Chasing Icarus (24 page)

Reporters and spectators alike watched in astonishment as the brazen pair collected Grahame-White’s fan mail and “sat on the clubhouse steps reading it.” Several of the more senior members of the New York Four Hundred shook their heads and muttered that in all their years they had never seen such behavior. It looked for all the world as if the couple didn’t have a care in the world, until the moment Sears glanced up and saw a “few photographers pointing cameras at her.” Jumping to her feet, she shooed them away, crying, “You newspapermen are a nuisance!” Moments later she and Grahame-White beat a retreat to the haven of his hangar, although not before the Englishman had jabbed a finger in the general direction of the reporters and accused them of being “prevaricators.”

Grahame-White might well have leveled the accusation at the Belmont Park committee when he read their morning bulletin regarding the Statue of Liberty race. Without warning the organizers had “revoked its rule that all aviators taking part in the race . . . for the prize of $10,000, offered by Mr. Thomas Fortune Ryan, must qualify by an hour’s flight at this meeting.” Grahame-White could not believe it. He looked down at bulletin No. 11 and read clause one again, just to make sure he hadn’t been mistaken. But, no, he hadn’t, it was there in black and white. Grahame-White stormed into the clubhouse and, waving the piece of paper in the face of the unfortunate receptionist, demanded to see J. C. McCoy, the committee chairman, and Allan Ryan, the general manager. Outside the club house entrance, the reporters pressed their ears to the door to see if they could hear what was being shouted. A few minutes later Grahame-White emerged and launched into a tirade against the committee: “I took out my Farman biplane on Sunday in very bad weather in order to qualify for the Liberty flight and smashed my machine,” he said, his brown eyes full of anger. “This put my airplane out of business for two days and prevented my going after several prizes. Now at the last moment the committee is going to allow anybody to fly for Mr. Ryan’s ten-thousand-dollar prize whether they have shown that they can keep up in the air for an hour or not.”

A principle was at stake, asserted Grahame-White, an inviolable law of aviation, which said that rules were not to be changed willy-nilly at the whim of the management. Yes, he said, it was unprecedented as far as he was aware. He had never heard of a meet altering the rules of entry halfway through. Grahame-White was at a loss to think why the committee had acted in so arbitrary a fashion. Apart from himself, Armstrong Drexel, Phil Parmalee, and Ralph Johnstone were the only fliers who had legitimately qualified; but then, as a reporter pointed out, Parmalee and Johnstone were Wright fliers, and the brothers had made it clear they would not permit any of their men to enter the race because in their view it would result in “certain death.” So there was your answer, they explained to the Englishman, it wouldn’t be much of a contest, just you and Drexel.

Still incandescent with rage, Grahame-White left behind one of set of “prevaricators” to confront another and disappeared back inside the clubhouse to make an official protest. It was only, reported the
New York Herald
, “after considerable dipping and diving and veering around in its course [that] the committee succeeded in getting Mr. Grahame-White to return to his hangar, and when assured that he was safely on the other side of the field determined that the new rule would be adhered to, and unanimously overruled the protest.”

Grahame-White took Eleonora Sears for lunch at the Turf and Field Club, but it wasn’t the most congenial meal of her life. The aviator sat brooding over the morning’s events, heartened only by the knowledge that “he had the moral support in his protest of most of the other aviators, among them Mr. Wilbur Wright.”

Most of the aviators, but not all, and definitely not John Moisant. The American had tried and failed to qualify for the Statue of Liberty race on Saturday, going up twice in the Hourly Distance event. The best he had managed was fifty-one minutes and eleven seconds, commendable but not good enough. Yet on Wednesday evening Moisant had told a reporter from the
New York Sun
that he was “planning to set his course to the Statue of Liberty straight over Brooklyn,” adding with his usual dash of bravado that he didn’t “see that there’s any more danger in alighting on a city than there is on water. There’s always a chimney for a man to hang on to.”

From the moment John Moisant had heard about the $10,000 on offer for the victor of the Statue of Liberty race, it had been his intention to win, and he was never going to allow the race small print to stand in his way. A quiet word in the committee’s ear, a reminder that he was one hell of a crowd-puller, that was all it had taken; and once again Moisant had set the revolutionary wheels in motion.

As Grahame-White sulked over lunch, the wind abated and rumors began to swirl around the Turf and Field Club that it was blowing no more than fifteen miles an hour. At one thirty P.M. the bomb was detonated to signal the start of the afternoon’s program, and the spectators’ tenacity was rewarded with the sight of Hubert Latham puffing on a cigarette as his mechanics wheeled out his Antoinette. He took off and began to edge tentatively round the course. Meanwhile, in the Wrights’ hangars, Arch Hoxsey finished a lunch of powdered sugar and tomato puree, then buttoned up his leather jacket, and Ralph Johnstone sat silently in the corner preparing himself for another ascent. This time the pair headed over the trees to the northeast and were soon out of range of even the most powerful field glasses.

No other aviator ventured from his hangar, so the crowd of twelve thousand lavished their attention on Latham’s lapping of the course in the Hourly Distance event, which once had been the preserve of Grahame-White. The spectacle was riveting, wrote the correspondent from the
San
Francisco Chronicle
, as the Frenchman “journeyed his way around the curves by sheer resourcefulness and nerve. The gale was so obstinate that he had to point head into it and steer due north in order to edge sideways, like a ferryboat in a tide, and make distance to the west.” At one moment, as he rounded dead man’s turn, Latham didn’t even attempt to maneuver but instead let the wind blow him sideways across the home straight and over the top of the grandstand. Soon the wind had increased again to close on thirty miles per hour, and Latham judged it too risky to remain aloft. He descended slowly and cautiously—what was known as terracing—motoring horizontally for a hundred feet, then dropping vertically a hundred feet, then advancing again, and so on, until finally he landed without misfortune. A little later, with no sign of Johnstone and Hoxsey, and no other aviator willing to confront the wind, Latham “had an offer of $750 by the management to fly around for the benefit of the crowd,” but he declined; his life was worth more than that.

An hour or so later the telephone rang in the office of the club house; it was Arch Hoxsey explaining that he wouldn’t be back until the morning. He had been blown a little off course. How little? asked Charles Edwards. Well, he’d landed in a field in Brentwood, twenty-five miles east of Belmont Park. No, no, he was fine, he declared, “he hadn’t even soiled his collar,” and a couple of bemused farmers had fetched some rope and secured his bi-plane to a tree. What about Johnstone, asked Hoxsey, any news? None yet, replied Edwards with a tinge of anxiety in his voice. Half an hour later, the telephone rang again. It was Johnstone. He was in a place called—What was it? he was heard to ask someone in the background—in a place called Middle Island, approximately fifty-five miles east of Belmont Park. He’d already booked in for the night at the Green View Hotel, and the proprietor, Mr. Helbeck, was busy preparing a plate of ham and eggs, and a can of gasoline was also on its way. Johnstone asked Edwards to make sure a message was passed to his wife, then he hung up and tucked into his food.

In the late afternoon a howling wester descended and “flitted the air with whirling autumn leaves, slammed down the benches in the grandstand, ripped out the canvas screens that bar the view of those who have not paid . . . and sent such a skirmish line of dust dancing around the track that the lamps had to be lighted outside the hangars for the mechanics to find their way about.” John Baldwin, a journalist for the
Scientific American
journal, broke a leg when the wind blew a hangar door into his path as he inspected the machines.

With no chance of any further flying, the spectators began to depart, although a few of the more well-heeled headed to the Turf and Field for a stiff drink. Claude Grahame-White was already there, not with Eleonora Sears, whose slot had expired, but with Pauline Chase, “to whom he is supposed to be engaged,” hissed the
New York Sun
.

Ralph Johnstone had unwittingly made the right decision in checking into the Green View Hotel. As he was waited on hand and foot, his fellow American aviators spent Thursday evening at the offices of the Aero Club of America in Manhattan’s Engineering Society’s Building in what the
New York Times
described as “a long session, productive of several heated arguments.”

The problem facing all those present was to agree on which three men should be selected for Saturday’s race, the blue-ribbon event of international aviation. The weather had twice forced the cancellation of the elimination trial, and with more wind forecast for Friday the Aero Club was obliged to find another way of selecting its trio of aviators. The rules stated that each nation’s team had to be publicly announced twenty-four hours before the race began, so the Aero Club had only a few more hours in which to reach a decision.
*

With Cortlandt Bishop in the chair, the committee of the Aero Club invited one by one Glenn Curtiss, Wilbur Wright, Armstrong Drexel, John Moisant, and Charles Hamilton to present his case in the club’s assembly room. Why, the Aero Club asked, should we select you? “For nearly three hours,” wrote the correspondent from the
New York Times
, “these representatives advanced their claims before the board and submitted to a series of questions. It was at this point that the conversation became heated.” Just how heated, the paper didn’t elaborate, but the face of Glenn Curtiss as he stormed out of the building a little after midnight suggested tempers had been at boiling point. Then Cortlandt Bishop appeared on the steps of the Engineering Society’s Building to formally announce the American team for the race: Walter Brookins, Armstrong Drexel, and Charles Hamilton. First reserve, said Bishop, would be James Mars, second reserve John Moisant, and third reserve Arch Hoxsey. The reporters clamored to know by what means the committee had reached their decision, but “no explanation was offered by the Board of Governors why the men named were selected,” and the papers were left to draw their own conclusions. “The failure to select a representative from the Curtiss fliers provoked considerable comment,” according to the
New York Times
correspondent, who wrote the Aero Club’s choice was “certain to breed considerable dissatisfaction especially among those who failed to get a place on the team.”

*
Britain’s team of Grahame-White, Alec Ogilvie, and James Radley had been selected by the Royal Aero Club at the start of October. The selection of the French team had become another bone of contention for the Aero Club of France with the Americans. Originally the team comprised Léon Morane, Le Blanc, and Latham, but on the eve of their voyage to America, Morane was injured in a crash. The French assumed it would be no problem to select a third aviator once in New York, but the Aero Club of America refused to allow this on the grounds that Aubrun, Garros, and Simon had been paid to attend the meet, whereas Latham and Le Blanc had not because they had come to contest the Aviation Cup. The French, needless to say, were angered by this ruling but had to enter the race with just two fliers.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I’ll Be Able to Give the Wrights

a Good Race

Friday, October 28, 1910

Alan Hawley and Augustus Post had with great relief boarded the Canadian Pacific sleeper at Quebec City on Thursday evening. The dinner at the Château Frontenac hotel had been pleasant enough, but not so the persistence of the vaudeville impresario who had “asked how four figures would look” in return for a three-week tour of North America. “Nothing doing,” Hawley had replied through gritted teeth. As the train had pulled away from Quebec City at eleven P.M. bound for Montreal, the pair nodded approvingly at the grandiloquence of their sleeping car. They had been given the stateroom, the “Fujiyama” carriage, with what they were sure were the softest beds in which they had ever slept. And as for the pillows . . . sheer bliss.

The sleeper arrived at Montreal at seven thirty on Friday morning, and the reception committee was primed to pounce. Two dozen officers and members of the Aero Club of America charged down the platform to see who could be first to shake the men’s hands. In the opinion of the correspondent from the
Boston Daily Globe—
one of many at the station— Hawley and Post “reluctantly left their beds in the stateroom” to accept the greetings bestowed upon them. Hawley had a noticeable limp, and for some reason the pair had changed back into their original balloon clothes. Their spirits were revived by a substantial breakfast in the Place Viger, a château-style hotel built twelve years earlier above the station. One of the Aero Club members persuaded Hawley to part with his pants for a few minutes so they could be “patched and pressed” by a member of the laundry staff. After breakfast Post and Hawley, proudly wearing his nearly good-as-new pants, posed for photographs and answered a few questions from the Canadian press. They were bored with retelling the same old story so they became anecdotal, coloring in the outline of their story with asides that had the Montreal newsmen beaming. What items of equipment did you take with you for your wilderness trek? someone asked. Let’s see, said Post: blankets, soup, a pistol, biscuits, bottle of peroxide. “Peroxide!” exclaimed the reporter. “For what?” Post looked at Hawley and began to laugh. “Well, it’s a secret, but . . . Hawley is very keen on natural history and is always on the lookout for freaks for the Bronx zoo. He thought that if we could catch a muskrat, dark in color, what we had in the bottle might help it to be a freak of nature from the Canadian wilds.” “Nature fakirs!” someone shouted, and the room collapsed in a fit of giggles. Later Hawley told of the time in Canada when they saw from the
America II
a “quiet-looking old gentleman who, after we had crossed his property of forest, let fly two charges of shot at us.”

The double act was worthy of the vaudeville stage, and murmurings of disappointment came when Hawley and Post were informed that it was time to leave. Their “sportsmanlike demeanor [had] captivated” the Canadian press, and praise for their modesty was also universal. Before they left the hotel to catch the one fifty-five P.M. Delaware and Hudson railroad train to New York, the two Americans sent a telegram to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Canada’s prime minister: PLEASE ACCEPT THE ASSURANCES OF OUR PROFOUND GRATITUDE FOR THE GENEROUS EFFORTS OF YOURSELF AND YOUR GOVERNMENT FOR OUR ASSISTANCE.

As the two said their good-byes at the station, the correspondent from the
Montreal Star
asked Hawley if he planned to continue ballooning after his experiences. Probably, he replied, “but I shall also have a look around in the aeroplaning game.” So was that where he saw the future of aeronautics? “Much has been done with airplanes, but the game is still young,” said Hawley, who added that he was “anxious to see the flights at Belmont Park tomorrow.”

Home, so nearly home, thought Hawley and Post as they settled back into their carriage, but not quite. First they had to endure an eight-hour journey during which they were objects of curiosity to all the other passengers. If that wasn’t bad enough, the correspondent from the
Boston
Daily Globe
had booked himself on the train, and nothing was going to prevent him from getting a story, particularly not the door to the balloonists’ private compartment. But for the first hour of the voyage south not even the reporter could get a word in edgeways as “people learned who was present on the train and kept coming along to introduce themselves and congratulate the airmen.” Even the normally impassive U.S. customs officer who boarded the train at St. John came over all misty-eyed when he spotted the pair. He pumped their hands and told them that “he shared the pride of all Americans in their great achievement.” Oh, by the way, he added, had they made any purchases while they were in Canada? Hawley and Post looked at one another, suppressed a smile, and replied in unison, “A clean shirt each.”

The man from the
Globe
saw clearly that Hawley and Post would have “preferred to spend the day in sleep,” but that was just too bad, he needed his story. Eventually Post could take it no longer and moved to another compartment, leaving Hawley at the mercy of the reporter. For a while Hawley retold the standard story of their trip, but later he began to open up as the reporter won his confidence with his gently probing line of inquiry. Hawley said that, yes, if his knee had become so bad that he couldn’t have continued, he would have been “justified in shooting himself rather than to die of cold or starvation alone in the deep forest.” Fortunately, he said with a short laugh of relief, it never came to that. But there must have been a time when you despaired of salvation? the reporter asked. Hawley pursed his lips in contemplation. “There was one incident about our trip that I haven’t mentioned in any of the interviews,” he said hesitantly. The reporter’s ears pricked up. Yes? “It was something which touched me very deeply and made a lasting impression on my mind.” Yes? The reporter’s pulse quickened. It was the prayer, given to Hawley by a friend before he left New York. The reporter asked to see it, but Hawley refused. The
Globe
’s correspondent persisted until he “finally won his consent.”

Hawley took the envelope from the pocket of his torn overcoat and read the prayer aloud, just as he had done five days earlier on the shore of the lake when his morale had been at its lowest ebb. The reporter scribbled the words of the prayer in his notebook, then added a note at the bottom: “Mr. Hawley is not a man of emotional nature, but he was plainly impressed, if not affected, as he folded the precious bit of card back into its envelope and returned it to his pocket.”

At Albany, Hawley and Post transferred to the Empire State Express for the final leg of their voyage to New York. Waiting to welcome them on board were Edward Stratton of the Aero Club of America, William Hawley, and a reporter from New York’s
World
, whose eyes narrowed like a jealous suitor’s when he saw the contented face of the
Boston Daily Globe
’s correspondent. No words were spoken when the brothers were reunited; there was “just a strong gripping of hands and a look that meant a great deal.”

The
World
had been trumped by its rival, and neither Hawley nor Post were in the mood to recite their story for the umpteenth time. All that Hawley would give the
World
’s reporter by way of a quote was his belief that if his experience had taught him anything, it was of the urgent need for the U.S. government “to equip its [coastal] life saving stations with airplanes.” For the price of one battleship, he continued, the “government could build one hundred airplanes and they would save hundreds of lives.”

The
World
’s reporter in exchange gave the two men a copy of his newspaper, which featured a substantive front-page spread about their adventure and also an editorial praising “their contribution to the romance of adventure.” William Hawley and Stratton produced a bundle of other clippings, including the glowing editorial in Friday’s edition of the
New York Herald.
Having congratulated them on their “record breaking aerial voyage,” the paper wagged a figurative finger at its readers and reminded them, “It must not be supposed that the balloon races are mere useless ‘drifting matches’ . . . It has trained and is training a great number of men—and women, too, for that matter—to feel at home in the upper air, and thus preparing them to use the dirigible flying machines of the present types and of the more highly perfected ones of the future. The plucky exploit of Messers. Hawley and Post adds to the luster of their country’s flag and will make their names famous in aeronautic annals.”

“Mere useless drifting matches”! Hawley and Post were aghast at the very suggestion. To what, or to whom, was the
New York Herald
referring when it challenged the accusation? they wanted to know. The offending article wasn’t to hand; it had tactfully been omitted from the bundle of newspaper clippings, but the city’s balloon fraternity was still seething over the editorial in Thursday’s
New York Globe.
The
Globe
for its part was indignant that the International Balloon Cup race had the nerve to call itself such. Fiddlesticks! It wasn’t a race, it was just an “aerial drifting competition . . . a manifest anachronism in these days of dirigibles and airplanes. A dozen oarless row boats ‘liberated’ in mid-Atlantic, each manned by a helpless crew whose only occupation was sitting still or bailing, would furnish an equally up-to-date sporting event.”

The Empire State Express arrived at Grand Central Station at ten minutes past ten on Friday evening, and a delegation from the Aero Club, who had come straight from Belmont Park, were there to greet them. The more self-important the person, the louder the greeting, and Post had to push aside one or two braying oafs so he could embrace his sister. Someone called for “Three cheers,” and the cry was taken up by the commuters headed home and a throng of students decked in Dartmouth colors who were in town for a Saturday football match. There was a battery of flashlights and a barrage of questions from reporters. The
New York Times
said Post “seemed nervous when he was welcomed by his friends, but it was not quite certain whether it was due to his experiences in the
America II
or the wild way in which he was rushed through the gates from the platform and snapshotted [
sic
] by the small army of photographers.”

By the time the two men had arrived at the Hotel St. Regis for a celebratory dinner, Post had recovered his poise. It had all been a bit too much, he told the
New York Times
, and he apologized for his scowling demeanor at Grand Central. “You cannot imagine how it feels,” he said with a smile, “to emerge suddenly from the solitude and rocks and pine trees of the Canadian wilds to meet crowds of people in this cheerful way.”

After the meal came the telegrams and the toasts. Of the former, none received a bigger cheer than the one from Sir Wilfrid Laurier, prime minister of Canada. It had arrived at the Aero Club of America offices during the afternoon, sent in response to the telegram wired him by Post and Hawley in Montreal: YOU OWE ME NO THANKS FOR THE ASSISTANCE WE ENDEAVORED TO RENDER YOU. PLEASE ACCEPT MY HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR SAFE RETURN FROM A REMARKABLE TRIP.

Cortlandt Bishop laid the telegram on the table and picked up his glass. Gentlemen, he said, please be upstanding for “our heroes.” The room rose as one and saluted the embarrassed pair. Neither Post nor Hawley displayed any desire to respond, observed the man from the
Boston Daily
Globe
, who had stuck limpetlike to the pair since their arrival in New York, so Bishop gave a knowing nod and said, “Keep your seats. You are men of action, not words.”
*

A little over twelve hours earlier Cortlandt Bishop had been in a far less good humor. He’d arrived at Belmont Park at seven o’clock on Friday morning to find the course enveloped in a heavy mist and a light drizzle watering the grass. The wind was at least behaving itself, thought Bishop as he walked toward hangar row, and so it seemed was the equally capricious Alfred Le Blanc.

Marguerite Martyn, the reporter for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
who had spent a day touring the hangars during St. Louis’s recent meet, had found Le Blanc the most intriguing aeronaut of all, a man who “would make a chapter in himself.” Most of the time in St. Louis, said Martyn, Le Blanc had been aloof both figuratively and literally. Yet “when he does come to our level he is most agreeable and charming.”

This morning Le Blanc was at peace with the world as he waited for his mechanics to finish tuning up his Blériot monoplane. He inspected his machine, giving the rudder and rear planes one or two turns, and examining the hundred-horse power engine with due diligence. He had on a tight-fitting helmet that covered his forehead, leaving visible two dark eyebrows that began on the bridge of his nose and climbed steeply away from his eyes, like Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxsey leaving Belmont Park. His mustache was long and curved, and his lower lip was unmistakably Gallic in its ability to express disdain with the slightest movement.

Up in the press stand the only reporter who had arrived early enough to witness Le Blanc’s inaugural flight at Belmont Park was the correspondent from the
New York evening Sun.
As his peers rode the railroad or drove out from New York City for the nine o’clock start, the newsman watched intently as Le Blanc ordered his men to crank up his machine. As the motor sounded, the Frenchman climbed into his seat and a few seconds later “raised his hand for the helpers behind to let go of the tugging flyer and [he] shot off like an arrow from a bow.” The reporter’s heart thumped as the Blériot’s hundred-horse power engine warmed to its task; he couldn’t believe no one else was here to see this, the first flight of “the most formidable foreign antagonist” in the competition, as one of his colleagues had earlier described Le Blanc. He was now sweeping down the back straight of the smaller course, past the hangars—where Grahame-White stood watching his foe—and approaching dead man’s turn. How would he cope with the notorious corner first time round? wondered the journalist. With ease. “His monoplane banked gracefully at the turn,” wrote the
Evening Sun
’s reporter, “[and] coming into the straight the Frenchman evidently gave his motor a little more gas for the monoplane seemed to suddenly leap forward and shot past the grandstand at terrific speed.” Le Blanc flew six laps, then landed close to his hangar, satisfied that he and his machine had the measure of the course. When the reporter reached him a few minutes later, Le Blanc’s face was streaked with oil but the Frenchman was in an ebullient mood. “Oh, I think I’ll be able to give the Wrights a good race,” he told a reporter.