Before he was known as the father of artificial Christmas trees, Si Spiegel was a brave army aviator. In the final days of World War II, he piloted his B-17 Flying Fortress into an armada of 1,500 Allied bombers that pounded Berlin. Hit by a flak, two of the plane’s four engines lost power as Mr Spiegel turned around to return to England.
Instead of bailing out for Germany and risking capture as a prisoner of war – especially given that he was Jewish – Mr Spiegel managed to land in Soviet-occupied Poland. After being stuck there for weeks, he improvised a daring escape – using parts of his own plane to outfit another B-17 that had crashed nearby, then flying to an American base in Italy.
Mr. Spiegel, who died at 99 on Jan. 21 at his Manhattan home, was among the last surviving American B-17 pilots of World War II, said his granddaughter Maya Ono. But Mr. Spiegel, an engineer by training, has another legacy: He was considered a pioneer of the mass-produced artificial Christmas tree.
The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, he grew up in a religious neighborhood in Brooklyn and never had a Christmas tree, real or artificial, in his childhood.
“I don’t think my grandfather was necessarily associated with trees and Christmas as much as the machines he built to make the trees,” Ms. Ono said, “and later in life, the systems he created to build a successful business and the relationships he cultivated.”
For Mr. Spiegel, becoming the king of artificial Christmas trees was a stroke of luck, but his religion played a role. After the war, he applied to be a commercial pilot, but was told he was barking up the wrong tree.
“They were blatant about it,” he said in an interview at the New York Military Museum in 2010. “It wasn’t that they gave you any excuse. They told you, ‘We don’t hire Jews.'”
He briefly enrolled at the City College of New York to become an engineer, but after his time in the war he found the academic routine disconcerting and frustrating. After a brief stint as a radio announcer in New Mexico, he returned to New York.
Benefiting from his early training in the army, he was hired as a machinist, but could not hold down a regular job because of his role as an organizer for the United Electrical Workers Union, which had been branded by its parent Congress of Industrial Organizations as full of communists. (Mr. Spiegel was later president of Local 1709 of the Machinists Union, affiliated with the AFL-CIO)
In 1954, he finally landed a permanent position with the American Brush Machinery Company, which was based in Mount Vernon, New York. He operated machines that made wire brushes and other materials for various industrial operations, including wood cleaning and polishing and metal finishing.
Artificial Christmas trees have been made for decades — first from the same bristles of animal hair used for toilet brushes, then from aluminum and finally from different forms of plastic.
After American Brush’s unsuccessful foray into the Christmas tree business, Mr. Spiegel, then a senior engineer, was tasked with closing down the artificial tree plant. Instead, he began studying natural conifers, improved brush-making machines to mimic real trees, and patented new production techniques.
He left the renamed American Tree and Wreath Company in 1979 and two years later founded the Hudson Valley Tree Company, which began mass-producing 80,000 trees a year on an assembly line that churned out one every four minutes.
By the late 1980s, his company was generating $54 million in annual sales and employed 800 workers in Newburgh, New York, and Evansville, Ind. He sold the Hudson Valley Tree Company in 1993, retired as a multi-millionaire and turned his attention to cultural, educational and social justice philanthropy.
Si Spiegel was born on May 28, 1924 in Manhattan. His mother, Massia (Perlman) Spiegel, a dressmaker and suffragist born in Bessarabia, named him after Issai (or Isaiah), the biblical prophet who expressed the utopian dream that “they shall know war no more.” His Ukrainian-born father, David, owned a laundry in Greenwich Village.
After graduating from Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan in May 1942, he worked for four months operating grinding machines for an industrial equipment manufacturer and then enlisted in the Army.
He graduated from aircraft engineering school at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, but was disillusioned: He wanted to fly planes, not repair them.
“How would I fight Hitler with a wrench?” he said in an interview with the New York Times in 2021.
He was sent to Mitchell Field, two miles away, where he became an Air Force cadet. During his education, he married Frankie Marie Smith in New Mexico. after the war they separated.
It was set up in Eye, England, near the North Sea, where its motley crew consisted of another Jew, five Catholics, a Mormon, and a criminal who had been given the choice of going to prison or joining the army.
Returning from his 33rd mission, the mammoth February 3, 1945, air raid on Berlin, Mr. Spiegel managed to belly-land in a frozen potato field in Reczyn, Poland. While the families of the crews were informed that their relatives were missing in action, they were detained by Russian troops.
Unsure what to do with their supposed allies, the Russians waited for orders from their superiors. But instead of staying put, Mr. Spiegel and his fellow officers secretly removed an engine and tire from their own plane to repair another sunken B-17 that had crashed nearby. They were exchanged for fuel and, on 17 March, the combined crews escaped to Foggia, Italy, where they were able to notify their families back home that they had survived.
Mr. Spiegel flew two more missions, then returned to New York on Aug. 31, 1945, but would return to England and Poland to reunite with his crew from the 849th Bomb Squadron of the 490th Bomb Group.
Mr. Spiegel joined Pete Seeger’s Good Neighbor choir and in 1949 attended Camp Unity, a Communist-affiliated summer camp in Wingdale, New York, where he met Motoko Ikeda, the daughter of Japanese immigrants who had settled in California. During the war, she and her family were imprisoned in an internment camp in Wyoming. Then her parents moved back to California and she went to New York. She and Mr. Spiegel married in 1950. Ms. Spiegel, who became an artist, died in 2000.
Since then, Mr. Spiegel has lived alone on the Upper West Side, not far from where he was born.
He is survived by his daughter, Sura Kazuko Ono. two sons, Ray Spiegel and Tamio Spiegel; His brother, Lee; and five granddaughters.
Mr. Spiegel celebrated the Jewish holidays with his children, but when they were young, a Christmas tree was a staple of the winter holidays — first a real one, then the best of his fake ones.
“They were pagan symbols,” he told the Times. “My kids liked it.”
His wife, too, claimed a cultural trait that was not part of her upbringing: “Motoko was better at Jewish food than my mother,” she said. “He could cook in any language.”
