Harold Elstner Talbott, Jr. (March 31, 1888 – March 2, 1957) was the third United States Secretary of the Air Force. Biography He was born in Dayton, Ohio, in March 1888 and died in 1957. He attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and spent two years at Yale University before returning to his father's construction company in 1911. He was a well-known polo player. Family Talbott's father was a wealthy engineer who was involved in the construction of the Soo Locks on Lake Superior and had various railroad and paper milling interests. Talbott Sr. was the first mayor of Oakwood, Ohio. He was also involved in the recovery of Dayton from the 1913 flood. He served as the director of the City National Bank of Dayton. His mother was active in the Dayton anti-suffrage league, which opposed giving women the right to vote. She was also involved in the Anti-Saloon League and was a patroness of the Dayton Westminster Choir. His brother Nelson "Bud" Talbott was the coach for the Dayton Triangles professional football team, a predecessor to today's Indianapolis Colts. His great-nephew Strobe Talbott was a deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration. In 1925, Talbott married Margaret Thayer (1898–1962), who was the daughter of Marian Longstreth Morris Thayer, a survivor of the disaster, and John B. Thayer, a railroad executive who perished aboard the ship. Harold's and Margaret's children included Margaret Noyes, Pauline Toland, John Thayer Talbott, and H. E. Talbott III. In July 1962 his wife (Margaret Thayer) committed suicide by jumping from the 12th story of their Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City. During World War II, the Runnymede Playhouse on the Talbott family estate in a residential neighborhood of Oakwood, Montgomery County, Ohio (a suburb of Dayton), hosted the Dayton Project (the part of the Manhattan Project involved in creating the neutron-generating triggers for the first atomic bombs from radioactive polonium). Charles Allen Thomas, a Delco-GM and Monsanto Company chemist who was in charge of the project, was married to Harold's sister Margaret. Career From 1906 to about 1913 Harold Talbott served as president of Platt Iron Works in Dayton along with his polo teammate Edwin F. Platt. Talbott's interest in aviation dated from the early days of the Wright brothers. He was a pupil of Katharine Wright and a customer of the Wright's bicycle shop. In 1915 Talbott helped build one