The Air Capital turned out to be a perfect fit for Fred Berry, his family and business.
Berry already had a pilot’s license and love of flying when he arrived in Wichita in 1957. He jumped into the city’s bustling aviation scene while building his construction and material handling dealerships into a national enterprise.
“We would never have been doing what we’re doing without airplanes,” he said. “We love face-to-face relationships with our people, and we love to get our corporate people home for dinner.”
Berry recounted his connection with aviation while accepting the 2024 Wichita Aero Club Trophy last month.
He grew up in Wood River, Il., just north of St. Louis, where his father farmed and sold farm machinery. An uncle, Art Berry, was the first pilot in the family, and Berry relished hanging around him and his pilot buddies.
“I got to sit in on those hangar talks, as those guys call them, and I got hooked.”
His parents gave him flying lessons as a high school graduation present, and Berry started as soon as World War II rationing rules were lifted. His first teacher owned a plane that was tied up to a float on the Mississippi River near Wood River’s oil refineries.
“There are some special conditions to flying off the water, but I didn’t know any better,” Berry said. “I was tickled to death with it.”
He finished his license the next year and made his first, albeit brief, trip to Wichita. An airplane dealer in Wood River sent Berry and two other pilots here to pick up new 140 trainers, which was Cessna’s entry into the air trainer business.
“I flew the trainer back to the dealer in Wood River with a three-day-old pilot’s license. I’m sure he had no insurance on me. He couldn’t have.”
The next year, Uncle Art bought the family’s first airplane, a war surplus PT26. Fred’s younger brother, Paul, earned his pilot’s license, and Art bought what Berry calls the family’s first “real airplane” — a Cessna 170.
“Now we were really in the corporate air business.”
Berry graduated from the University of Illinois and Harvard Business School and served as an Air Force maintenance officer during the Korean War. Returning home, he realized that the younger sister of a fraternity brother from St. Louis had morphed into a Washington University co-ed and queen of its engineering society.
He asked her on a date to a Harry Belafonte concert. When she pointed out the concert was in Chicago, Berry said he’d fly them there, land at Chicago’s lakefront airport and “have you home by midnight.”
Fred and Suzanne Berry will have been married 70 years on April 2. They have four children, 17 grandchildren and 30 great-grandchildren.
The plan had always been for Fred and Paul to join the family business, which distributed farm equipment in the St. Louis area and much of Illinois. But a merger of equipment manufacturing companies led to independent distributors like the Berrys being bought out.
“That left younger brother Paul and me, both recently married, each with our first baby, unemployed.”
Their father was willing to back them in their own equipment business. They found one based in Wichita whose owner had died. They named it the Berry Tractor and Equipment Company and used an airplane to visit its branches in Garden City and Russell. “The highway system was certainly not what it was today. It was before the interstate.”
Paul left the business but Fred’s son, Walter (now executive chairman), and grandson, Jon (president of operations), have kept it going and growing. Locally, the business sells heavy equipment on West Street, bobcats on the north side and forklifts on the south side.
Outside Kansas, general aviation proved similarly helpful to the Berry Cos. Of 65 locations in 11 states, Fred said, “every one of them has an airport, but not all of them have airline service, and some of those that do, it’s very limited.”
Suzanne Berry got her pilot’s license in 1961, and Walter’s high school graduation present was the same as his father’s. The family often flew on family vacations. Indeed, Fred and Sue have piloted planes in all 50 states, renting a plane in Hawaii for that purpose. They also flew to Europe with friends, passing over Canada, Greenland and Iceland along the way.
Another son, Franklin, is also a pilot who built several small aircraft himself before going on to a career with Cessna. Today, he’s one of the chief volunteers behind the B29 Doc restored WWII bomber.
The Berrys have owned 22 planes over the years, many used. Fred Berry remembers going to see their first new one work its way down the production line at Cessna in the late 1970s.
Their planes were used for the community, too. Berry recalled flying fellow trustees of Wesley Medical Center to Estes Park for a conference, Junior Achievement participants to New Orleans for an event and a singing group from the Institute of Logopedics — now Heartspring — to Indianapolis for a performance.
“That was probably the most rewarding and most satisfying of all my community service,” he said.
Berry has chaired the boards of United Way of the Plains, Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce and other organizations, while the Aero Club recognized him for numerous contributions to Wichita’s aviation community. As one speaker at the Aero Club gala said, Berry “has been a mainstay in anything related to the community of Wichita and beyond. If it has something ‘wow, gee whiz’ going on in the community, it’s got the Berry Foundation and Fred Berry’s name somewhere involved.”
Fred Berry stopped piloting in his late 70s, persuaded by his flight instructor and a soaring insurance premium. He’d logged over 7,000 flying hours in 62 years — “as good as it gets,” he said.
“I still love to fly at age 96,” he added, “but I just can’t touch anything.”
