One Summer: America, 1927

by Bryson, Bill

It thereupon urged every citizen, as a matter of national urgency, to work for “the establishment of airports and similar facilities,” so that the United States could take “its rightful place” as the world leader in commercial aviation.

  From the start his receptions were chaotic. Excited onlookers and even members of the official greeting parties tended to rush forward to greet the plane as it was still taxiing. This was profoundly unnerving to Lindbergh. He had once seen a man sliced in two by a spinning propeller. Because he had no forward visibility, every landing was effectively blind. At least twice—in Kansas City and Portland, Oregon—crowds on the runway forced him to set down on nearby farmland. Elsewhere, batteries of guns fired in salute of his arrival produced drifting smoke that obscured his visibility further. All in all, he faced more dangers flying around America than he ever had on his flight to Paris.

  To try to keep to schedules, Lindbergh was often driven at high speed along his parade routes, a matter that dismayed spectators and alarmed Lindbergh since onlookers here, too, were inclined to step into the road for a better look.

  An entirely typical day was Lindbergh’s visit to Springfield, Illinois, on August 15, where he arrived in the early afternoon, having flown from Chicago by way of Mooseheart, Aurora, Joliet, and Peoria. In the one hour and forty-one minutes he was on the ground at Springfield, Lindbergh did the following: made a brief speech at the airfield; was presented to a hundred or so local officials; was invited to admire and review the 106th Illinois Cavalry; was placed in an open-top car for a five-mile dash past fifty thousand cheering people waving flags; laid a wreath at the tomb of Abraham Lincoln; and was taken to the local arsenal, where he was presented with a gold watch and bathed in a succession of rambling, overwrought speeches. Here is a sampling of the florid tribute paid him by Mayor J. Emil Smith:

  As he sailed through the silver of that summer dawn, the stars watched with a still delight to see a child of earth so brave riding the air, a comrade of cloud and wind and foaming wave. And as he neared his goal the sun, the sea and the huge unfettered spaces hailed him a victor and chanted to him, “Well done.”

  All that made the Springfield stop a little different was its extreme familiarity: this had been one of Lindbergh’s working airfields during his stint as an airmail pilot. Indeed, he had chosen the site of the field just fifteen months earlier.

  In conclusion, the mayor announced that they were renaming the airfield Lindbergh Field in his honor—an irony that cannot have been lost on young Charles, since just the previous year the citizens of Springfield had overwhelmingly defeated a bond proposal to build a decent airfield in the town. That they had any field at all was thanks only to the local chamber of commerce, which provided modest funding to give the city the most basic facilities.

  After his ceremonies, Lindbergh was rushed back to his waiting plane for an onward flight to St. Louis, where he faced more presentations, more crowds, and yet another evening banquet. Lindbergh was under such constant pressure on the ground that he found the flying between cities the most restful part of his tour, and sometimes introduced long detours into his itineraries to give himself some peace. Where he could—over lakes, for instance, or level ground—he often flew just fifteen feet or so above the surface, which increased the sense of speed and thrill but narrowed his margin for recovery to zero if anything went wrong. He was given two days a week off, which must have been a blessed relief, but even then he was far from home and constantly in the company of strangers.

  Charles Levine was now the only Atlantic flier still in Europe, and he showed no inclination yet to come home. He poked around for the rest of the summer. He traveled to Italy, where he met the pope and declared Mussolini the greatest statesman in the world. Returning to Paris, he made the papers for getting into a fistfight with a fellow American near the Opéra. “I never saw the man before, but he insulted me and I took a crack at him,” Levine said. “I used to be a boxer,” he added significantly. The cause of the outburst was never explained but was rumored to involve a woman.

  Levine also announced plans to fly home with Maurice Drouhin, one of the two French pilots whose endurance record Chamberlin and Acosta had beaten in Levine’s plane in April. This would present an interesting challenge since Drouhin spoke no English and Levine no French. Levine several times announced takeoff dates, but each one came and passed. Then abruptly in late August, Levine collected his plane from the hangar at Le Bourget and took off in it. Some hours later, officials at Croydon Aerodrome in London were astonished to see the plane approaching in a decidedly erratic fashion. The Columbia was a famous airplane, so they recognized it at once, but it was obvious that whoever was flying it was either incompetent or incapacitated. This was a matter of some alarm: Croydon was a busy airport, with regular passenger flights to Paris and elsewhere, and controllers had only limited means to alert other aircraft to stay back. The Columbia circled the airport four times, once almost crashing into the control tower.

  Finally, it came in to land at a steep and awkward angle, and hit the ground so hard that it bounced high into the air again before slamming heavily back to earth and rolling to a halt. Out from it stepped a beaming Charles Levine. It was the first time he had ever flown solo. It transpired that he had traveled 130 miles farther than necessary to get there. Levine said he had just had a whim to go up alone. Soon afterward, however, news reached London that Levine had in fact taken off just ahead of a writ from Drouhin, who was complaining bitterly that Levine owed him 80,000 francs in wages. The hangar manager at Le Bourget also reported that he had never been paid. Levine had evidently also failed to tell his wife that he would be leaving her behind in Paris. (Their marriage did not long outlast the summer.)

  To avoid arrest now, Levine had to give a formal undertaking that he would never under any circumstances attempt to fly over British soil again. Levine was nothing if not indefatigable, and within a few days he announced plans for another Atlantic flight, this one from Cranwell Aerodrome in Lincolnshire with Captain Walter Hinchliffe, a senior pilot of Imperial Airways. In the days that followed, Levine constantly contradicted himself about whether he and Hinchliffe would fly to America westward over the Atlantic or eastward across Asia and the northern Pacific. In the event, they didn’t go anywhere and the papers lost interest in both of them.

  Drouhin did eventually get some of his back pay, but didn’t have long to enjoy it. He died the next year in a crash during a test flight at Orly. Hinchliffe didn’t fare any better. He vanished at about the same time while trying to fly the Atlantic with a female companion.

  With the Atlantic conquered, attention turned to the Pacific—specifically, the 2,400 miles of challenging emptiness that lay between California and Hawaii. In the immediate aftermath of Lindbergh’s flight, James D. Dole, a Massachusetts native who had amassed a fortune growing and canning pineapples in Hawaii, announced a new challenge, to be called the Dole Pacific Race, with $35,000 in prize money. Dole’s event was to be a proper race, with competitors all taking off at the same time (or as nearly as possible) from the municipal airfield in Oakland, California. The race was scheduled for August but was overtaken by events considerably before then. On June 29, two army fliers successfully flew in a Fokker from Oakland to Oahu in twenty-six hours. It was an extraordinary achievement—hitting Hawaii was a real feat of navigation—and the two pilots, Lieutenant Lester J. Maitland and Lieutenant Albert F. Hegenberger, deserve to be remembered, but unfortunately they weren’t even much noticed then because their success occurred at exactly the moment that Commander Byrd and his team were splashing down at Ver-sur-Mer. Two weeks after the Maitland-Hegenberger flight, two more pilots, Ernest Smith and Emory Bronte, also flew from Oakland to Hawaii—though only just. Virtually out of fuel, they crash-landed into a tree on Molokai but somehow emerged unscathed. They had beaten Maitland and Hegenberger’s time by fourteen minutes. So by August 16, when the Dole race got under way, the competitors had absolutely nothing to prove.

 
Staging it as a race considerably heightened the dangers. It increased pressure on pilots to take off whether or not their aircraft were fully ready, and then to push those planes to their limits in order to beat others reasonably presumed to be doing likewise. A race—particularly a well-publicized race with a big prize—tended to attract fliers who were more eager than skillful. Hawaii was a tiny target in a vast ocean, and reaching it stretched even the most experienced pilots to the limits of their capabilities. The whole enterprise was a recipe for catastrophe, and catastrophic it proved.

  Three competitors died in crashes before they even reached Oakland. Another plane crashed in the sea as it approached the Oakland airfield; the two occupants escaped without serious injury, but their plane was lost. Another plane was not allowed to depart after it became evident that the pilot had no idea how much fuel he needed to reach Hawaii and didn’t have a fuel tank nearly big enough. It was quite clear that several of the hopeful competitors were dangers to themselves.

  By the day of the race, the number of planes taking part had been reduced to eight, and four of those scratched before takeoff or turned back soon after. Of the four planes that set off, two made it to Hawaii and two more were lost en route. One of those never seen again was a plane carrying a pretty twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher from Flint, Michigan, named Mildred Doran, who was not a pilot but simply accompanying others to add glamour and interest for the press. When word got back that six people, including Doran, were missing, a pilot named William Erwin took off from Oakland to look for them, but he disappeared, too. A great sea search—the greatest in history, it was claimed—was mounted, involving thirty-nine warships and nineteen civilian ships, but nothing was found. The navy reported, a bit sourly, that it had burned 383,550 gallons of fuel looking for lost fliers. Altogether, ten people died in the Dole race. The whole thing was widely criticized. Byrd called it “hasty and ill-advised,” and many echoed his sentiments.

  Despite the disaster of the Dole race, people were suddenly announcing daring and risky flights all over the place. Paul Redfern, the son of the dean of Benedict’s College, a school for black students in Columbia, South Carolina, announced a plan to fly 4,600 miles from Brunswick, Georgia, to Rio de Janeiro in a Stinson Detroiter airplane. Redfern was an unlikely hero. He had been crazy about planes all his life—so much so that he often wore an aviator’s goggled helmet even when on the ground and just going about his daily business—but his academic training was as a musician. His experience as a pilot consisted of a couple of years of barnstorming at county fairs and working as a spotter of illegal stills for the government. The same age as Lindbergh, he was small and slight (he weighed just 108 pounds) and had a nervous-looking face, but then he had a lot to be nervous about. He was proposing to fly 4,600 miles—farther than anyone had ever flown before—over ocean and jungle, into a realm far beyond the range of reliable maps and weather reports.

  He packed as if he didn’t really expect to make it. He took with him fishing tackle, rifle and ammunition, quinine, mosquito nets, surgical kit, spare boots, and much else that would only be of use if he crash-landed in the jungle. For his short-term needs he packed twenty sandwiches, two quarts of coffee, a pound of milk chocolate, and two gallons of water. On August 25, he took off.

  Aviation experts quoted by the Associated Press said that it would take him at least sixty hours to reach Rio. Before he had even cleared the Caribbean he was lost, and dropped a message to a Norwegian freighter, the Christian Krohg, asking for directions. The message bounced off the deck and into the sea, but amazingly a Norwegian seaman dived in and retrieved it. The message said: “Point ship to nearest land, wave flag or handkerchief once for each 100 miles. Thanks, Redfern.”

  The ship obliged and Redfern, with a snappy wave, departed. It was the last anyone ever saw of him, though for years afterward missionaries and other visitors to the interior of Dutch Guiana passed on reports of a white man living among the Indians. According to these reports, the Indians treated the man as a divinity because he had dropped in on them from the sky. The white man, it was said, had taken a wife and now lived in contentment with the natives. Several expeditions plunged into the jungle to try to find Redfern. At least two men lost their lives in the quest, but he was never found. In 1938, at the request of Redfern’s wife—that is, his one certain wife, back in America—Redfern was declared officially dead by a court in Detroit.

  Scarcely less improbable, but miraculously more successful, was a flight undertaken by Edward F. Schlee, a Detroit businessman, and William S. Brock, a cheerful, conspicuously portly former airmail pilot. They set out to beat the round-the-world record of twenty-eight days, fourteen hours, and thirty-six minutes made the previous year by two other Detroit men using airplanes, trains, and ships, but this time they intended to do it exclusively by air.

  Schlee, the son of German immigrants, had been an engineer for Henry Ford, but in 1922 he left Ford and opened a gas station. Then he opened another. Within five years he had more than a hundred gas stations. He also owned a small airline called Canadian American Airways, through which he employed Billy Brock. Schlee was thirty-nine years old in the summer of 1927, Brock thirty-one. Brock had already been in the news that summer for dashing by air from Detroit to the Black Hills to deliver a new collie to Grace Coolidge, the president’s wife, after her previous pet ran off.

  Although neither Brock nor Schlee had any experience of distance flying, they set themselves the ambitious goal of circling the world in just fifteen days. Their plane was a Stinson Detroiter powered by a Wright Whirlwind engine. They took off the day after Redfern, and for the next two and a half weeks their exploits gripped the world—largely because they were so constantly and thrillingly operating at the very edge of their competence. They successfully flew the Atlantic—a notable achievement in itself, of course—but had no idea where they were when they got to the other side. Passing over a beach crowded with holidaymakers, they dropped a message asking the name of the locality. A man with a stick obligingly traced SEATON in the sand and pointed to a Union Jack fluttering over the promenade. With their location fixed, they proceeded to a triumphant reception in London. They took off from Croydon just hours before Levine flew in, rather more erratically, from Paris. The daring adventurers made their way in stages across Europe to Constantinople before continuing on to Calcutta, Rangoon, Hanoi, Hong Kong, and Shanghai before they were finally forced down by a typhoon on Kyushu in Japan. They had covered 12,795 miles in nineteen days, but they were still 9,850 miles from home. Bad weather and the daunting breadth of the Pacific made them decide to end their quest while they were still ahead, and they returned by ship to a hero’s welcome. The trip took more out of them than they seem to have realized. At a banquet in Detroit upon his return, Schlee got up to speak, read the first five words of his speech, and collapsed as the events of recent weeks caught up with and overwhelmed him.

  Things did not get better for Schlee after that. In the summer of 1929 he was nearly killed when he was hit by a spinning propeller. The propeller struck his head and amputated his right arm at the shoulder, leaving him much diminished. Just three months after that, he lost everything in the Wall Street crash. In 1931, his plane, Pride of Detroit, was auctioned by order of the sheriff’s department as part of a debt judgment. It was bought by a man named Floyd M. Phinney for just $700. Schlee died in 1969 “in obscure poverty.” Brock, too, did not fare well. He died of cancer in 1932.

  And still people kept flying. In Britain, an unlikely sixty-two-year-old woman, Princess Anne of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, stepped forward as yet another figure to attempt the first east-to-west crossing. The daughter of the Earl of Mexborough, Anne had grown up in London as Lady Anne Savile, but had married, at the rather advanced age of thirty-one, Prince Ludwig Karl zu Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg of Germany. Widowed after just two years, the princess used her considerable inheritance to indulge a passion for aviation. In 1912 she became the first woman to cross the
English Channel by air—albeit as a passenger. Soon after, again as a passenger, she flew from Egypt to France. When, in 1927, a dashing captain named Leslie Hamilton expressed a desire to cross the Atlantic from east to west, she funded the flight on the understanding that she would accompany the fliers. With Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Minchin as copilot, they took off from an airfield near Salisbury in Wiltshire. The princess wore a stylish hat and an ocelot coat, as if they were off for cocktails at the Savoy. They were sighted over Ireland and again from a ship about halfway across the Atlantic, but they never reached America and no trace of them was ever found.

  At about the same time, a plane called Old Glory, owned by William Randolph Hearst, took off from Old Orchard Beach in Maine—the beach where Lindbergh had made his recent unscheduled landing in the Spirit of St. Louis—heading for Rome. Old Glory was piloted by Lloyd Bertaud, the man who had taken out an injunction against Charles Levine in May after Levine failed to provide contracts and insurance as promised. Accompanying Bertaud as copilot was James DeWitt Hill, and along for the ride as a passenger was Philip A. Payne, editor of Hearst’s Daily Mirror. Just three and a half hours after takeoff they issued an urgent, unexplained SOS. They were never seen again. A few hours later, two Canadian airmen, Captain Terrence Tully and Lieutenant James Medcalf, took off from Newfoundland, bound for London in a plane called the Sir John Carling. They were never heard from again either.

  23

  H. L. Mencken called it “the one authentic rectum of civilization,” but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic. In 1927, the iconic sign on the hillside above the city actually said HOLLYWOODLAND. It had been erected in 1923 to advertise a real estate development and had nothing to do with motion pictures. The letters, each over forty feet high, were in those days also traced out with electric lights. (The LAND was removed in 1949.)