Allen Paulson
Allen Eugene Paulson (April 22, 1922 – July 19, 2000) was an American businessman.
Business career in aviation
Born in Clinton, Iowa, Allen E. Paulson was on his own at age 13, supporting himself selling newspapers and doing janitorial work at local hotel until he moved to California in 1937. There, he worked on a dairy farm to pay his way through school. After finishing high school in 1941, he took a 30-cent-per-hour job as an entry-level mechanic for TWA. In 1943-45 he served in the US Army Air Corps and spent a year studying engineering at the University of West Virginia. After the war, he went back to TWA, this time as a flight engineer, and used his GI Bill of Rights to get his pilot's license. He then began flying commercially for TWA. Using his TWA travel privileges, he began flying to Chicago to buy cars that he drove back to California to sell. Soon, he had a van and was transporting a number of vehicles on every trip.
He left TWA to form his own company in 1951, first buying surplus Wright R-3350 engines from Boeing B-29s and selling the parts to airlines. In 1955 he purchased his first aircraft for resale, stripping the aircraft for parts and scrapping the rest and later rebuilding one aircraft for resale out of the parts of several. The first airplanes he bought were three Convair 240s; Western Airlines had turned to Lockheed Electras. Later, he bought all of TWA's Martin 404s. He sold those, 240s and Convair 340s for corporate airplanes.
