Airlines”
- Wikipedia, “Frank Lorenzo”
- The Washington Post, “Lorenzo Declared Unfit to Run Airline,” April 6, 1994
- The Buffalo News, “Frank Lorenzo: Destroyer of Unions and Airlines” (reviewing Aaron Bernstein’s Grounded)
- Wikipedia, “Carl Icahn”
- Fox Business, “What is Carl Icahn’s net worth?”
- PBS News, “Billionaire Carl Icahn strikes settlement with US regulators…,” August 2024
- Thomas Petzinger Jr., Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos (Times Business / Random House, 1995)
- Avgeekery, “Inside the Continental Airlines Merger Fight of 1981,” June 9, 2025
- The Washington Post, “Texas International, Continental Airline Takeover Up to Reagan,” October 8, 1981
