An avid private pilot, he served during World War II as superintendent of operations at Falcon Field near Phoenix, Arizona, training Royal Air Force pilots, and later as captain in the Air Transport Command, ferrying cargo in small planes to military bases throughout California.

His postwar film career was impeded by a contract with RKO, then controlled and virtually brought to a halt by the eccentric policies of its owner Howard Hughes.

In 1958, he retired from film work and moved to New York City, where he opened a stage production office with Richard Meyers, and pursued his hobby of training Labrador retrievers for field trials.

[1] Retirement afforded Potter the opportunity to indulge his passion for writing scholarly monographs about Sherlock Holmes for The Baker Street Journal.

[2] In addition, Potter twice won the Morley-Montgomery Award, one of the highest distinctions given by the BSI, for his articles "Reflections on Canonical Vehicles and Something of the Horse" (1971) and '"John H. Watson, Word Painter" (1976).