Happy to be in complete control, Praeger advertised for civilian pilots willing to brave any kind of weather and quickly hired four applicants. The first was Max Miller, a sandy-haired former Army flight instructor born in Norway. “I’ve covered as much as 300 to 400 miles a day, only stopping for gasoline and oil or necessary repairs,” Miller wrote to the Post Office Department. “I have carefully considered the risk involved caused by bad weather conditions, and I would be willing to do my best under those circumstance and would be ready to go out at any time required.” Miller got the job.
So did Eddie Gardner, a former race car driver from Plainfield, Illinois. Gardner was a show-off who entertained audiences with impromptu aviation stunts. His colleagues nicknamed him “Turkey Bird” because his takeoffs tended to be wobbly. Gardner preferred the more manly “Turk Bird.” Gardner wasn’t particularly handsome, with his thinning hair, homely smile, and hooked nose, but he had no trouble getting dates. There was something irrefutably glamorous about the Air Mail Service pilots. When he suited up in his leather flying gear, even the Turkey Bird looked like a Hollywood hero.
Praeger and his pilots traveled to the headquarters of the Standard Aero Company in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where they tested new planes with bigger gas tanks and more powerful engines. Gardner thrilled the crowd with figure eights. Praeger scolded him when he landed, and Gardner promised never to do it again. The second assistant postmaster general told a group of reporters at the factory that the new planes would enable the Post Office to extend airmail across the country. “There is no guess work about it,” he said. “It is just as feasible to operate a mail line from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast in relays of 200 to 250 miles as it is to operate a single line of 250 miles with the certainty with which the aerial mail has been operated between New York and Washington.”
The first step was to carry mail from New York to Chicago. Praeger and Burleson believed their pilots would be able to make the trip between the two cities in nine hours, easily beating the fastest trains, which took 21 hours. In 1915, a pilot named Victor Carlstrom made the trip in a total of 8½ hours, but it took him two days. He got as far as Hammondsport, New York, before he was grounded for the night. Then he flew the rest of the way in the morning. Carlstrom never had the chance to try again. He died in a crash two years later while giving a flying lesson to a student in Newport News, Virginia.
Praeger wanted his men to make the nearly 800-mile journey between New York, and Chicago on a daily basis. Nothing like this had ever been attempted before. The Air Mail Service pilots would have to cross a section of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania that they called Hell’s Stretch. Fog often shrouded the Allegheny peaks, and there was virtually no place to land safely if aviators had engine trouble. Still, Praeger pressed on with what he referred to as “Project Pathfinder,” mapping out a route from Belmont Field in New York to Chicago’s Grant Park, with refueling stops along the way in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and the cities of Cleveland and Bryan in Ohio.
Before the first flight, Benjamin Lipsner, the Post Office’s recently hired superintendent of airmail, decided to turn Project Pathfinder into a contest between pilots Miller and Gardner. He invited them to lunch and told them of the plan. As Lipsner explained it, Miller would leave first and Gardner would follow. That didn’t sit well with Gardner. “What do you mean follow?” he asked.
“Wait a minute,” Lipsner said. “Don’t get so excited about it, Eddie. It doesn’t make the slightest difference to me who leads. You can lead the way and Max can follow.”
“Oh Max can, can he?” said Miller sarcastically. “Why I couldn’t follow him for a mile without running him down.”
Lipsner flipped a coin. Miller called heads and won. Gardner was still miffed, but there was nothing he could do.
“Good luck, Max,” Gardner said. “You deserve it.”
Miller looked embarrassed. “I ought to be ashamed of what I said.”
“Aw shut up,” Gardner told him.
The sky was cloudy on September 5, 1918, when Gardner and Miller departed from Belmont Field. Gardner couldn’t resist teasing Miller before he took off first at 6 am. “Look me up when you get to Chicago, Max,” Gardner said. “I hope I don’t get sleepy waiting for you.”
As soon as Miller departed, it began to rain. “Just our luck,” said Eddie Radel, a mechanic who would make the trip with Gardner. “I’ll bet Miller missed it.”
“Forget it,” Garner assured him. “A bad beginning is a good ending.”
It quickly got worse. Gardner and Radel climbed into their plane only to discover that it had a bad engine. Gardner commandeered another aircraft over the objections of the maintenance crew. “But Eddie, that plane has never been tested,” a crew member warned.
“I don’t give a hang,” Gardner said. “Is she full of gas?
“Yes.”
“Then it’s going to Chicago right now, tested or not.”
Gardner turned to Radel. “Are you game?”
“You know me, Turk,” Radel said. “Just say the word and I’m with you.”
Gardner and Radel took off at 8:50 am. As they crossed the Hudson River, Radel discovered that he had forgotten a fire extinguisher and the lunches he had prepared for the two of them. Praeger was furious about the troubles afflicting Project Pathfinder, and there were more to come. Miller made it safely to Lock Haven, but then his radiator started to leak, forcing him down in a field. A suspicious farmer with a shotgun confronted him. “You just get off my place or I’ll blow you to pieces,” he said. The next place Miller touched down, the locals were more hospitable. Nevertheless, he lost his way and didn’t make it to Cleveland until sunset. He was infuriated when his superiors ordered him to spend the night in the city. Miller felt better when he learned that Gardner was stuck behind in Lock Haven for the evening because of his own engine trouble.
Miller awoke the next morning and waited for the mechanics to fix his radiator. He finally departed at 1:35 pm and arrived at 6:55 pm in Chicago, where a huge crowd awaited him. Miller posed for pictures, savoring his victory. Naturally, he was eager for Gardner to arrive so he could gloat, but Gardner’s plane didn’t appear in the sky. Then night fell, and Miller began to worry about his friend. Finally, Gardner telephoned to say he was turning in for the night in Westville, Indiana, because it was too dark to fly farther. “Hey, Turk. I thought you were going to look me up when you got to Chicago,” Miller joked, before Gardner slammed the phone down on the receiver.
Once Gardner reached Chicago the following day, the two pilots forgot about the competition and enjoyed themselves. Politicians and business leaders invited them to lunches and dinners, raising champagne glasses in their honor. But in truth, the pilots hadn’t accomplished much. Miller’s trip had taken 37 hours; Gardner’s journey had lasted 48 hours. They would have to do better to persuade Congress to permanently fund the new airmail route. Fortunately, Project Pathfinder wasn’t over yet. The two pilots had to fly back to New York.
The weather was beautiful on the morning of September 10. Having already won the coin toss, Miller got to lead the way again. “So long, Eddie,” he told Gardner. “I’ll think of you when I’m walking down Broadway tonight.” He left at 6:30 am and got as far as Cleveland before his radiator started leaking again. Miller landed in Cleveland for several hours of repairs, and he didn’t arrive in Lock Haven until 7 pm. Miller wanted to go on, but it was getting dark.
He called Lipsner. “Say, chief,” he said. “I’m in Lock Haven, and everything’s all right now. My radiator had only a small leak, but I think it’ll hold all right until I reach New York.”
“What?” Lipsner replied.
“I’m going to New York. I’ll call you from Belmont Park before you go to bed.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind.”
“You wanted me to make it in a day, didn’t you?”
“You’ll stay right where you are,” Lipsner commanded. “It’s too much of a risk to finish the trip tonight.”
Miller wanted permission to take off, but it was futile. “You’re flying the mail for Uncle Sam and you’d better obey orders,” Lipsner told him. “Do you think I want you flying over those mountains and New York skyscrapers at this time of the night? Besides, that radiator is very unreliable.” Miller reluctantly gave in.
Gardner had better luck. He and Radel made it as far as Jersey City by nightfall. Rather than consult Lipsner, they crossed the Hudson River and flew over Manhattan, dazzled by the illuminated city. “The metropolis was wonderful—lights twinkling everywhere,” Gardner recalled. “Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn—lights, lights, lights, and more lights.” The lights, however, became a problem when Gardner tried to locate Belmont Field. “Desperately, I tried to find the landing flares at Belmont Park,” he said. “It was like trying to pick a couple of stars out of the Milky Way. I was baffled by the lights. They all looked alike.”
His plane nearly out of gas, Gardner searched for an open field and crash-landed in Hicksville, New York, 10 miles from his destination. When he came to, he pulled Radel out of the wreckage. Radel looked at Gardner strangely. “Gee, Eddie, you’re all cut up,” he told him. The local police arrived and summoned an ambulance to take the two men to the hospital, but not before Gardner was sure that his mail would be taken into New York on the next train. Praeger was elated. His pilot had flown from Chicago to New York in nine hours and eighteen minutes. Granted, Gardner hadn’t made it all the way to Belmont Field, but he had gotten close enough. Praeger sent Gardner a telegram: “You made a great flight. Hope you and Radel will have a speedy recovery from your injuries.”
The warm feelings didn’t last long. Within a few weeks of his epochal flight, Gardner refused to make his appointed rounds on a foggy November day. Praeger sent an angry telegram: “START THE MAIL SHIP WITHOUT A MINUTE’S DELAY.” When Gardner remained on the ground, Praeger fired him. The next day, Gardner traveled to Washington to plead for his job, but his boss was unmoved. Miller resigned in protest. Lipsner quit too, complaining to reporters about the imperious second assistant postmaster general. Newspapers lambasted Praeger for mistreating the heroic airmail pilots, but Burleson stood behind him and the controversy blew over.
Praeger soon regretted the departure of his star pilots. He tried to start regular service between New York and Chicago in December, but it was clear from the first day that he should have waited. His newer pilots weren’t prepared for long flights over unfamiliar terrain. They got lost. They crashed. The newspapers declared the new route a lost cause. “All that remains of New York to Chicago air mail service, which began life fresh and full of vigor yesterday morning, is a trail of broken or lost airplanes,” the New York Tribune lamented. After four days, Praeger canceled the new service altogether.
Politics intruded on Praeger’s plans too. World War I had officially ended on November 11, 1918. The Army wanted to get back into airmail delivery so its pilots would have something to do in peacetime. It had powerful allies on Capitol Hill. The same month, Republicans gained control of Congress. Republican congressman and future New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia led a campaign to defund the U.S. Air Mail Service and turn its operations over to the military. La Guardia had been an Army pilot during the war on the Austro-Italian front and fancied himself an aviation expert. “The Areo mail of this country is doomed to failure,” he warned. In the end, the Post Office retained control of the service and got more funding for it, but only because Praeger and Burleson spent a good deal of time on Capitol Hill, fending off the military’s takeover attempt.
Remarkably, none of this discouraged Praeger. He resumed service between New York and Chicago on May 15, 1919, the first anniversary of the Air Mail Service. Now that the war was over, there were plenty of experienced pilots available. Much to his relief, Miller and Gardner returned to the service, although they didn’t last long with the Post Office. Shortly after his return, Miller was flying over Morristown, New Jersey, when his plane’s engine caught fire. The plane crashed, and Miller was burned beyond recognition when the gas tank exploded. “Max Miller was the best pilot who ever sat in a plane,” a devastated Praeger said. Gardner left soon after and died two years later while barnstorming in Nebraska.
Republicans kept agitating for the cancellation of airmail, but Praeger ignored them. He was consumed with its potential to hasten the mail. He monitored the service obsessively, learning the names of every pilot, mechanic, and night watchman and keeping track of every plane’s whereabouts. On Sundays, Praeger met with his administrative staff at the Washington office, where they sat around his enormous desk with their jackets off and ties loosened, debating possible improvements. The second assistant postmaster general always had the final word. “When he said, ‘By Golly, that’s what we’ll do,’ there was no appeal,” recalled Leon Lent, Praeger’s chief aviation adviser.
On May 15, 1920, the second anniversary of the Air Mail Service, Praeger boasted that his pilots had flown into New York in storms so fierce that ships couldn’t enter the city’s harbor, and they had delivered mail to Chicago when trains were snowbound. Now it was time to carry mail to San Francisco. “Commercial aviation has arrived, and it cannot be stopped,” Praeger insisted.
Early airmail pilots had been frightened by the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania, but those peaks were less than 2,000 feet above sea level. To reach San Francisco, they would have to soar 9,000 feet above sea level to cross the Continental Divide. Then on the border of Utah and Idaho they would encounter the Wasatch Range, which an aviation writer described as “a maze of canyons, deep narrow [gorges], and sharp crest ridges that offered little hope of a survivable forced landing.” They could expect more unforgiving terrain beyond the Rocky Mountains. After pausing in Reno, Nevada, pilots would have to ascend 10,000 feet above sea level to get over the Sierra Nevada, which the department described as “a genuine no man’s land of mountain cliffs, canyons, small lakes, creeks, and trees and generally rotten flying territory.” The airmail pilots would also encounter frequent snowstorms, gale force winds, and subzero temperatures in this part of the country.
Praeger was convinced his men could overcome these obstacles. The Air Mail Service began coast-to-coast service in September 1920, transferring mail to trains at night when it was dangerous to fly and sending it back into the air at daybreak. The courageousness of the pilots who flew the transcontinental route cannot be overstated. In Aerial Pioneers: The U.S. Air Mail Service, 1918–1927, William Leary describes how pilot James Murray crashed in a snowstorm on the way from Salt Lake City to Cheyenne: “The aircraft was a complete write-off, but Murray crawled out of the wreckage with only minor cuts and bruises. The accident took place at 4:45 p.m. Murray decided he would have to walk to safety. With the aircraft’s compass smashed, he used the setting sun as a reference and trudged eastward for an hour through two feet of snow until he reached a frozen lake. With snow still coming down and darkness approaching, Murray took refuge under a cedar tree for the night. The next morning he found an abandoned cabin but no food. Walking into the rising sun, he came across a road with a signpost pointing to Arlington [Wyoming], fourteen miles distant. . . . Eating occasional handfuls of snow, he continued on his way. The tired and hungry pilot reached Arlington at 2:45 p.m., having walked eight hours to cover the fourteen miles.” Needless to say, other pilots who crashed under such conditions didn’t survive.
Burleson and Praeger were running out of time. Tired of Wilson’s progressive tendencies, Americans voted overwhelmingly in November 1920 for Republican presidential candidate Warren Harding, who promised a “return to normalcy” and vowed to veto any more airmail funding bills. Burleson and Praeger knew they would lose their jobs as soon as Harding took office, but first they wanted to demonstrate that their pilots could make the entire 3,000-mile transcontinental journey in the air, whi
ch would require night flying, of course. They drew up a plan for two teams of aviators to simultaneously take off from New York and California. Ideally, the pilots would make the trip in 36 hours, four times faster than the transcontinental railroad.
The weather on the East Coast was terrible on the morning of February 22, 1921, when pilots Elmer Leonhardt and Ernest Allison left New York and headed west. Leonhardt was forced down in Pennsylvania because of icy conditions. Allison made it to Cleveland and handed his mailbags to Walter Smith. Smith reached Chicago, but his superiors grounded him because they felt it was too dangerous to fly in the mix of snow, rain, and fog.
On the West Coast, the airmail pilots fared even worse. Farr Nutter and Raymond Little took off in separate planes from San Francisco just before 5 am. They flew in the dark to Reno, where they passed their mail to Samuel Eaton and William Lewis. Eaton and Lewis took it to Elko, Nevada, and they changed planes. When they tried to leave, Lewis crashed and died during takeoff. Eaton gathered up his colleague’s mail and flew to Salt Lake City, where he gave the sacks to James Murray. In Cheyenne, Murray met up with Frank Yager who took them to North Platte, Nebraska. The pilot waiting for him was Jack Knight, whose name would shortly become known to every American.
A former World War I flight instructor who grew up in Buchanan, Michigan, Knight looked a bit like Fred Astaire, with the same elegant, thin face, high cheekbones, and receding hairline. He had already set speed records carrying the mail, and he was dutiful. A few months earlier, Knight had crashed on the way from Chicago to Cleveland. Once he came to his senses, he persuaded someone to watch his plane and got his eight bags of mail onto a train. Then he hopped onto a trolley into Cleveland, and the next day he flew the mail to Chicago as if nothing had happened.
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