by Brian Murphy
The boy turned. He left the Cranes’ porch and got back on his bike for the next delivery. There were always more.
Around the country, similar messengers on similar bikes with similar telegrams were also making their rounds with news of events that had taken place on that first day of winter in 1943.
On Audubon Road in Montgomery, Alabama, the parents of Marine Corporal Thomas Carl Alford were informed he was missing in action on December 21 in a South Pacific battle. In Syracuse, New York, the family of Army Air Forces First Lieutenant Norman English learned he was last seen during fighting in the Italian campaign near Florence. In Long Island City, the telegram said Seaman First Class Joseph McGovern was washed overboard off the New England coast while attempting to hoist the colors on the bridge of the submarine USS S-17.
At 12 Lincoln Street in Houlton, Maine, Mary Hoskin had to sit down after reading the telegram about her missing husband. She was shaking and gasping for breath as she read and reread the words, almost as if she was trying to will the message to change. Mary instinctively ran her hand over her belly. She was five months pregnant and tried to calm herself. I have to think of our baby, she told herself. Stay steady. She tried to walk off her nerves in tight circles around the living room. She started scrubbing the kitchen counters. Cleaning always calmed her. Just then, she thought of how she liked to make dinner for Harold. She put down the cloth and broke down in tears at the kitchen table. She was so lost in her grief that she never remembered her mother making the call to Harold’s parents or being helped into bed to try to sleep away the sad afternoon.
The next correspondence she received was her own letter to Harold, dated December 19. The note inside ended: “All my love to the dearest husband and daddy in the whole world.” Outside on the envelope it was stamped Returned to Writer.
More than thirty years earlier, on a September afternoon in 1913, the steamship Prinz Adalbert pushed north against the Delaware River current. The thousand or so immigrants on board had finally cleared their medical screenings and general vetting downriver at the Marcus Hook reception center, which was having its busiest year processing newcomers bound for Philadelphia. The clearance documents for the American arrivals included all-purpose affidavits from the ship’s officers. They pledged that the émigré in question was not “an idiot, an insane person or a pauper, or likely to become a public charge or is suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease.”
It had been a relatively easy crossing from Hamburg. The late summer can be complicated if a tropical storm kicks up. This time, however, the ship stayed ahead of a low-pressure system spinning up the center of the Atlantic. The Prinz Adalbert headed toward Philadelphia on a magnificent day. A few puffy clouds dotted the sky, but not enough to block the sun for long. There was just a hint of the coming fall, carried in a breeze from the north that kept the temperature in the midsixties. The immigrants crowded the deck under the shadows of the ship’s triple smokestacks. Exactly seventeen months before—from a point on the same deck—the ship’s chief steward snapped a photo of a passing iceberg marked with a scar of red paint. Some believe it was among the last sightings of part of the berg that carved the fatal gash in the side of the Titanic.
When Philadelphia’s busy wharves came into view on September 15, 1913, the excitement onboard the Prinz Adalbert rose. The dominant chatter was Hungarian. But there were groups of Austrians, a few Poles, and pockets of Yiddish-speaking Jews leaving behind the frightening insecurities of czarist Russia. Among them was a twenty-year-old yeshiva trade school student from central Ukraine and his teen bride. The young Karagodskys were getting the first look at the place where they would reinvent themselves as Louis and Sonia Crane.
As they stepped onto the cobblestone docks, the couple entered a city that had become one of the great, and most turbulent, centers of Jewish immigration in little more than a generation.
A seminal moment in the city’s Jewish legacy came on a raw winter day decades earlier, in February 1882. An immigrant-packed ship, not unlike the Prinz Adalbert, dropped anchor off Philadelphia. On board the SS Illinois were more than two hundred Russian Jews, the first major group of eastern Europeans to arrive in Philadelphia, seeking refuge from rising mob violence. The pogroms—a Yiddish word meaning destruction—had expanded sharply the previous year when false rumors spread that Jews had a hand in the St. Petersburg bombings that killed the reformist czar Alexander II. Jews who had the money and connections to flee were doing just that.
Shortly after the arrival of the Illinois, a VIP gathering convened at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music under its fifty-foot crystal chandelier aglow with 240 gas flames. Among the notables discussing the plight of the Russian Jews that night was Pennsylvania’s governor. At one point, a firebrand activist rallied the assembly—and drew applause from Jewish leaders—by insisting it was the city’s duty to offer haven for “people in exile, chased out of their homes, robbed of their possessions and murderously treated.” His words were prophetic. After the Illinois, ship after ship arrived carrying Jews from places such as Kiev, Odessa, and the Karagodsky homeland, Shpola, a crossroads of Jewish culture in Ukraine. By 1904 the Jewish population in Philadelphia had grown more than fourfold to about seventy thousand and would continue to swell for another decade and begin to rival New York as a hub of Jewish scholarship, commerce, and enterprise.
But there were growing pains. The established German-speaking Jews—whose ranks included Thomas Edison’s rival Siegmund Lubin and other luminaries—began to bristle as the demographic scales tipped in favor of the Yiddish masses. One night, disgusted crowds stormed out of a Jewish theater performance when actors performed in Yiddish instead of German. It was once said the German Jews contributed the money; the Russian Jews contributed the tuberculosis. It wasn’t too far off the mark in some respects. Many of the city’s Yiddish-speaking arrivals in Philadelphia congregated in a wrong-side-of-the-tracks jumble of boardinghouses, street hawkers, and sewage-fouled alleys. After downpours, the streets flooded so badly that some people kept rowboats on hand to get around.
At the same time, greater strains were emerging over what it meant to be Jewish in this new land.
Some factions, such as so-called Jewish anarchists (they called themselves the Knights of Liberty and other names), were finding their voice in Philadelphia. Their messages emphasized workers’ rights and had little room for Jewish solidarity. They cast the city’s Jewish leaders in the roles of proxy oppressors. To the angry upstarts, the prominent rabbis and the Jewish gentry were on the side of bankers and factory owners who had no interest in improving the lots of the newer immigrants. Soapbox speakers at the piers would harangue newly arrived immigrants to turn their backs on the Jewish establishment and traditions. Instead, they would urge, throw your support to the fledgling unions and other groups challenging the old order. They emphasized their disdain for tradition at every opportunity. They would hold dances on solemn Yom Kippur and loiter outside synagogues on Saturday, blowing cigarette smoke into the faces of those going to worship. “The atmosphere,” wrote one local Jewish historian, “was poisoned.”
When the future Louis and Sonia Crane passed through the last checkpoint, they were atop the crest of an immigration wave. The year 1913 marked the peak of the eastern European influx into Philadelphia and many other seaboard cities. More than twenty ships arrived in Philadelphia in September of that year, bringing thousands of immigrants who stayed put or began the next leg of their trek overland. Newspaper classified sections were packed with help-wanted offers: cooks, plasterers, dishwashers, maids, waitresses. A basic room in Philadelphia’s teeming Jewish quarter could be found for as low as $1.50 a week, and, for those who needed cash, pawnshops were ready to make a deal. “We buy old gold, silver, false teeth,” one promised. The automobile—virtually unknown in provincial Europe—was already a semiaffordable dream in Philadelphia. A used 1910 Thomas Flyer Runabout with 50 horsepower und
er the hood was going for $650 or best offer.
The immigrant flow wasn’t to last, however. World War I erupted the next summer. It brought passage to America to a near halt. But for those who arrived in the city before the doors slammed shut, new areas were opening fast.
One reason was the humble streetcar.
Electric-powered trolley lines started to snake into leafy West Philadelphia across the Schuykill River. New homes and stores quickly followed. By the time the row-house developers reached the corner of Baltimore Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street in 1925, Louis and Sonia Crane had formally adopted their new names, had taken the oaths as new citizens, had honed their English, and were parents to three boys and a girl. A dozen years after arriving in Philadelphia, it was time to move, Sonia insisted.
She wanted out of South Philadelphia, which was close to Louis’s auction company but also drawing Leon’s older brother Nathan into some unsavory street gangs. Sonia took the lead. She got on the trolley and found their new house on Baltimore Avenue.
Leon Crane pushed his way through the crowd. There was never much excitement on his sleepy end of Baltimore Avenue, miles from downtown. Or at least it all seemed too sedate for an eleven-year-old who liked to imagine he was designing newfangled planes ready to soar off on travels and adventures. But this sidewalk hubbub near young Crane’s house was definitely something different. Newspaper hawkers were selling out fast. People were talking about a place Crane knew well, the local Ambassador movie house, and something he could hardly imagine: the faraway French Riviera.
What’s going on? Leon asked.
Kid, someone chimed in, you don’t read the papers? The tycoon who used to own the Ambassador was killed by his wife in France. The court said it was self-defense. Check her out, kid. The girl is a knockout.
Crane hurried to class. It wasn’t worth being late and risking the wrath of his parents, who expected nothing short of excellence.
He got the rest of the story later. Turned out that Philadelphia theater mogul Frederick G. Nixon-Nirdlinger, whose empire included the Ambassador, was fatally shot by his newlywed wife, a former beauty queen named Charlotte Nash. It all happened in a fancy hotel room in Nice two months earlier in March 1931. Nixon-Nirdlinger was wildly jealous. He hired detectives to follow his young wife—despite the fact that he had conveniently left out some details of his own life before they were married, such as: he already had a wife and a pregnant mistress. A fierce argument erupted after Charlotte was accused of being unfaithful. She pulled out a pistol stashed under a pillow. Two shots hit their mark. Fred was dead. A French jury, however, needed only ten seconds for its decision. They agreed with the defense claims of self-defense. “She is too beautiful to be bad,” her attorney said as he wooed the sympathetic jurors.
But what gripped the schoolboy Crane more than the lurid murder tale from France were the descriptions of the couple flying around Europe in the latest planes. Crane simply couldn’t get enough of aviation. He constantly doodled pictures of mighty Zeppelins and long-distance aircraft such as “Lucky” Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. Leon, or Lee as he was called, didn’t dream so much about being in the pilot’s seat. What fascinated him were the mechanics and engineering of getting the thing off the ground. The Depression was narrowing dreams and expectations everywhere. But aviation seemed immune to the imploding economy. New planes and ideas kept on coming. Record books were being revised before the ink could dry.
Lee Crane thought endlessly about the boundless skies, but his own world was very small in comparison. It revolved around West Philadelphia, the cramped bedroom shared with his two brothers, and a trip now and then to the New Jersey shore. At the same time, the backdrop of Crane’s boyhood world was changing rapidly. The Jewish influence in the neighborhood was giving way, as migrating southern blacks gained footholds in West Philly. Other groups soon joined them, as Philadelphia’s streetcar suburbs became a patchwork of languages and backgrounds. The high school’s athletic field, once a vista of white kids on green grass, became the home of Negro League teams from 1931 to 1935 and featured such dynamos as the rail-thin flamethrower Stuart “Slim” Jones. Years later, at the tail end of the Depression, Jones ended up penniless and died before his twenty-sixth birthday.
Crane’s parents didn’t get too involved in synagogue or community affairs. The internal rifts within Philadelphia’s Jewish world were not their problem. Tradition, however, was paramount. Passing on Jewish life to their family was taken far more seriously than getting involved in the passing political storms. The Crane children had private Hebrew and religious lessons. Bar mitzvahs were more than just coming-of-age parties with cash and frivolous loot from relatives. The gifts from Louis to his boys were prayer shawls known as tallit and small boxes called tefillin containing Torah verses and worn with leather straps during weekday morning prayers.
Meanwhile, Louis and Sonia were busy staying ahead of the Depression.
Sonia brought in money as an accomplished seamstress. She turned her back on the fledgling unions and negotiated her own pay, demanding—and getting—the same as her male coworkers. She didn’t bend easily. Sonia had learned from an early age how to take care of herself and protect her family, which lived on the poorer side of the Jewish district in Shpola. When the local Cossacks got drunk, they often raided the Jewish neighborhoods. Anyone unfortunate enough to be in their path—especially a young girl—might suffer unspeakable abuses. When it was time to hide, Sonia and her two sisters stashed themselves in a hidden room under a closet floor. The Cranes eventually had enough money to bring over relatives, including Sonia’s sisters.
That’s because Louis, highly educated and even more highly motivated, had found his footing in Philadelphia in the auction business, sometimes traveling as far as North Carolina to buy up failing businesses. The family had it better than many. There was even enough money for music lessons for the kids. Leon picked the clarinet. Old brother Morris gravitated to the violin. Louis bought a car, a noisy contraption with faulty headlights. He rigged up a flashlight on the steering wheel to help guide his way.
By the time Leon was in West Philadelphia High School, his interest in aeronautics was sealed. “There were a lot of aeronautical firsts,” he would say later in life. He wanted to be part of it. He graduated in February 1937 with fanfare that included high honors, kudos for his stint as yearbook editor, and a laudatory send-off toward greater things. “Best in everything he undertakes,” the yearbook inscription reads. “Leon has justly earned the position of best student.” Still, there were Jewish quotas in place for admission at some of the most prestigious colleges. Older brothers Morris and Nathan managed to get into medical schools—with a little help, in Nathan’s case, of five thousand dollars slipped to the right person.
Leon was short a few math credits, however, and made them up during a spring semester at the University of Pennsylvania. The term ended just as Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan set off on their ill-fated round-the-world flight. Sonia wanted Leon to follow his brothers into medicine. But Leon had other plans. He was bound for MIT and the labs that were pushing the bounds of aeronautical engineering.
In Cambridge Crane quickly found his niche. He joined the “Jewish” fraternity Phi Beta Delta and immersed himself in campus life and its brainy pedigree. A freshman-year frat photo shows Crane, looking dapper in a dark suit and striped tie, standing near future Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. They became poker buddies. And it’s very likely they chewed over their shared paths as whip-smart kids from down the coast (Feynman’s home base was Far Rockaway, New York) who were now somewhat awed as small fish—the smallest, in fact, as freshmen—swimming the intellectual currents of MIT. Crane and Feynman fell into what Feynman would later call the “studious” group of the fraternity. The others were the “wild social guys.” Each had a role. The bookworms would help with the schoolwork as in-house tutors. The partygoers would, well, get parties goi
ng. And that required some preparation where needed. Feynman recalled that some of the more outgoing frat brothers taught him to dance. Once that was done, they moved on to setting him up with a blind date. It was a girl named Pearl. “So I was from New York, so I said, ‘Oh, Poil, Poil.’ They said, ‘No, you must say Pearl, because she’ll be horrified if you say Poil,’ and so on,” Feynman recounted in a 1966 oral history. He managed just one properly enunciated “Pearl” at the beginning of the date before slipping back into his New Yorkese.
Crane also had a front-row seat to some of Feynman’s pranks, such as the time Feynman stole the door to a frat-house room that was a favorite study site. Crane, meanwhile, also gravitated toward some of the more innovative minds on the faculty. One of his advisers was Manfred Rauscher, who had visions of moving the daily commute from the roads to the air. He codeveloped an everyman plane, playfully named after the flightless Dodo, with folding wings for easy garage parking.
Inevitably, Crane figured that if he wanted to design airplanes, he should learn to fly them as well. He earned his private pilot’s license through a university training program and entered the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. That led to a stint in the summer of 1940 at a military installation in Virginia, learning how to handle guns and artillery. Although America was still officially neutral, telegrams calling up reservists kept flowing out of Washington. Crane’s came in late 1941, just months after he graduated from MIT. He was told to report to Wright Field in Ohio, near the site where B-24 designer I. M. Laddon began tinkering with plane designs in the 1920s. At Wright Crane was happy to see a dozen old faces from MIT, including the extra good news that one of the crew had brought his 1936 Olds so they could tool around off base.