The other two members of the team were Charles Willard, “Daredevil” to his friends, a twenty-seven-year-old Harvard graduate who seemed to eat nothing but chocolate, and a twenty-four-year-old Canadian, John McCurdy, who had first flown in 1907, a year after graduating from Toronto University with an engineering degree.
As Curtiss and his men started to assemble their new airplane, Wilbur Wright was inviting members of the press into his hangar to view his latest invention. “The cup will remain in America,” said Wright, patting the machine’s yellow-pine propeller. Reporters gathered round the aircraft asking questions as they examined it. It was built of ash and spruce, with the wings covered with bleached cotton. Some of the taller correspondents could reach up on tiptoe and almost touch the top of the six-foot-ten-inch biplane. The New York Herald reporter scribbled furiously as Wright gave the visitors a tour of the machine that he and his brother had christened the Baby Grand. “The exact dimensions of the new Wright racer can now be given,” he wrote. “The planes [wings] are 26 feet long and 3 feet 4 inches wide. They are set 3 feet apart, and the radiator and gasoline tank are placed directly behind the driver. There is only one seat on the racing machine.”
Compare this new compact plane with the traditional Wright biplane, Wilbur said, the wingspan of which was thirty-nine feet. He invited reporters to have a look at the rudder—“hardly larger than a handkerchief”—and he also drew attention to the four-wheeled undercarriage and the antiskidding blinkers on the forward skids, which would increase the machine’s keel. “The engines used are the same that have been used by the Wrights for years,” added the impressed correspondent from the New York Herald, “but they are far more powerful than any so far set up in the Wright factory.” Instead of four cylinders, the Baby Grand had twice that number. Yes, admitted Wright when asked, the sixty-horse power engine was still inferior to the hundred-horse power engines of the Blériot, but that wouldn’t matter come the day of the big race. He paused for dramatic effect . . . before revealing that in a series of trial flights in the Baby Grand, his brother, Orville, had reached a top speed of 72mph. There was an intake of breath from the correspondents. If that was true, then Wilbur was right, the cup would remain in America.
Later in the morning, when the rain had eased, members of the Glenn Curtiss team folded back the doors of hangar No. 5 and bade reporters inside to view their latest innovation. An awkward silence ensued as the newsmen made mental comparisons between what was now before them and what they had just seen in the Wright hangar. The New York Herald correspondent turned a page in his notebook and wrote, “The Curtiss racer, on the other hand, looks like a handkerchief just out of the shop.”
The man from the New York Sun made the mistake of asking Curtiss to describe some of the features of his monoplane; he soon stood corrected. “He calls [it] a ‘single surface’ airplane,” explained the Sun’s reporter, “which at first glance looks like a monoplane. In fact the secondary plane is merely a small auxiliary only 8 feet long and 2 feet wide.”
Other outstanding details noted by the newsmen were the aircraft’s fifty-horse power engine, its tricycle undercarriage, its wingspan of twenty-six feet, and its size, just twenty-five feet from tip to tail. Unusually for a new monoplane, it was a pusher, the name given to those airplanes in which the engine was situated to the pilot’s rear. Most manufacturers had stopped producing pushers after several men had been crushed to death by the engine in crashes they would otherwise have survived. Curtiss shrugged when pulled up on the point and admitted that the plane “has never been flown and is wholly an experiment.” The Sun reporter told Curtiss that a few hangars along, Wilbur Wright was fizzing with confidence about his prospects in the International Aviation Cup, so how did he rate his own chances? Curtiss didn’t want to speculate, and if anything, he sounded rather diffident about his new invention. “Whether it will fly well—or fly at all—remains to be found out at the present meet,” he said.
The first “special” train, laid on solely for the benefit of the meet, arrived at the Belmont Park station at noon and the race-goers were ready with their umbrellas as they stepped onto the platform. Having seen a large white flag atop the 395-foot-high Times Tower on Forty-second Street a while earlier as they made their way to Pennsylvania Station, they were confident of seeing some flying, despite the rain. The owner of the tower, the New York Times, had agreed to a request from the meet organizers to communicate to New Yorkers the course conditions by way of one of three flags: blue—no flight; white—flight probable; red—flight in progress. Thousands of spectators drove from Manhattan, and the prime parking spaces were soon full of mud-spattered automobiles. Local residents were quick to spot the shortage of parking places, and soon signs appeared outside their homes offering the use of their front yards as parking spaces in return for $1.
The entrance to the course was flanked by two lines of gray-uniformed security guards, members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which had been hired to control a tournament that was on private land and thus outside the jurisdiction of the Nassau County police. The guards had an unsmiling swagger, an enjoyment of the power that came with the well-cut uniform, and anyone who was slow in handing over the $1 entrance fee to the turnstile operator was harshly rebuked.
Once inside Belmont Park the whole atmosphere changed, and instead of menacing stares from Pinkerton’s men, the spectators were accosted by myriad “vendors who hawked programmes [sic], sandwiches, aviation postal cards, peanuts and candy . . . and the highest prices possible were asked of the spectators.”
Children pestered their parents for a toy airplane or a souvenir pennant from one of the many kiosks, while their fathers attempted to win choice cigars by knocking down puppets with three balls. Mothers browsed the knickknack stalls for house hold decorations made from smoked glass before the entire family eventually hired a set of camp stools—thirty cents each—and made their way to the field enclosure on the opposite side of the course to the grandstand.
Signs guided the bewildered with arrows pointing to the “popular-priced” restaurants and those, such as the Turf and Field Club, which were affordable only to the affluent. A reporter from the New York Sun stopped outside one of the more affordable restaurants and examined the menu. “Popular prices, eh?” grumbled the man next to him. “Popular with the man who owns the eatables, I guess.” The cheapest food joint was the kiosk under the grandstand where beef stew cost fifty cents, a plate of ham and eggs sixty cents, a roast fresh ham sandwich seventy-five cents, and an apple pie twenty-five cents.
The society correspondents of the newspapers, those same ones who had harassed Claude Grahame-White earlier in the week, had returned in force and were now either besieging the entrance to the members’ clubhouse or commandeering a table in the Turf and Field Club, fork in one hand, pencil in the other, noting which members of the fashionable set were present. There was Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt (recently returned from Europe, where she’d spent $18,000 on the latest Paris fashions) looking resplendent in an “apricot-colored polo coat and bell-shaped blue hat.” Was that a white muff she was carrying? wondered the correspondent from the Sun. No, it was her little white dog. Armstrong Drexel’s willowy sister-in-law, Marjorie, “excited much admiration in a gown of black velvet and a large black picture hat.” Mrs. Sidney Dillon Ripley, who wore a loose-fitting coat and black hat “with two quills jauntily fastened on the left side,” was lunching with Mrs. Tyler Morse, who had come “well prepared for the weather in a white fur coat worn over a checked polo coat.” The Sun’s society correspondent rated Mrs. James Brown’s outfit “one of the most startling costumes” he’d seen in a long time. A flame-colored coat fastened at the bottom with small black buttons was topped off with a black velvet hat adorned with feathers.
The New York Sun’s correspondent next turned his attention to the wisteria gown worn by the wife of General Stewart Woodford. She and her husband were hosting a lunch party in the Turf and Field Club, and so engrossing
was the conversation that no one noticed it was nearly one thirty P.M., the hour when the tournament officially began. Over the polite murmur of luncheon chat there came the noise of an airplane engine. On hearing the sound, reported the Sun, General Woodford “became so excited . . . that he ran out of the dining room and carried his napkin along.”
As General Woodford hurtled out of the restaurant, a pall of yellow smoke drifted across the course from the aerial bomb that had just been exploded to signal the meet was under way. The wreckage of Tod Shriver’s machine had been cleared by workmen, his blood washed away by rain, and only a few early-bird spectators were aware he had ever flown.
The engine that had so galvanized the general was Claude Grahame-White’s, and as he continued to warm it up, Peter Prunty used his megaphone to inform the six-thousand-strong audience of the day’s schedule. From one thirty P.M. to two thirty P.M. was the Hourly Distance event; after a break of fifteen minutes, the second Hourly Distance event and the Hourly Altitude event would commence. At four P.M. the twenty-mile cross-country flight would begin, at the same time as the Grand Altitude competition. Prunty reminded spectators that the cross-country race, to a captive balloon ten miles east over Hempstead Plains and back, was dependent on the weather not deteriorating, as otherwise it would be deemed too hazardous.
Now Grahame-White was taxiing across the grass, and Prunty fell silent and watched with the rest of the crowd. In the grandstand Pauline Chase sat with her hands clasped tightly together as her fiancée with “an ever-increasing humming roar crossed the starting line.” He rose into the air as the band at the front of the grandstand struck up “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own,” and the crowd tapped their feet in time to the music. A couple of minutes later Armstrong Drexel was airborne, perched on the hollow body of his Blériot monoplane, which, to the Washington Post, sounded like a “mosquito,” but to the New York Herald correspondent was more like a “bumblebee.”
John Moisant, flying an identical machine to Drexel’s, was next to leave the ground, and he climbed swiftly to two hundred feet, higher than both Drexel and Grahame-White, who chugged slowly round the 2.5 km course, rarely rising higher than the eaves of the grandstand. All three fliers were competing in the Hourly Distance event, the aim of which was to complete as many laps as possible within sixty minutes, but it was also the opportunity to qualify for Thursday’s Statue of Liberty race, a late and controversial addition to the meet’s schedule.
A fortnight earlier a New York businessman, Thomas Ryan, had offered a prize of $10,000 for the first man to fly from Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty and back. What an idea! cried the Aero Club of America. Instead of New York City coming to Belmont Park, Belmont Park will go to New York City. What better way to spread the aviation message? Neither Ryan nor the organizers expected the fliers to take the safe route, across country to the sea and then along the coastline; that was approximately sixty-six miles, whereas the direct route was only thirty-three miles. That was, however, as the New York Times pointed out, “over the populous sections of South Brooklyn.” The New York City Herald thought it a wonderful prospect, a “thrilling event,” but added with a harrumph that Wilbur Wright was “strongly opposed to flying over cities . . . He says that while it is an aviator’s own business whether he decides or not to risk his own neck, he has no right to endanger the lives of others.”
Taking into account the concern of Wright and some other aviators, the Belmont Park organizers had imposed a stringent entry criterion for any aviator wishing to compete for Thursday’s Statue of Liberty race: “The prize will be open to all competitors who shall have remained in the air in one continuous flight one hour or more during previous contests in the meet.”
Thus Grahame-White, Drexel, and Moisant were competing in the Hourly Distance event not just in the hope of winning the $500 on offer, but also to qualify for the Statue of Liberty race. To Drexel, $10,000 (approximately $160,000 today) was small fry, he flew just for the sport; but the sum was large enough to tempt Grahame-White to drop his objection to flying over cities, which he had manifested at Boston. For Moisant, $10,000 would go a long way in bankrolling his next revolution.
For an hour Grahame-White flew placidly but persistently round the circuit. The crowd clapped respectfully, and the man from the Washington Post praised his “workmanlike precision,” but it was hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff. “Here he comes again,” shouted someone in the grandstand, as Grahame-White angled into the home straight past dead man’s turn, “it’s Merry-go-round White.”
Drexel dropped out having completed ten laps in nineteen minutes, and soon Moisant tired of the plodding pro cession and started to lay on a show for the masses, “rising and falling, turning and dipping, as easily and gracefully as a swallow.” Suddenly he swooped down from three hundred feet and shot across the grass as if he were trying to cut it, bringing several hundred spectators to their feet in excitement. And all the while Grahame-White continued on his remorseless way, ignoring the American gadfly, and “turning the corners as closely as a trained race horse.”
Moisant was down after fifty-one minutes with only eighteen laps to his name after all his showboating. He had a small problem with the engine, he explained, but would be back to try again in the second Hourly Distance events. Grahame-White remained aloft the full hour and descended only when he saw his manager, Sydney McDonald, flagging that the time was up. Grahame-White came down smiling; not only had he flown twenty circuits, he’d also qualified for the Statue of Liberty event.
Moisant took off again at two forty-five P.M. in a foul mood, having been docked four laps by the officials on his first flight, “on account of cutting slightly inside a pylon.” What a surprise, muttered some of his rivals, Moisant penalized for cutting corners. His second attempt to qualify for the Statue of Liberty race again ended in failure, this time after forty minutes because of a mechnical problem. His disappointment, however, was small compared to that felt by the Curtiss team when Eugene Ely took the new single-surface machine out of the hangar. Within a few minutes Ely was down with engine trouble, and only one of the Wright fliers, Arch Hoxsey, in an old biplane, could give the crowd their money’s worth. The New York Herald described how he went up “growing smaller and smaller, until he finally disappeared in the fog. He was completely lost to view in the clouds for about a minute. He descended as he had ascended, in great spirals, landing as gently on the turf as a leaf dropping from a tree.” Belmont Park exploded in a cacophony of hollering and hurrahs as Hoxsey, in a black leather coat with fur-lined combination leggings and boots that reached to the hips, jumped down and received the congratulations of Ralph Johnstone.
The fog that had shrouded Hoxsey from view sank lower throughout the afternoon, forcing the organizers to cancel the Grand Altitude Contest. They were about to do the same to the cross-country competition when John Moisant whispered something in Peter Prunty’s ear. The next minute the crowd were on their feet applauding as Prunty announced that Moisant wouldn’t be deterred by a spot of fog: he intended to try for the cross-country prize.
It took him thirty-nine minutes and forty-one seconds to fly the twenty miles to the captive balloon and back. When he landed, he was so cold he had to be lifted from his seat. Later Moisant confessed to reporters that the fog hadn’t troubled him, but he’d been “so blinded by rain that he couldn’t make out the balloon afloat in the Hempstead Plains.”
Moisant basked in the crowd’s acclaim as around him the other aviators packed up for the day unnoticed. The first day of the Belmont Park Meet had ended with no doubt as to who had been its star. Playing to the press with all the adroitness of Grahame-White, Moisant donated his airplane’s propeller to the New York Herald, the most influential newspaper in America as far as aviation was concerned. The paper blushed at such largesse and thanked Moisant, the man whose daring skill “has won for him a host of friends.”
* Dr. John Moorhead, with a corps of assistants from Bellevue Hospital, wa
s in charge of a “fast automobile ambulance,” but this was not yet in place at the time of Shriver’s accident.
CHAPTER NINE
Tears Started to Our Eyes
Sunday, October 23, 1910
Neither Augustus Post nor Alan Hawley felt much like talking when they woke early on Sunday morning. It was still raining and the pair felt weak and in no condition to endure another day’s trek through the tyrannical wilderness. They breakfasted on an egg and a couple of crackers as the rain beat on the canvas roof of their bivouac in a despondent symphony. Post wrote in his log, “Each of us realized without mentioning it to the other, that our lives might be drawing to a close.” After they had eaten, Hawley took an envelope from the inside pocket of his shabby overcoat and told Post that it had been given to him by a friend shortly before he’d left New York; it was to be opened only if Hawley found himself in trouble. It felt an appropriate moment. He opened the envelope and removed the card. It’s a prayer, Hawley told Post, and he began to read:
A PRAYER FOR MR. HAWLEY
Dear God, the best friend of all: Watch over and keep him from danger in his perilous trip and may his heart go up to Thee in tender gratefulness for all thy goodness. Grant him his ambition to win and bring him safely back.
Hawley slipped the envelope back inside his jacket as “tears started to our eyes.” A short while later they noticed the rain easing, and within the hour it had stopped. “Our ambitions,” Post wrote, “which had been at rather a low ebb, flowed strong again, and urged us on.” They were soon striding purposefully along the damp beach with Hawley telling Post his knee felt much improved after a day’s rest. They clambered up and over the boulders without impediment and saw that ahead the shoreline appeared free of obstacles, except for a series of streams that emptied into the lake. Post peered through his field glasses and told Hawley that none of them should pose a problem, even for an old cripple like him. They started to laugh as they struck out east, and by lunchtime the two men had forded the streams.
Chasing Icarus Page 15