by Pete Fusco
Thus began in 1919 an untethered magic time in aviation when pilots and wing walkers pushed their aircraft in a way that might have caused Wilbur and Orville Wright to reconsider what they had wrought. A willing audience, many of whom had only seen airplanes in wartime newsreels, awaited cash in hand for the next traveling air circus or the next silent film.
Hollywood quickly recognized that audiences were wild for flying scenes—the riskier the better. That it wasn’t faked made it all the more appealing. Stunt flying and wing walking, like pretty girls, handsome men, and bar fights, were winners in any film production. If flying didn’t fit in a film, the scripts could be rewritten during lunch to accommodate the many eager aerial stuntmen and women—and too many Curtiss Jennies to count.
A good many of the pilots that would carry aviation through the 1920s had flown in World War One. They came home to the United States convinced of their invincibility. After all, they had survived a conflict that killed seventeen million and maimed twenty million more. The war had not been their idea but it had provided them training, and after it ended, airplanes. The government had not yet intruded on the fun and pilots of the barnstorming era were limited only by their inventiveness and regulated only by their fear. By the end of 1919, the barnstormers and silent movie daredevils had done just about everything possible in an airplane—or so they thought.
8
ANOTHER SQUADRON
ORMER “Lock” Locklear had two mottos. One was spoken: “Safety Second!” Another was implied: “Follow This!”
In 1919, Locklear was the first wing walker to transfer from one aircraft to another by standing on the top wing of a Curtiss Jenny and grabbing a rope ladder attached to the landing gear of a second Jenny above. Fellow stuntman Frank Clarke was the first to step from top wing to the bottom wing of another aircraft, but Locklear upped the stakes by stepping from top wing to top wing. Locklear was known to transfer from aircraft to aircraft to relieve tension and, hard to believe, he did it at night! In Locklear’s signature “Dance of Death,” he and another pilot swapped aircraft in flight. Few challenged Locklear for his title “King of the Wing Walkers.”
Locklear was not only a member but the poster child of the “Squadron of Death,” a group of stunt pilots, wing walkers, and parachutists that wore their dim future like a badge. Membership was open to all, but was understandably small. Of the twenty-three Squadron members, eighteen were killed flying stunts or wing walking for the movies by the end of the 1920s.
Ormer Locklear’s legend began on a training flight while learning to fly in the U.S. Army Air Service. The radiator cap came off of a Jenny in flight; scalding water showered back on both instructor and student. Locklear solved the problem by climbing out of his cockpit, making his way to the engine and stuffing a rag in the radiator.
Locklear left the Air Service in 1919 after watching others wing walk and fly stunts at air circuses. Locklear believed he could wing walk and fly better than any of them. He formed the successful Locklear Flying Circus and barnstormed the country, earning as much as $3,000 for a single performance. Locklear, who enjoyed a privileged upbringing and fine education, was not in the business for the money. Then as now, risking all in the air fulfilled a greater craving that will never be fully understood by those who desire only to watch.
The silent movie industry, which had mostly faked aircraft stunts before the war, recruited barnstorming pilots to film the real thing. And who better than the dashing, handsome, and well-known Ormer Locklear? Universal Pictures bought all of Locklear’s airshow bookings for July 1919, and signed him to a contract to make two movies. Locklear flew, did the wing walking, and starred in The Great Air Robbery. He was the first all-inclusive Hollywood stuntman, as comfortable making love to the heroine as he was hanging by his knees from the landing gear. In The Great Air Robbery, Locklear transferred from the landing gear to an open car, beat up the villain, grabbed the stolen money, and climbed back on the landing gear seconds before the car crashed. The New York Times review of the movie was noteworthy, but mostly for its skepticism:
Lieutenant Locklear swings from one airplane to another and crawls out on the tail of a flying machine several thousand feet, presumably, above the earth. The melodrama’s use of airplanes for midnight mail deliveries, highway, or rather highair, robberies, and battles between the forces of law and lawlessness adds excitement.
Considering the number of men and women that gave their lives to provide the “excitement” mentioned, the reviewer’s use of “presumably,” indicating he or she was not entirely convinced that the scenes were filmed in the air, was a grave injustice, but forgivable. Not everyone believed that people would take such risks for a movie, or for any other reason.
Universal did not make the second film with Locklear. In 1920, he signed with Fox Film Corporation to co-star with Louise Lovely in The Skywayman. In keeping with his reputation for thrilling moviegoers, Locklear transferred from a plane to a train and in another scene hung on a landing gear while shooting at the escaping villains. He also flew through a church steeple. Though he starred in only two movies, Locklear appeared in others, all the while raising the danger bar for aerial stunts. More than a few stuntmen were killed attempting to duplicate his work.
Theater ad for The Great Air Robbery starring Ormer Locklear, who played the hero and did the stunts.
A model airplane had been planned for the crash scene at the end of The Skywayman. Locklear would not hear of it. Perhaps his pride was on the line or he may have wanted the extra money. Locklear persisted until the director relented.
The scene called for a tailspin—some accounts refer to a “spiraling dive”—at night with two pilots in the aircraft. Locklear recruited Milton “Skeets” Elliott, a friend from Air Service days. When a script called for Locklear to wing walk, Elliott’s steadiness at the controls made him the pilot of choice. Newspaper readers of the era knew the team as “Lock and Skeets.”
The plan was for Locklear and Elliott to recover from the maneuver at the last possible moment and land. Stock footage would be substituted for the crash. Originally, the scene was to be shot in daylight; filters on the camera lenses would simulate darkness. But the day ran long and darkness arrived. Lock and Skeets agreed to fly the scene. Bright arc lights were employed to allow filming.
Ormer Locklear hangs on to the side of Curtiss Jenny during a movie stunt.
On the night of August 2, 1920, Locklear and Elliott took off about 10 p.m. and circled until the arc lights were in place. Locklear had feared the intense brightness would blind him during the spin. He arranged with the ground crew to turn off the lights when the Jenny was at a safe altitude to recover from the spin. Locklear and Elliott put their lives in the hands of the lighting crew’s judgment. Phosphorous flares attached under the wings, to make it appear the aircraft was on fire, would help the two pilots find the ground.
For reasons that will never be known, the arc lights were left on, possibly due to miscommunication. The aircraft spun from 4,000 feet but never recovered. It crashed into a pool of oil. Locklear and Elliott died instantly before a large crowd that had assembled to watch the filming. Locklear was twenty-eight years old. Elliot was thirty. It’s not known which of the two pilots was flying the aircraft when it crashed.
The Fox Film Corporation used the actual footage of the fatal accident in The Skywayman, but earmarked 10 percent of the movie’s profits for Locklear’s and Elliott’s survivors. No one can speak for the dead, but one suspects that Locklear, at least, would have wanted the scene included in the film. Sadly, The Skywayman is now a “lost film.”
According to a contemporary schedule of standard rates for aerial stunts, a “plane spins down on fire, does not crash” would have paid $50 each to Locklear and Elliott. The same schedule paid $1,200 if the pilot was willing to crash the aircraft.
“I don’t do these things because I want to run the risk of being killed,” Locklear once said. “I do it to demonstrate what can be done
. Somebody has got to show the way someday we will all be flying and the more things that are attempted and accomplished, the quicker we will get there.”
It’s debatable whether Locklear and Elliott contributed to the advancement of aviation with their deaths, except to make the public more aware that flying, with all its inherent dangers, was part of post-war America and was likely to remain. Pilots of the day ran with the hot torch of a new science, trying not to burn their hands while not really knowing where they were headed. They tried everything, accepting the rewards as well as the risks. In the end, neither Locklear nor Elliott would have expected sympathy. They might have even resented it.
Fellow stuntman Dick Grace, unofficial captain of the Squadron of Death and one of its few survivors, witnessed the accident on the movie set. He wrote about it in his 1929 book, titled, as one might expect, Squadron of Death:
… I heard the ungodly crash that only those who have witnessed a tailspin into the ground can understand. The sky was covered with a red illumination. For miles around one could see. The ship had fallen into the pool of an oil well. It was all on fire. Locklear and his pilot Skeets had joined another squadron.
In the same book, Grace wrote of the harsh reality that marked the lives of aerial stuntmen and, in his view, even their afterlives:
The great difference between the lives of people in the outside world and this hell of ours is that when we make a mistake in a stunt our mistakes are irreparable. There are no erasers in our pencils. A mistake to us is a blot of blood. The dye is so permanent that the stain is everlasting. God is our only eraser—and He just rubs us off as part of His daily business.
Grace’s words were a fitting, if hardly inspirational, belated requiem for his friends and fellow Squadron of Death members Locklear and Elliott, both of whom had taken more chances and been granted more passes than humans are normally allotted. If Grace’s assessment of the hereafter is accurate, one wants to believe that even as God erased Locklear and Elliott from the roster of the living, He may have smiled in admiration for the two young pilots who sought only to live the gift of life to the fullest, no matter the outcome, rather than die serenely as old men in warm beds.
Any discussion of the Squadron of Death must include mention of the Thirteen Black Cats, another self-branded troop of 1920s Hollywood aerial daredevils that boldly toyed with the Fates. They wore black sweaters sporting the number “13” and a black cat in a white circle on the front and their name on the back, providing both a handy bull’s-eye for Morta as well as a convenient way for her to keep track. As was the case with the Squadron of Death, many of the Black Cats were dead by the time Hollywood no longer required their services.
Famous wing walker Gladys Ingle, as unflinching as any man who ever walked on wings, was the only woman member of the Black Cats and was among the survivors. She lived to the age of eighty-two.
9
RETAKE
AS aerial stunt scenes grew in popularity among the moviegoers of the 1920s, directors asked for more varied and hazardous stunts from their pilots and wing walkers. Doing the same routines over and over was not good enough. Curiously, the same few clichéd horse stunts have been used for decades in thousands of western films. The cynical but inescapable conclusion is that film studios, in the silent era at least, worried more about their horses than their pilots and wing walkers.
And, as if performing a dangerous stunt at a thousand feet once wasn’t risky enough, directors regularly asked for second and even third takes.
None of that was enough to keep Earl Burgess away from Hollywood. After serving as a flight instructor during World War One, Burgess barnstormed briefly before heading west, where his skills and daring were in great demand by film studios, and the money was good.
Burgess found work on a silent comedy titled Sky Eye in February of 1920. He had executed two stunts for the film, an aircraft to aircraft transfer and a jump from an aircraft to a speeding train. The director then asked for a stunt that demanded more physical endurance than most. In the scene, a pilot named Walter Hawkins flew the aircraft while Burgess, who carried more extra weight than most wing walkers, climbed out of the Jenny cockpit and made his way to the landing gear, where the stuffed dummy of a villain awaited. After Burgess arrived at the landing gear, he thrashed the dummy and threw it to the ground.
For unknown reasons, the director asked for a retake after the aircraft landed. He offered Burgess a day to rest but the stuntman did not want to wait. On the retake Burgess again threw the villain to the wind after a sound pasting. To lengthen the scene and add to the action, Burgess had been directed to shinny along the leading edge of the wing, hand over hand, to the skid under the Jenny wing tip. He would use the skid to help push himself back onto the wing and return to the cockpit.
Burgess reached the wing skid but lacked the strength to climb back on the wing. The pilot of the camera plane realized Burgess was in trouble and flew toward him. He planned to put his top wing under Burgess, who could then drop onto it. But Burgess lost his grip and fell to his death moments before the camera plane could get into position. Burgess, like many of the silent movie stuntmen and women, was not wearing a parachute. Ironically, some sources give him credit as the first person to jump out of an airplane wearing a parachute. Burgess was among the first members of the Squadron of Death to die. He was twenty-six years old.
Cameraman on top wing of Curtiss Jenny filming a silent movie.
Who was to blame? The director for requesting another take of a dangerous stunt? Burgess himself, who turned down the chance to rest and perform the stunt the next day? The question is as unfair as it is unanswerable, unless viewed against the backdrop of 1920s aviation, in particular 1920s Hollywood aviation.
Burgess had explained the planned stunt to fellow Squadron of Death member Dick Grace. Years later, Grace included the conversation in his 1929 book, Squadron of Death, an account of the tenuous existence of silent movie stuntmen. Grace’s feelings about the stunt were foretelling: “… I looked over his (Burgess) heavy-set body and mentally noted the fact that he weighed about fifty pounds too much for quick, nimble walking on wings.”
Grace later gained a unique appreciation of Burgess’s horrifying predicament from a similar experience. While doubling for Tom Mix in a cowboy film that featured airplanes, a stunt called for Grace to scale down a twenty-foot knotted rope tied inside the cockpit. After pretending to shoot at outlaws, Grace climbed back to the cockpit. The scene would be shot twice, first from the ground as the aircraft passed by and then in the air from another aircraft.
During the airborne filming, Grace scaled down the rope a second time. When he tried to climb back to the cockpit, a holster he wore caught in a loose flap of fabric on the side of the fuselage. He was stuck mere inches from the safety of the cockpit but could advance no further. Grace wrote that his arms felt lifeless except for the pain of constricting muscles. He recalled the death of Earl Burgess. Grace’s thoughts are not entirely unexpected, but nonetheless startling. From Squadron of Death:
… Then I looked down. The distant earth was inviting—restful. To one suffering as I was the fall with death at the end held no such terror as I had dreamed. Thus had Burgess died, and I believed that it was with no regret or fear. He must have felt as I did at that moment: longing to be relieved at any cost from the anguish of utter exhaustion.
Grace risked letting go with one hand and got rid of the holster, which fell away. The pilot helped by flying the airplane with his knees while hanging over the side and hauling the desperate rope-climbing cowboy into the aircraft.
Most pilots assume dying in an airplane would be quick, if not necessarily clean. But hanging from an airworthy aircraft without hope in excruciating pain beyond the reach of help as arm and hand muscles fade and fail must be an especially terrible kind of end. Yet the prospect was not enough to stop Burgess and many others from attempting such dangerous stunts for the camera. Nothing filmed since comes close to the body of work
the silent movie stuntmen and stuntwomen left behind. Had it not been captured on film, future generations might justifiably question that it ever happened.
How Earl Burgess and the rest of the Squadron of Death, the Thirteen Black Cats, and other forgotten contributors to that era of film must yawn and scoff from their graves at the computer-generated drivel Hollywood passes off as action today.
10
MAKING DO
ON the Fourth of July, 1920, U.S. Army Air Service pilot Lt. Patrick H. Logan participated in an airshow that was the highlight of a weeklong inauguration of a new airport in the Baltimore area called Dundalk Flying Field. As Logan took off in his crimson Nieuport 28, the Red Devil, he could not have imagined that the airport would be renamed in his honor a week later.
Logan had flown to Dundalk the day before from his base at Bolling Field in Washington. His first act at the airshow was a mock dogfight with another Air Service aircraft. He landed and took off again a short while later to fly his solo routine, the featured act of the afternoon. After Logan had been in the air about fifteen minutes, his motor stopped and he entered what a reporter from the Baltimore Sun described as a “spectacular spiral.” Logan never recovered from the spiral and the Red Devil crashed before two thousand spectators. Logan survived but died of injuries later that day on the operating room table. He was twenty-seven years old.