“In some antarctic [sic] valley, perhaps, shut in by towering mountains, a thrilling discovery awaits us. We may find forms of life completely new to us. Who knows what link with prehistoric times might be there?”
By the time of the first major New York Times story on Byrd’s expedition that March, forty thousand people had applied to go to Antarctica without knowing what position they might be assigned, or even if the expedition would accept applications. Even Byrd was surprised by how many were ready to work for free in a decade when fast-growing companies with increasing demand for labor paid respectable wages of $20 a week, good enough for a room in a boarding house. (A real striver could earn triple that.) Within a day of Russell Owen’s article, applications began pouring in by the sackful. There was still no rundown of which spots were available—some, surely, would be filled by people Byrd already knew—or which skills were necessary to apply. Byrd’s people severely underestimated the number of applications that would end up on their desks to sort through; between twenty thousand and forty thousand wishful letters—some papers claimed the number was closer to sixty thousand—arrived at the makeshift office in the Hotel McAlpin.
Byrd picked his staff in great secrecy. Members of the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt clans were among the thousands who competed for spots and were rejected even as mess boys. Following the commander’s wishes, staffers avoided taking on too many rich grandstanders. There were some, sure—he had favors to return—but Byrd also handpicked a microcosm of America from its population of 110 million: plenty of Swedes, Scots, Irish, Italians, and even a Jew. But not, Billy noted, a single Pole. Maybe that would be his in, if he applied. There was no deadline; applications were rolling, answered if a man like that was needed. He’d need a guardian’s approval, though: he was still seventeen, with his eighteenth birthday, so frustratingly, on September 10, days after the volunteers would set sail. If only his pop would sign that damn parental waiver!
Owen soon revealed that Byrd’s advisor on the expedition was none other than fifty-six-year-old Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who had reached the South Pole first. The two explorers had met in person at least once in Spitsbergen, Norway, on the island of Svalbard, when Amundsen was photographed offering congratulations after Byrd’s “successful” flight over the North Pole. The two egoists had come to like each other, exchanging letters over the past months. Amundsen, who had been first mate of the unprecedented “overwintering” at Antarctica (on Adrien de Gerlache’s trapped ship Belgica, in 1898 and 1899), was the world’s most experienced living explorer, and it was for his familiarity with the polar region that Byrd listened to him the most. He warned Byrd of the changeable nature of Antarctic ice: that one year it could be everywhere and the next year nowhere at all. Steely eyed and efficient, Amundsen had taken a risk in wintering on the Ross Ice Barrier in 1911, understanding that ice could break off, or calve, and plunge his primitive polar colony into disaster, but he wasn’t wrong. And he’d beaten Scott to the pole, hadn’t he? Amundsen, always careful in assessing the competition, knew Byrd couldn’t pilot a plane that well, but he thought the commander shared his combination of caution and guts—as Amundsen saw it, unusual in a glut of rash explorers—and the American was an excellent navigator, a skill not to be knocked. Amundsen knew his old pedestrian-and-dogsled methods were almost obsolete; he understood as well as Byrd that aviation was the way of modern exploration. Powered flight would put the final pieces of the jigsaw in place.
The pragmatic Norwegian suggested the flagship for Byrd’s Antarctica expedition: a Scandinavian ship called Samson, made for hunting seals in icy conditions. He knew the boat well, having worked on it in the Arctic as a younger man. The forty-six-year-old ship was a windjammer: 161 feet long, 27 feet across at the beam, and wooden sides 34 inches thick, to withstand the shock of breaking through ice. Byrd ran the idea past William Todd, a very prominent businessman friend who owned a shipping yard in New York, one of the largest in the country. Todd helped locate the old vessel in TromsØ, Norway, and offered to convert it to a barque (short for “barquentine”): a romantic type of ship with three or more masts. The barque would be almost archaic, evocative of the grand old days; for instance, Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Endurance had been a barque that got trapped in the Antarctic ice and was crushed. Bernays wasn’t Byrd’s only friend with a knack for PR.
After speaking with Byrd, Owen reported, Todd arranged for the sealer to sail to his Brooklyn yards via Oslo. She arrived following two months at sea, with rotted sails and rigging, ready for rebirth.
So even the famous Amundsen shared his admiration for Byrd! How Billy yearned for a taste of dangers, hardships, thrills on the ice. He pestered his father yet again for a chance to apply, but Rudy told Billy sternly to pick up his uneven grades so that he might have a shot at the prestigious Cooper Union arts course: the revered institution in downtown Manhattan offered free tuition for those who deserved the chance. Many of Billy’s teachers considered him a bright fantasist and worried about his chronic absenteeism, even if he passed tests well enough to graduate. They warned his parents that life required focus; big dreams were never enough.
If most of Billy’s fellow students were not attending the elite Ivies because of financial hardship—not to mention prejudicial quotas against Jews, Italians, and African Americans—they were on track to receive offers from places such as the free City College system located between West 130th and West 141st Streets in Manhattan. America’s first municipal university filled quickly with young men and women from the immigrant Jewish community in particular. In a mere thirty years, college enrollment had tripled, with female, minority, and immigrant enrollment drummed up by suffragists and educational reformers. Still, Rudy often joked with his wife that what their underperforming kid really needed wasn’t college but a kick up the backside. What an advantage he had over his parents in life! Work harder! Stop talking about Antarctica! Billy did work harder—on learning more about the expedition.
• • •
Floyd Bennett was dead. Billy couldn’t believe it. He had read that Bennett was the steadiest of pilots, always putting caution before thrill. Bennett had met Richard Byrd back in 1918 in flight school in Pensacola, Florida. While Bennett was not dynamic—a little on the dull side for an aviator—Byrd, who valued loyalty above any character trait, had come to consider him his closest friend. How could the thirty-seven-year-old man who piloted Byrd to the North Pole and shared his 1926 tickertape parade be dead of pneumonia? Would the expedition to Antarctica continue?
Byrd, reporters said, was visibly shaken at the burial in Arlington National Cemetery on April 27, 1928. The tragedy had made him question whether he had it in him to go through with his plans. But his friend would want him to keep going, he decided. After the funeral, he pulled a stone from Bennett’s grave to carry with him and drop over the South Pole when the time came. To the press attending the funeral, he explained that after an emotional graveside chat with his old friend, he would continue with a spirit of noblesse oblige.
A few days later, when back in New York City, Byrd confirmed his decision to press on during a press conference in the teaky Biltmore Hotel, where, in suite 340, a half dozen secretaries and a telephone switchboard operator worked at high speed. After Byrd’s embarrassing one-room suite at the Hotel McAlpin, he’d next arranged a move to the Putnam offices at 2 West Forty-Fifth Street. The rooms were provided by his publisher, George “Gyp” Putnam (grandson of the founder of G. P. Putnam’s Sons), friend of the daring flyboys and an explorer himself: in 1926 the American Museum of Natural History had sponsored Putnam’s Arctic expedition, and in 1927—the year he published Charles Lindbergh’s We, the most successful nonfiction book to date—he had led an expedition for the American Geographical Society to collect specimens on Baffin Island in the Arctic Ocean of northernmost Canada.
But in Byrd’s private view, the Putnam Building was still not impressive enough for a commander. He networked with fellow horse lover John
McEntee Bowman, the new owner of the Biltmore, who offered him living quarters and office space on the third floor. Byrd accepted happily. The Biltmore was a luxurious hotel next to Grand Central Station, significant enough to have played host to President Woodrow Wilson and Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and complete with its own private train track. Byrd knew his time there would coincide with that of former New York governor Al Smith, who was on another floor planning the Empire State Building, his second act after having lost the 1928 presidential election to Republican Herbert Hoover. Byrd and Smith knew one another through friends and often asked after each other’s highly publicized progress in the Biltmore’s elevators and lobby.
• • •
With the warmth of spring and the pangs of love that went with the season, Billy had his first steady girlfriend in 1928. This dark-haired beauty was edgier than the flossy flappers with their daddies’ money. She never teased him that his voice had not deepened fully or that his immigrant heritage was a deal breaker—that was her ancestry, too. She went to his arty public high school, after all: a street-smart, down-to-earth, regular New Yorker like him, zippy and talented and burning to make her mark. They posed for photos together, a dyad of bohemians. (If only he had written his darling’s name on the back of those photographs!)
Impulsive as Billy was, almost as soon as he met this good-looking gal, he started with the I-love-yous. Weeks later, he wanted to marry her. He and his girl had been together for a solid two months now. How was this a lark? But his pop would have none of this nonsense. Why did he risk coming to America? Did Rudy have to remind Billy that he would inherit his interior decoration business one day? His son needed to be sensible, go to college, and master a trade. Rudy had built up a clientele that admired him—some of them, as he had hoped, now lower-tier silent-movie stars, for he was a handsome and personable self-educated man with a sense for elegance.
Francesca begged Billy to stop his folly, and this time when his father yelled at him in fury, Billy obeyed. He was a kid; he wasn’t willing to lose his parents. But he did not break up with The One right away, not before the Textile High prom. That would have been cruel to both of them.
Billy’s senior prom started Friday, May 4, at eight thirty, in the big dance hall at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, with music by the Dick Stiles Orchestra. It was a relief to not enter the floor as a stag begging for a dance. This was one of the last proms at the old Waldorf, a lavish hotel on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street that would soon be demolished to make way for the Empire State Building. But that May night, the hall was bathed in fragrance, with flowers at every table and girls in evening gowns with flowers pinned in their hair gliding over the dance floor with their escorts, each, like Billy, wearing a boutonnière. The student newspaper the Textilian’s final issue for the year called the evening perfect down to the last waltz.
• • •
The best-paid people on Richard Byrd’s staff were press agents, and others gave him PR advice for free. Publisher Gyp Putnam pushed the commander to run a contest to select a scout to join the crew. A true-life account of the journey to Antarctica by an American Boy Scout might be a bestseller. Byrd considered Putnam a fellow who knew how to market adventure even better than he did—and Byrd had taken Harvard Business School classes in marketing to prepare for the expedition. Gyp Putnam was certainly onto something: Ernest Shackleton had launched his own contest eight years earlier, choosing James Marr from 1,500 British applicants to join the 1921 Quest expedition. The eighteen-year-old Scot went on to write Into the Frozen South, a book for boys like Billy, captivated by polar journeys. He had a lot to write about, as Shackleton never even made it to Antarctica, dying of a heart attack on barren South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic.
Byrd would have his own Boy Scout. The sensational contest was announced in June. And if all 826,000 Boys Scouts had wanted to go on Byrd’s trip, 80,000 of them immediately applied from across America.
In Billy Gawronski’s final days at Textile High, the crash of the airship Italia during a flight around the North Pole, and the rising career of a beguiling young aviatrix named Amelia Earhart dominated headlines. The kidnapping of a ten-year-old New York City girl named Grace Budd was much spoken of, too. (A few years later, this crime would be linked to infamous serial cannibal Albert Fish—Grace was eaten.) But the Textile seniors of 1928 were less concerned with the front-page news than with the dreaded New York State Regents Exam that commenced Monday, June 18, and lasted all week. This was considered their final exam. But even while studying, Billy was reminded of Byrd: a New York dairy firm had bought the right to produce official expedition protective covers, distributed free to all students, with which he had covered his books.
After getting their passing marks, the seniors would be free. But Billy knew he wouldn’t be, not really, not from his father; he was still scheming about how to get Rudy to sign his parental release papers for the heartfelt application he planned to send Byrd. He could be a low-level seaman, ordered to stand watch at the crow’s nest or maybe even to take a trick at the wheel. Anything he could do for Commander Byrd would be an honor.
Then came the second death. On June 18, the first day of the Regents Exam, Roald Amundsen, that hypervigilant first man to reach the South Pole, disappeared with five others during a rescue mission to find the airship already in the news, the Italia, which had crashed near the North Pole. Their bodies would never be found. It was another setback for Byrd: a lost advisor on the heels of the death of his pilot and dear friend. And to think that Amundsen had once been a rival, back when Byrd snatched from him the first flight over the North Pole in 1926.
Yes, it was a tragic coda to the Norwegian’s career, but at least Amundsen had died a death befitting an explorer. Many had perished magnificently in the Antarctic, including Ernest Shackleton and much of Robert Falcon Scott’s party, who froze and starved to death in 1912 when their supplies ran out. Who would die in Byrd’s expedition? In a perverse way, the fear—the very real fear—added to the appeal. Billy knew Scott’s last words (found in his diary) by heart: “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions that would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our bodies must tell the tale.”
Again the teenager decided to make a last-minute plea for sending a Pole to the pole. But again and again, Rudy Gawronski waved away the paperwork Billy desperately typed out for him.
Rudy had his own idols. His pet quote was from the Polish general Józef Piłsudski, a hero of the Great War and, to many proud Polish men, their country’s George Washington: “To be defeated and yet not surrender, this is victory.” He made Billy say the words out loud: “Byc zwyciezonym I nie ulec to zwyciestwo.” How Rudy wished his son worshipped the truly brave Piłsudski more than this manufactured hero Byrd.
• • •
Byrdmania wasn’t just for boys and men. Among the rush of letters from around the world were hundreds of applications from women and girls spurred on by high-profile achievements of adventurous ladies in their modern era. That very June, Amelia Earhart had become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger, while the year before, seventeen-year-old Elinor Smith became the youngest licensed pilot in America. The Long Islander, nicknamed “the Flying Flapper of Freeport,” would set a new world altitude record in 1930. Female swimmers were in the news just as frequently: in 1926 Gertrude Ederle, a twenty-year-old Manhattanite whose father was a butcher over by Tenth Avenue, became the first woman to swim the English Channel. Ederle had been given her own parade down Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes (the stretch of lower Broadway that bisects the financial district); she even made a guest appearance in the now-lost silent romantic comedy Swim Girl, Swim.
Miss S. Nevin Wemple, thirty-four, a rare female doctor of dental surgery, of 542 Fifth Avenue, wanted to join Byrd’s men as expedition dentist and begged for no publicity. Ann Pender, twenty-three, and Marie Buma, t
wenty-six, from Worcester, Massachusetts, applied together, writing, “We do not wish for you to get the impression that we are of the flapper type.” Winnifred Webster Harlow, a New York consulting character analyst and psychologist, asked for the privilege of accompanying the group as the expedition analyst, explaining, “While each man is studying the pole, I may study the soul. I know my findings would be of interest and help to science.” She included a clipping she’d written for the daily tabloid New York Evening Graphic, a salacious publication nicknamed the “Porno-Graphic” by the other big dailies. The Graphic often used retouched photo collages called Composographs to create “photographs” of events of which it could not obtain actual photos; one such Composograph accompanied Winnifred Harlow’s application. The “photo” showed how aviators like Richard Byrd were on track to develop birdlike eyes.
Perhaps the most appealing letter of all came from thirteen-year-old Nancy Pugh from Springville, Louisiana, daughter of Mrs. Nicholls Pugh, who impishly crossed out her mother’s name on her stationery and wrote in her own. Her two-page plea ended:
I’m a tomboy girl. If I were a boy I’d give my eyeteeth to be on one of your expeditions, and I intend to be an adventurer and aviatrix when I am grown. I refuse to stay at home . . . but my mother and daddy have discouraged such work projects. Tell me anyway if I can go in I’ll be there. I’m home I wear knickers and I can do anything any boy can besides being a pretty good shot. At inanimate things.
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