Si Spiegel, war hero who modernized Christmas trees, dies at the age of 99

Before he became known as the father of artificial Christmas trees, Si Spiegel was a brave army aviator. In the closing days of World War II, he piloted his B-17 Flying Fortress into an armada of 1,500 Allied bombers that ravaged Berlin. Hit by anti-aircraft fire, two of the plane's four engines lost power as Mr Spiegel changed course to return to England.

Rather than rescue Germany and risk being captured as a prisoner of war – especially because he was Jewish – Mr Spiegel managed to crash land in Soviet-occupied Poland. After being trapped there for weeks, he improvised a daring escape, using parts of his own plane to rig another B-17 that had crashed nearby, then flying to an American base in Italy.

Mr. Spiegel, who died Jan. 21 at his home in Manhattan at age 99, was one of the last surviving American B-17 pilots from World War II, his granddaughter Maya Ono said. But Mr. Spiegel, a machinist 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, natural or artificial, growing up.

“I don't necessarily think my grandfather associated himself with the trees and Christmas as much as he did with the machines he built to make the trees,” Ms. Ono said, “and later in life with the systems he created to make the trees to make. building a successful business and the relationships he built.”

For Mr. Spiegel it was a fluke to become the king of artificial Christmas trees, but his religion did play a role. After the war he applied to be a commercial pilot, but was told he was barking up the wrong tree.

“They were open about it,” he said in an interview with the newspaper New York State Military Museum in 2010. “It wasn't like they gave you an 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 wartime service he found the academic routine disturbing and repulsive. After a brief stint as a radio announcer in New Mexico, he returned to New York.

Capitalizing on his early army training, he was hired as a machinist, but was unable to hold down a steady job due to his role as an organizer of the United Electrical Workers Union, which had been branded by the parent Congress of Industrial Organizations as full of communists. (Mr. Spiegel later served as president of Local 1709 of the Machinists Union, which belonged to the AFL-CIO.)

In 1954, he finally got a permanent job with the American Brush Machinery Company, located in Mount Vernon, NY. He operated machines that manufactured brushes from wire and other materials for various industrial functions, including cleaning and scrubbing wood and metal finishes.

Artificial Christmas trees have been made for decades, originally from the same animal hair bristles used for toilet brushes, then from aluminum and finally from various forms of plastic.

After American Brush unsuccessfully expanded its business into the Christmas tree business, Mr. Spiegel, now a senior machinist, was tasked with closing the artificial tree factory. Instead, he began studying natural conifers, adapting brush-making machines to mimic real trees and patenting new production techniques.

In 1981, he became president of the renamed American Tree and Wreath Company, which began mass-producing 800,000 trees per year on an assembly line that churned out one every four minutes.

By the late 1980s, his company generated $54 million in annual sales and employed 800 workers in Newburgh, NY, and Evansville, Indiana. He sold the renamed Hudson Valley Tree Company in 1993, retired as a multi-millionaire and turned his attention to cultural, educational and social justice philanthropy.

Si Herbert Spiegel was born on May 28, 1924 in Manhattan. His mother, Massia (Perlman) Spiegel, a seamstress and suffragist born in Bessarabia, named him after Issai or Isaiah, the Biblical prophet who expressed the utopian dream that “they shall learn war no more.” His Ukrainian-born father, David, owned a hand laundry business 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 before enlisting in the Army.

He graduated from aircraft mechanics school at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, but became frustrated: He wanted to fly planes, not fix them.

“How would I fight Hitler with a wrench?” he told The New York Times last year.

He was referred to Mitchel Field, two miles away, where he became an aviation cadet. While in college he married Frankie Marie Smith in New Mexico; after the war they divorced.

He was deployed to Eye, England, near the North Sea, where his varied crew included another Jew, five Catholics, a Morman, and a criminal given the choice of going to prison or joining the army.

Returning from his 33rd mission, the massive air raid on Berlin on February 3, 1945, Mr. Spiegel managed to belly land on a frozen potato field in Reczyn, Poland. While the crew members' families were told that their relatives were missing, they were held by Russian forces.

Unsure of what to do with perceived allies, the Russians waited for orders from their superiors. But instead of staying put, Mr. Spiegel and his fellow officers surreptitiously removed an engine and a tire from their own plane to repair another hobbled B-17 that had crashed nearby. They traded for fuel and on March 17, the combined crews fled to Foggia, Italy, where they were able to report to their families back home that they had survived. Mr. Spiegel led two more missions and then returned to New York on August 31, 1945, but he would return to England and Poland for reunions of his crew from the 849th Bomb Squadron of the 490th Bomb Group.

Mr. Spiegel joined Pete Seeger's Good Neighbor Chorus and in 1949 went to Camp Unity, a communist summer camp in Wingdale, N.Y., where he met Motoko Ikeda, the daughter of Japanese immigrants who had settled in California. During the war, she and her family were incarcerated in an internment camp in Wyoming; then her parents returned to California, and she went to New York. She and Mr. Spiegel married in 1950. Mrs. Spiegel, who became an artist, died in 2000.

Since then, Mr. Spiegel has lived alone on the Upper West Side, not far from his hometown.

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 Jewish holidays with his children, but when they were young, a Christmas tree was an indispensable part of the winter holidays — first a real one, then the best of his fakes.

“They were pagan symbols,” he told The Times in 2021. “My kids liked them.”

His wife also adhered to a cultural trait that was not part of her upbringing: “Motoko was better at Jewish food than my mother,” he said. “She could cook in any language.”