When I was a licensed “ramp rat” at the Pacific Airmotive Company in Burbank, California, during the thirties, a parade of American flying legends brought their equally famous airplanes to us for servicing and maintenance. As one of the two at PAC who knew how to take care of any kind of aircraft that came in, I worked with many celebrated pilots—Amelia Earhart, Jacqueline Cochran, Howard Hughes, and Wiley Post among them.
We frequently had Post’s white Vega, the Winnie Mae, in the hangar. Wiley was such a congenial character that we mechanics felt we could talk to him as though he were one of us. One time I was assigned to re-skin the lowerright stabilizer on the Winnie Mae, and when I finished, I burned in my initials and the date. Years later, when I saw the bird hanging from the roof in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, the initials were still there, barely distinguishable under the paint.
In 1935 Wiley combined a Lockheed Orion fuselage with Sirius wings for a goodwill flight during which he and Will Rogers planned to go islandhopping in Alaska and possibly continue to Japan and around the world. He wanted to install pontoons for the over-water sections of the flight, but Lockheed had refused to fit the pontoons Wiley brought to it, claiming they would make the plane tail-heavy. So he brought the bird to PAC, and I was told to fit the pontoons and ready them for shipping to Alaska.
I didn’t know about Lockheed’s stand, but to me the pontoons looked like a pile of junk. When I asked Wiley where he had picked them up, he said, “If you must know, they’re off a Fairchild Razorback.” I told him that installed the way he wanted them, the pontoons would be too far aft on the Orion fuselage and would make it tail-heavy. He responded, “That’s none of your business. Just do as you’re told.”
A cocky twenty-two-year-old with a short fuse, I lost my temper and called Wiley a few choice names. He started for me, stopped short, laughed, and said, “Look who I’m getting mad at! You’re the guy I depend on for giving my engine a good final service. Come on, Art, let’s get those fittings made.”
Wiley had signed a statement accepting full responsibility for the installation. Nevertheless, I was not comfortable about it and told him I was going to tell PAC’s manager, Edwin O. (“Eddie”) Cooper, how I felt. Wiley said that was fine, but he still wanted it done his way. Even the inspector who came to certify the plane seemed unconcerned. He figured a great pilot like Wiley Post knew what he was doing.
After Wiley and Will Rogers were killed, the villagers who had given them directions to Point Barrow reported that he hadn’t spent much time warming up his engine. On takeoff he went into a steep climb, the engine coughed a couple of times, and he lost power. At the slow speed he was flying, Wiley couldn’t get the nose down. He went into a spin and hit the water upside down within half a turn.
I know that Wiley chose to use the lighter of the two Pratt & Whitney engines the company suggested, because I serviced it. Had he selected the heavier one, perhaps he and Rogers might have survived.
The bodies were returned to Burbank by air, and we put them in a hearse to be taken to the funeral parlor. Eddie Cooper had received a telegram from Wiley the day before he died. It said, “Everything going fine.”
—Arthur R. Kennedy, a still-active aviation consultant, lives in Portugal.
LINE DRIVE
When I was a kid I had a nervy dad, whose dream had been to make it in professional sports, preferably baseball. Failing in that youthful ambition, he somehow succeeded in getting us onto the Boston Red Sox outfield for morning practices during the team’s spring training in Sarasota, Florida. We would be out there with the odd other gatecrasher in street clothes and with numerous Red Sox players in uniform. This was the 1950s, and America wasn’t yet hyperlitigious, so we were generally allowed to remain on the field chasing balls or, more usually, watching someone else snare them. I remember Lew Kiley, a Red Sox pitcher, trying on one occasion to eject us, and my father inventing all sorts of reasons why we ought to be able to stay put. He was quite the con man; for starters, there I was in Florida for close to six weeks, missing a good chunk of school.
Anyhow, the most glamorous player the Red Sox had to offer was Ted Williams, who, though aging, was still a pretty sight to watch in a batting cage. I was a great reader of baseball history and at age ten or twelve already knew Williams’s life and achievements backwards and forwards. I used to read one book in particular over and over: Arthur Daley’s Times at Bat, which offered marvelous vignettes on such luminaries as Dizzy Dean, the Babe, and yes, Teddy Ball Game.
So there I was in the outfield one day, clad in my ball cap and shorts, pounding a Rawlings mitt as big as my head. Your very relevant question, since we are talking history, is exactly how old I was. I can’t see myself being over twelve, but I could have been as young as nine or ten. I had already spent thousands of hours playing baseball, so I knew how to field pretty well for my age.
Williams used to hit hooking line drives, and this one started well out in his “wrong field”—that is, almost at the left-field foul line. I had stationed myself somewhere in fairly shallow center field. There were ballplayers near me, behind me, and in front of me in the infield. Anyway, this hook started out by way of Peoria, so to speak, and then it curved and curved and curved, and suddenly it was zeroing in at high speed right for my young head! I know this sounds positively mythological, but it happened. At the last second I had to make a quick decision: either raise my glove and snare that liner or be killed. Somehow I managed to catch it right in front of my face, and I remember some of the Red Sox players yelling, “Sign him up!”
That was nice of them to say, but there was no real possibility of that. I wasn’t fast enough to be a fielder, and in Little League games when I came to bat, I was terrified of the fastballs sizzling in on me, a fear that didn’t leave me until I quit organized baseball at about fourteen. And though my father had an obsession with sports, that was his thing. Eventually a son ought to develop interests of his own, and I did.
But there it is: my brush with history—the day I caught a line drive off the bat of the last .400 hitter, the one many still call the greatest ever. My thanks to Rawlings and to plain luck for saving my young life.
—Barnett Singer teaches history at Brock University in Ontario, Canada.
NO ANSWER
In 1945 I was a member of a supersecret Army intelligence unit attached to the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. We were sent to a desert camp called Trinity, northwest of Alamogordo, New Mexico; our assignment was to cover the area within a hundred-mile radius of zero point so that we could remove residents quickly if the mushroom cloud blew toward them spewing radioactive dust.
The blast was scheduled for July 16, 1945, at 4:00 A.M. A fellow agent, Harold Jensen, and I drew Socorro, a little town northwest of ground zero, as our vantage point. A soaking thunderstorm was in progress as we parked our car outside town to avoid attracting attention at that early hour.
We waited until four-thirty. Then until five o’clock. Strangely, nothing happened even after the storm had abated. Had there been a postponement? We drove into Socorro to call from a pay phone in the lobby of a small hotel—we had been given codes so that we would not reveal the secret—but there was no response from the operator. The phone was dead.
We knew that all telephone communications from Los Alamos to the desert test site went through Socorro, and it was vital that scientists and engineers in Los Alamos and Santa Fe communicate with authorities in the desert who were preparing the test. We had to find out what had happened to disrupt communications.
We tracked down the telephone exchange by following overhead cables. The switchboard turned out to be in a private home, as were many in small towns back then. From the porch we could see scores of lights flickering, indicating that officials were frantically trying to get through.
Unaware of her key role in the momentous test, the operator was sound asleep on a cot beside the switchboard. I pounded on the door. She came out rubbing her eyes. I nodded toward the switchboard, and she sprang to work, putting through the calls.
That did it.
Jensen and I returned to our outpost and sat on the front fender of the car to watch the show. At five-thirty the detonation took place: no sound at first, just a giant, bright yellow fireball like a super-sun that hurt the eyes. In a few moments came the sound of a drummer striking a huge drum, but we felt no concussion or strong wind.
Like everyone else, Jensen and I kept the explosion secret until August 6, 1945, when President Truman announced “the most terrible destructive force in history.”
—Al Bennett lives in Everett, Washington, and is the retired managing editor of the Everett Herald.
EARLY COLOR TV
In 1946 I was in the U.S. Navy, stationed at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. In addition to the experimental television transmitting station and receivers that had been instituted in the New York City area before the war, television broadcasting had been started on a small scale (the legend was fifty receivers) in the District of Columbia.
At the research lab some of the crews that had spent the war years installing and testing exotic electronic devices on naval vessels had time on their hands and decided to construct their own television receiver. The hardest part to obtain—the video picture tube—was readily available at the lab because every radar system contained one.
In June 1946 word spread rapidly that the Louis-Conn heavyweight championship fight would be televised. The technicians at the lab realized that the potential audience would probably be greater than one picture tube could handle. So when the crowd showed up on the evening of the bout, the long room contained not one but ten screens, all in a row, about three feet apart. The installer crews had triumphed again!
My memory is as follows: poor sound, good picture. But the radar picture screen’s images were not black and white but shades of green. It took a few minutes to figure out which fighter was Joe Louis (who won) and which was Billy Conn.
Everyone had a great time, but it was a long while before I saw color television again.
—Arthur Kalbhenn is an arbitrator for the securities industry and a hospital volunteer who lives in Richboro, Pennsylvania.
IN GOOD HANDS
During the summer of 1948 I was captain of a sightseeing boat taking tourists for a waterfront view of the nation’s capital. The boat was available for charter, and in the days before air conditioning it was popular with Washington hostesses giving evening parties. We sailed with one deckhand who doubled as bartender and waiter.
One evening when we were in the river below Alexandria, one of the guests asked permission to come into the darkened wheelhouse. During our brief chat the boat’s engine developed a noise that I did not like. Since the deckhand was busy with the guests, I asked the gentleman if he would take the wheel for a few minutes while I went below to check on the engine. I showed him the course I was steering and went about my business. He was right on course when I returned, and a few minutes later he left, remarking that it had been some time since he had been behind the wheel.
Shortly afterward the hostess came into the wheelhouse asking if Admiral Halsey was still there.
—A. Leavitt Crowell lives in Sequim, Washington.
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