Twenty-nine-year-old self-taught engineer and aviation pioneer Albin Longren made his first successful flight in a plane that he had built himself in Topeka, Kansas, on Sept. 2, 1911.
Inspired, Longren started his own company, and the Longren Aircraft Corp. began turning out planes. One of his most interesting creations was aimed at Kansas farmers: a biplane whose wings folded up for storage in a barn or garage.
Longren loved to fly, and supplemented his income through barnstorming exhibitions, popular in the early 1920s. He sold the planes his company built to the general aviation market and the military, but people weren’t as fired up to buy their own airplanes as he’d hoped. The company went bankrupt in 1926.
Longren scuffled around for the next few years. He worked for Clyde Cessna in Wichita during the 1930s, but was forced out in a corporate power play. By then, he had the financial means to restart his own company, and he decided to do so in Torrance. Longren Aircraft Co. Inc. opened for the second time in 1938 at its new location at 2576 Carson St.
This new iteration of the company focused its energy not on aircraft production, but on components, especially fuselages. Longren had developed a special technique of stretching aluminum and other materials into strong, uniform shapes that could be easily utilized in airplane construction.
Hampden Wentworth was born on Feb. 7, 1921, in Boston, Mass. The well-to-do Wentworths moved west to California when Hampden was a teenager.
Like Longren, he too had a lifelong love of aviation. He was barely out of his teens when he joined Longren Aircraft, but quickly rose to the rank of vice president and chief engineer. The company’s new focus made it a natural supplier for larger aircraft manufacturers such as Douglas, Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop, who were being kept busy by the onset of World War II.
At age 23, Wentworth enlisted in the Navy, and was selected for cadet training in the Naval Air Corps academy in Berkeley, Calif. The entire staff at the Carson St. plant gathered to give him a sendoff in June 1944.
He was stationed at Pensacola, Fla., at the time he was discharged from service in May 1946. He returned to Longren as vice president, where his older brother, Chapman, was serving as president.
Albin Longren had remained with his Torrance company until 1945, when he retired to his ranch in northern California. He died at 68 in 1950. But his company continued to gain momentum.
In the early 1950s, Hampden Wentworth was elevated from plant operations manager to company president. He led the company’s expansion plans when it began to outgrow its Carson St. location.
He negotiated the purchase of ten acres at the northeast section of the then-new Torrance Municipal Airport property for Longren’s new facility, which would be in addition to the Carson St. plant. The new plant, which opened in 1957, was located at 24751 Crenshaw Blvd., in the airport’s industrial section.
Longren built on its wartime success by diversifying its product lines. It still manufactured airplane fuselages and other metal parts, but it also branched out into metal consumer products after the end of World War II.
Under Wentworth, it also grew because of his innovative management strategies. Not all companies in the 1950s had a complex profit-sharing plan for employees, gave them one three-day weekend every month and threw elaborate plant-wide holiday parties.
During all this time, Wentworth never lost his passion for flying. He and his wife, Christina – they married in 1947 – often left their Palos Verdes Estates home on Via Somonte for frequent globe-trotting trips in his plane. Wentworth had fully reconditioned and updated the 1939 Beechcraft 17B biplane once flown by aviator Jacquline Cochran.
On one such adventure in South America in 1951, the couple’s plane disappeared from radar screens when it had to make a forced landing on a farm in Bolivia due to mechanical difficulties. They got the plane repaired and returned home safely.
In 1954, they took a nine-week trip to Europe and the Mideast, which included them almost getting shot at by soldiers in Jerusalem before successfully identifying themselves.
In 1959, Wentworth, by then the company’s owner, successfully negotiated Longren Aircraft’s merger with Middletown, Ohio airplane parts manufacturer Aeronca Manufacturing Corp. Albin Longren’s company name was no longer, this time for good. Wentworth retired from the company and turned to stock trading and investments at the family’s new, larger home on Portuguese Bend Road in Rolling Hills.
On Feb. 2, 1960, the couple was returning from a Southwest U.S. trip when engine trouble during a snowstorm forced them to make a landing in the mountain town of Reserve, New Mexico.
Though he was advised to wait until morning when the snow would have been frozen, Wentworth, in a hurry to get home, fixed the engine and decided to try to take off in the slushy snow.
The Beechcraft failed to gain altitude and ran into several fence posts and small trees before crashing into a hillside. The Wentworths died instantly. They left behind four children, Francisca, 8, Christopher, 7, Strafford, 5, and David, 3.
Wentworth had borrowed the aircraft, a Beechcraft biplane similar to his own, from Torrance City Council member Robert Jahn.
Sources:
“Albin Longren: The Aviation Pioneer You Don’t Know,” by Frederick Johnsen, General Aviation News website, March 28, 2025.
“The Birdman of Topeka,” by Giles Lambertson, Smithsonian magazine website, July 22, 2015.
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