Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/august 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/august 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 5
The year was 1911, and I was fourteen, just emerging from a wonderful boyhood in Sheepshead Bay, New York. Even though Sheepshead Bay was part of Brooklyn, it was so rural in those days it might as well have been Kansas. At the time, we were living in a farmhouse on the estate of a millionaire horse breeder named James Ben AIi Haggin. Lucky for me, the house was right across the road from the racetrack of the Coney Island Jockey Club.
A few years before, Charles Evans Hughes, the governor of New York, had abolished betting at racetracks throughout the state. As a result the racetrack in Sheepshead Bay lay idle. However, it soon became an ideal flying field for America’s pioneer pilots. Aviation was just beginning to attract public interest, and fliers like the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss were being taken seriously.
Curtiss regularly brought groups of student pilots to the racetrack to practice and stage exhibitions. Other fliers who appeared there from time to time were Clifford B. Harmon, a New York real estate magnate who flew a huge French-made Farman biplane, and Lawrence Sperry, whose father, Elmer, invented the gyroscopic compass and later founded the company that would become Sperry-Rand.
For boys like myself all this activity was a magnet, and we haunted the place whenever we were free from chores at home. We considered it an honor to run errands and do other little jobs for these glamorous “bird-men.” To be able to touch an “aeroplane” was awesome to us.
At any rate, on the hazy Sunday morning of September 17, 1911, I had just returned from Mass with my family at St. Mark’s Roman Catholic Church in Sheepshead Bay when I learned from some of my chums that the daredevil aviator Calbraith Perry Rodgers had arrived at the track with his specially built open-seat Wright biplane. What’s more, Rodgers, a rangy motorcycle racer with only sixty hours of flying experience, was about to attempt to fly across the country in fewer than thirty days in a bid for a fifty-thousand-dollar prize put up by the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. When I heard the news I ran over to the track to join a group of locals who had already gathered around Rodgers and his plane.
The sponsor of the flight was Armour & Company, the large Chicago meat-packing firm, which was promoting a new soft drink called Vin Fiz. Accordingly, painted on the underside of the lower wing of Rodgers’s plane were a bunch of Concord grapes and the words Vin Fiz .
For the next two hours the plane was readied. The fuel tank, which was suspended from the upper wing, was filled with naphtha. (All it took was ten gallons.) The thirty-five-horsepower engine was tuned; the twin wooden propellers were checked. Meanwhile, we boys, feeling very important, hustled around, bringing funnels, stepladders, rags, and wrenches and other tools.
Finally, Rodgers,