too soon.” I have thought about that day, which seems a very short time ago, many times. I was in a hurry to grow up because I was living among airplanes and pilots and I wanted to be a part of that exciting world. I could not wait to get my hands on the controls.
I always looked forward to Dad returning after he was gone for several days because he quite often brought me a present, usually an airplane that the Natives from the outlying villages had carved. I never expected a present other than a toy airplane. I made my first model airplanes out of toothpicks and tissue paper. Eventually, an older friend in the neighborhood, Frank Conway, was kind enough to teach me to build with model airplane kits and to show me how to fly them. In those days, the power models flew “free flight,” meaning they were trimmed to climb making left turns with the help of engine torque and when the engine quit, they would descend in right turns minus torque and hopefully land not too far away.
Later, I got into control line flying. The ignition on the gas engines operated with two flashlight batteries, a coil, and a condenser, which provided spark plug ignition through points that opened and closed on a cam on the crankshaft. When the engine would not start it was usually due to no spark. When this happened, I often persuaded Richard to put his hand on the spark plug to see if there was any spark. When he resisted, I told him that if he didn’t do it, he could not watch me fly. He finally figured out that I had no way of preventing him from watching. As he got older, he blamed his hair loss on all of the electric shocks I forced on him.
One of the best things about airplane-crazy kids having a pilot for a dad is that we ended up with old airplanes in our backyard that provided endless hours of fun and fed our dreams about someday becoming pilots. The first old plane was an Avro Avian biplane that my dad’s good friend Robert Crawford had crashed. Somehow my dad ended up with it and even though he had the Wien mechanics rebuild it, he never trusted the splices in the fuselage enough to fly it. So Richard and I got it.
Then when I was around twelve years old, my brother and I talked the owner of a Kinner Bird biplane into selling it. It had been sitting at Weeks Field for years and was complete except for the engine. We paid five dollars of our hard-earned allowance money for it. What a find that would be today. As I remember, the wings had been removed and were lying alongside the airplane. We didn’t even bother to take them with us. As we walked home pushing the fuselage, a policeman stopped us and asked where did we think we were going with that airplane? We had to stay there until he verified the transaction from the seller. That Kinner powered Bird provided us with many good hours of simulated flight, but in time we decided to remove the fabric and cover the bare fuselage with canvas and make a boat out of it. We lived near a slough and longed to get out on the water. That plan didn’t turn out too well. But, always full of new ideas, I decided I would convert the fuselage into a helicopter using the old Avro engine that was stored in the Wien hangar. After I finished drawing up my plans for the helicopter, I showed them to my dad. He acted very impressed and told me that he thought it would fly. Encouraged by his comments, I went to work but eventually I ran into structural and design problems and aborted the program due to lack of funding. My twenty-five cents a week fell short on costs. I sure wish I had that rare airplane now.…
AS I GREW OLDER, IT DIDN’T TAKE ME long to figure out that the gasoline engine could open up a whole new world for me. In the back of the Pacific Alaska hangar, there was a dump where they discarded old airplane parts and my friends and I would scrounge through it looking for construction material. One day we discovered a motorcycle frame with an engine still attached. We unbolted the engine and dragged it home in a little wagon.
Inside a tent in the backyard, I was busy dreaming up plans for how to use the engine when a stranger appeared at the tent opening. He was searching the neighborhood for his missing engine and was giving me a good chewing out when my mother heard the commotion and came out of the house. She did not like seeing her son being verbally abused and gave the man a tongue lashing in the way only a mother could do. He took the engine back, but a few days later I found a small 5/8 hp engine sitting on the front steps. I guess the man took pity on me and saw that I was simply a curious kid. It did not have much power but it was self-contained with the fuel tank in the frame and it ran perfectly.
Anything motorized caught my attention. A close family friend, Joe Crosson, built a small go-cart for his sons with a Maytag gas-powered washing machine engine. It was a masterpiece of engineering. Day after day, Joe allowed me to share it with his sons on the Pacific Alaska Airways ramp at Weeks Field, giving me a thrill that I was able to drive a “car.”
I figured out another way to benefit from motorized transportation. When I knew that my father was due home from the airport, I waited for him with my bike at the corner of our block and intercepted him on the road. He would slow down and let me put my right foot on the running board of our 1941 Studebaker while I hung on to the door sill with my right hand, steering the bike with my left. That was the only way I could figure how to motorize my bicycle. Sometimes he would go around the block to give me an extended ride.
As I grew into my early teens, my father let me drive the Wien Airlines tractor that they used to tow airplanes. When we used it to landscape our yard, my younger brother and sister would hang on to the drag as I towed it and it was great fun. In later years when I worked for Wien Airlines after school and on weekends, they let me tow airplanes with that tractor. It was all part of my learning and I’m sure my early interest in all things motorized helped me when I began learning to fly.
In the years that followed, I yearned for motorized transportation of my own. I finally determined that if I were ever going to have a car, I had to build it myself. I scrounged airplane parts from the Wien hangar—wheels, tail wheel forks, steering wheels, and tubing—and talked the mechanics into welding the different parts together. For the pulley that I needed to mount on the drive wheel I bolted two pizza pans together. I scrounged a V belt from an old car and installed the 5/8 hp engine that had been given to me. I guess you would call the transmission a direct drive system. I built about three go-carts and they all ran, if only for a short distance.
MY FASCINATION WITH AIRPLANES CAME NOT ONLY FROM having a well-known aviator as my father, but also from my exposure to the pilots and flights that passed through Fairbanks, an aviation crossroads at that time, throughout my childhood. When world renowned pilots and airplanes would arrive in Fairbanks, most of the town, including my family, went to the airport. It was an educational experience for me to see these different airplanes and hear about their missions.
When I was about eight years old, I remember meeting Robert Crawford, the composer of the Army Air Corps song, and sitting on the floor next to the piano, watching him bang out “Off We Go” so loudly that I had to cover my ears.
The first Army airplanes—two Douglas O-38 biplanes—arrived at Weeks Field in 1934 to survey Alaska for an Army airfield location. President Roosevelt was concerned that Alaska might be vulnerable to attack, but this was still a time when the Navy’s viewpoint about national security held sway; battleships were considered more important than air power. For years, General Billy Mitchell had tried to convince the military that airplanes were critical to national defense and he made this point so strongly that he was later court-martialed for insubordination. In 1925, he had even forecast that someday the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor from the air, and this, of course, is exactly what happened. The Japanese paid attention to General Mitchell and so at the beginning of World War II, they had more airplanes and aircraft carriers than the United States. It’s too bad we didn’t listen to him. Shortly after the O-38s, Major Hap Arnold arrived with ten Martin B-10s to prove the capability of the Air Service as they continued to push for more emphasis on air power.
In 1935, I was playing with my friend Earle Grandison, and we saw Wiley Post and Will Rogers flying over Fairbanks. Their plane was a Lockheed on floats, which was actually assembled from parts of two different Lockheeds. Wiley had installed a larger engine with a heavier than usual three-bladed propeller, making the plane very nose heavy. It probably never should have been certified. I accompanied
