America’s Local Service Airlines, Part IV: Ozark, Pacific & Piedmont 

OZARK AIR LINES

Like several other local service carriers, Ozark got its first experience operating an intrastate service. However, it was five years from the time that the intrastate operation in Missouri was shut down until Ozark Air Lines once again became airborne.

Ozark was the brainchild of Laddie Hamilton, who had transportation in his blood. Born June 28, 1910, Laddie’s given name was Homer Dale Hamilton. His father worked for the St. Louis – San Francisco Railway (The Frisco). After operating his own automobile garage in Springfield, Mo., Laddie went to work for Floyd W. Jones, first as a bus driver, then, in 1936, as manager of the southern portion of Jones’s Mo-Ark Coaches (later Mo-Ark Trailways). Floyd Jones and Laddie Hamilton developed a business relationship that would serve them both well for many years to come.

With Jones’s help, in 1937 Hamilton purchased the bankrupt Dixie Coaches, a bus line operating in Alabama and Mississippi. He resuscitated the company, turning it into a
financially-healthy enterprise, then sold it for a profit to Southeastern Greyhound Lines in 1942.

Laddie Hamilton had earned his pilot’s license in 1928, so it was no surprise that his next move would be into the field of aviation. He was training pilots during the war working for Oliver Parks’s Alabama Institute of Aeronautics part-time while acting as regional manager for Southeastern Greyhound Lines in Tuscaloosa.

On a spring day in 1943, he met with his friend, Floyd Jones, and two other gentlemen, Barak T. Mattingly and Arthur Heyne, both attorneys, at Mattingly’s office in the Title Guarantee Building on Chestnut Street in Downtown St. Louis. The purpose of their meeting was to discuss forming an intrastate airline that would operate between Springfield, St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia, Missouri.

Articles of Incorporation were filed with the Missouri Secretary of State on August 26, 1943, and a charter was granted on September 1. Ozark Airlines was officially in business (note that “Airlines” was one word in the original incarnation of Ozark). Ozark was formed with the intent of starting one of the new “feeder” airlines that the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) was contemplating. The four founders felt that the CAB would look more favorably upon a company that had intrastate operating experience when it came time to issue the Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity, required for interstate operation.

Ozark started getting its experience by offering charter services out of Springfield. Then, with three Beech Modelt . . .