Kid Carolina

by Heidi Schnakenberg

  Dick was seriously bitten by the aviation bug. He went back to Europe, took up an apartment in St. John’s Wood in London, bought a plane for himself, and spent the next year flying as often as he could. He took intensive courses in commercial flying in France, Germany, England, and Italy. While there, he also explored his love of sailing.

  In between commercial airline courses, Dick bought his first sailboat and acquired an English girlfriend named Pat, who followed him wherever he went. He picked up two crewmen, both two decades his senior, who were badly in need of work. One was a Navy sailor named Captain Phelps; the other was a sweet old man called “Honey” who knew the English coast like the back of his hand. Over the course of their route down the European coast, Captain Phelps taught Dick everything he knew about sailing.

  Honey had little formal navigation education, but he had a good sense of the sea. Instinctively, Honey managed to steer the boat anywhere they wanted to go. On one occasion they hit a storm in the Mediterranean, and Pat was thrown across the boat and injured. They were all up to their armpits in water but managed to survive and had to sail all night with the ship full of water. With Honey at the bridge, they made it safely through the night. Dick never doubted Honey’s navigation skills or the sturdiness of the sailboat again.

  Dick loved the boat so much, and the memories of his first sailing experiences that were associated with it, that he kept it for the rest of his life. The old boat symbolized Dick’s adaptability and his willingness to withstand extreme discomfort and danger for the sake of sailing, proving he was more than a soft, spoiled heir. But his strength when confronting such risky adventures would later contrast sharply with his weakness in the face of personal responsibility.

  Dick returned to New York in 1926, and recruited his younger brother, Smith, to Long Island’s Curtiss Field to work on planes with him for a new company he’d formed called Ireland Amphibian. The company was named for George Ireland, the builder of the fly boat aircraft that his company maintained. In 1926, his company participated in the development of the first amphibious planes produced in the United States. Later, the company would shuttle wealthy passengers from Manhattan to Long Island and back.

  At the time, Richard E. Byrd, Charles Lindbergh, Wilmer Stultz, and Amelia Earhart stored their planes at Curtiss Field. Dick and Smith both became acquainted with them all. On one occasion, Dick and Wilmer Stultz were in Pennsylvania together picking up a new plane when they met Lou Gordon, an expert Fokker mechanic. Dick and Wilmer invited Lou to Curtiss Field to work on manufacturing planes, and that was how Gordon got the job as Amelia Earhart’s mechanic, for which he would become famous.

  Meanwhile, Dick needed more cash. He had dreams of building his own commercial airline, and his several-thousand-dollar allowance wasn’t sufficient. He formally petitioned to have the trust company increase his allowance to $50,000. Uncle Will didn’t share Dick’s airline vision and thought the boy had lost his mind. But Will also knew that Mary’s and Nancy’s spending habits on clothes and food had spiraled out of control—he told himself that at least Dick was trying to be industrious.

  Dick won the petition and increased his allowance to $50,000.

  At age twenty-one, Dick watched as Charles Lindbergh rolled his airplane out from Curtiss Field in May of 1927. At eight in the morning, Lindbergh taxied the Spirit of St. Louis to the adjoining Roosevelt Field and departed for Paris, leaving cheering crowds behind. Dick and many other distinguished guests were there to see him off. After Lindbergh’s flight, Dick was so inspired by the event that he decided then and there to work on his new airline.

  His little brother, Smith, was even more inspired. By 1927, Smith was spending less time in high school and more time flying planes with Dick. He had become a seasoned pilot already, and participated in daring air races and stunt flying in New York and Winston-Salem, which was Smith’s specialty. Smith also took flying lessons under Orville Wright and acquired an official license bearing his signature, just like his big brother. Eventually sixteen-year-old Smith dropped out of school for good to become a full-time pioneer in the new industry.

  Both boys joined the Quiet Birdmen of America association, a secret aviation fraternity started by World War I pilots, officers, and Curtiss Field aviators in 1919. It was an aviation version of the Masons, and Dick and Smith were joined in the fraternity by Charles Lindbergh, among others. It was a fitting tribute to Dick’s and Smith’s growing obsession with aviation. Dick continued to be a charter member for most of his life.

  After Lindbergh’s historic flight, it seemed unthinkable that the owners of Curtiss Field were planning to sell the airfield to real estate developers. Dick intervened. In August of 1927, he bought the facility, upgraded the twenty hangars, and refurbished the entire field. In addition he bought thirteen passenger planes, and officially started his own airline—Reynolds Airways. It was one of the first domestic commercial airlines in the United States. The airline’s office was headquartered in Midtown Manhattan in the newly constructed Graybar office building behind Grand Central Station. In addition, Dick took a five-year lease on Hadley Field in New Jersey as a second base for the airline, which would provide domestic service from New York to smaller towns in upstate New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and eventually to Winston-Salem. Dick served as president of his new airline and appointed a former Navy pilot, Tiffany Carter, as his vice president. To manage the books, Dick hired a young lawyer from Winston-Salem, Stratton Coyner. Dick was later quoted saying, “Things that facilitate transportation do the greatest good for civilization.” It was clear that Dick meant, and acted on, what he said.

  Curtiss and Roosevelt fields were still very popular after Lindbergh’s flight, and Dick exploited the economic opportunity. Under Dick’s ownership, Curtiss Field offered organized tours of Lindbergh’s transatlantic takeoff site. Dick also offered flying lessons, many of which Dick and Smith taught themselves, and worked with the Plane Speaker Company—a maker of aerial speaker equipment—so advertisers could blast announcements from the air. It was also the era of Prohibition and, for a spell, his airline unwittingly assisted in illegal rum-running for mob boss Frank Costello until one of his planes crashed on a run.

  Dick used the Garden City Hotel as his base and went into Manhattan regularly on the weekends. Both he and Smith were familiar faces in New York’s fashionable cafés and speakeasies, and Dick even financed a couple of Broadway musicals just for fun. He spent piles of his new cash on expensive cars and gifts for his girlfriends.

  Smith continued to dabble in stunt flying and often practiced flying over the Reynolda golf course and Winston-Salem’s Miller Field, where Dick had just expanded his operations. When he was in New York, Smith became so attached to his brother’s airfields that he slept in the hangar at Hadley Field when he was working. He brought two of his friends, Ab Walker and John Graham, to work for Dick, and to keep him company. Smith was thrilled when he personally met Charles Lindbergh, who wanted to try out one of Dick’s planes at Curtiss Field and decided he would make Winston-Salem one of his stops on his national tour. Lindbergh’s interest in Winston-Salem set Dick and Smith into a flurry of activity to upgrade the city’s small Miller Airport in time. Dick donated money to build steel hangars, install electricity, and renovate the landing strips. On opening day ceremonies, there was an entertaining amateur air race, and Smith won.

  A Taste for Alcohol

  Along with developing companies, properties, and airplanes, Dick developed his drinking habit in New York as well. While the almost nightly rowdy parties in New York’s speakeasies and cafés had been fun, they also fostered Dick’s alcoholism. When Dick was under the influence, his behavior was often erratic, bizarre, and wildly unpredictable.

  While Dick was working on his new airline, he rented a cottage in Long Beach, Long Island, which he shared with Smith’s friend John Graham and a few servants that he’d brought up from Winston-Salem. But that fall—on September 11, 1927—Dick attended a play he had fin
anced but had never seen before, called Half a Widow, at the Waldorf Theatre. A few days later, he got rid of his Long Island cottage and told his Winston-Salem servants they were no longer needed and that he would be sending them back home to Reynolda. Dick, John Graham, and another colleague, Manuel H. Davis of the Plane Speaker Company, moved into the Hotel White on Lexington Avenue.

  On September 15, Dick cashed a check for $5,000, and told his chauffeur, John de Carlos, to buy $130 worth of train tickets for the servants to return to Winston-Salem, and asked him to see them off at Penn Station. Then he told the chauffeur to take his Rolls-Royce to the Mineola rail station, where Dick would pick it up at 11:00 P.M. after he visited the Nassau County Fair.

  Dick picked up John Graham and the two went to the fair briefly but soon made their way to Rothman’s Roadhouse in Oyster Bay, where they drank until eleven. Then they made their way into Manhattan to the Charm Club at 137 West Fifty-first Street, where they stayed until the early morning hours.

  After a long night, Dick and John Graham left with a Broadway showgirl, Marie Houston, and Dick asked John to see Marie off at Grand Central Station at 6:00 A.M. That was the last anyone saw of Dick.

  Meanwhile, at 12:30 A.M. the same night, late-shift workmen at Orchard Beach heard a loud splash in Long Island Sound. They found the noise peculiar but went on working anyway. A few days later, Dick’s abandoned Rolls-Royce was found overturned in the water in Port Washington. The car had gone over a six-foot concrete pier at Chicken Point at the end of a mile-long rough dirt road. The car had apparently been driven to the pier with the headlights off. The workmen fished the car out of the water and it sat on the beach for several days, unclaimed, until John de Carlos retrieved it. He didn’t say a word about what had happened and seemed unsurprised to see the car there.

  Meanwhile, almost two weeks passed and no one had seen or heard from Dick. Uncle Will, Ed Johnston (who was still a guardian at the time), and Dick’s officers at Reynolds Airways began to worry that something had happened to him. When they determined that the upturned Rolls-Royce was Dick’s, they began to panic. They figured that the car went into the water about the same time that Dick would have been going from Long Island to Manhattan, but a thorough search around Chicken Point turned up nothing. Ed went to New York, enlisted the help of private detectives at the Val O’Farrell Agency, and initiated a nationwide manhunt. Uncle Will offered a large reward if anyone found Dick. The producers of Half a Widow were frantically looking for Dick, too, because they were relying on him to pay salaries and rentals or their show would close.

  The case of the missing tobacco heir was all over the news. As the days passed, all kinds of tips came in. One couple thought they spotted him at a sporting event in Florida; others reported seeing him in Chicago. But most tips were coming from St. Louis.

  As the days went on, some family members were decidedly unworried. One of Dick’s relatives, H. W. Reynolds, said, “We think Dick is somewhere hiding, it’s a habit of his to go away without telling anyone.”

  Eventually Dick’s chauffeur came forward and said Dick told them he was leaving New York, and once he left his car in Port Washington for him, he was off duty indefinitely. Then, Marie Houston turned up in New York and told authorities she had gone to St. Louis to see a sick relative and Dick had paid her way, but she hadn’t seen him since. John Graham was repeatedly grilled about Dick’s whereabouts, but he refused to talk, saying he hadn’t seen Dick since the morning of the 16th and he didn’t wish to fuel speculation. Meanwhile, Half a Widow closed.

  Finally, the investigators got a tip from a man named Charles Cruinshaw in St. Louis, who said he knew where Dick was but he wanted to secure his reward before he would reveal his whereabouts. Once investigators assured him that he would be paid, he said Dick could be found “in the fifth booth on the left side of the room at the Grand Inn of 910 North Grand Boulevard.”

  Sure enough, the detectives descended on a chop suey joint at that address and found a man fitting the description of Dick, sitting in a booth with a man and woman. The man’s shirt was soiled, his tie crooked, and he carried an unmarked suitcase. When detectives first approached him, the man denied he was Dick Reynolds and said he was from Maine. Then he produced a driver’s license with the name John Graham. Detectives said that Dick Reynolds was associated with a John Graham, and the man said he had heard of Reynolds and Graham of Winston-Salem but it wasn’t him.

  The detectives knew he was lying. Finally, Dick said, “This is getting on my nerves. Yes, I’m Reynolds.”

  While Dick talked, the man and woman he was with slipped out of the restaurant, never to be seen again. It had become a habit of Dick’s to pick up “temporary friends” on such excursions, whom he kept around as drinking companions for days on end. The unidentified man and woman, as well as Mr. Cruinshaw, were likely more of his typical human collectibles.

  Dick was further identified by an engraved green fountain pen that he carried with him everywhere. But Dick’s explanation for his long absence only got weirder.

  He said he left unannounced because he “did not wish to be bothered,” and he first went to the heavyweight rematch between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. Then he registered at the Claridge Hotel under the name Joy K. Fleet (named for a character in a film), where the bellboys reportedly enjoyed generous tips, and he attended the local horse and dog races in both Chicago and St. Louis. He said he’d only found out about the manhunt the day before and had confided in Mr. Cruinshaw that he was the man they were looking for. Dick offered no explanation for the Rolls-Royce, except to say that it must have been stolen, and claimed to have told both John Graham and Manuel Davis where he was going.

  The newspapers were unsatisfied with Dick’s nonexplanation. He continued to be questioned and he finally said he just got “fed up” with New York where “money talks.” “No matter what I do, where I go, they’ve always got something to sell me. It’s buy this stock or buy that. I just got fed up on society and the night life along Broadway and decided to take a sort of vacation,” said an exasperated Dick.

  While he was “on vacation,” a tragic Reynolds Airways plane accident occurred on September 17. One of the sightseeing planes had crashed near New Jersey’s Hadley Field, killing seven people onboard. Dick was so disillusioned by the accident that he left his officers to handle the day-to-day operations of the airline. Dick’s fabulous aviation adventures in Long Island were dampened by this tragedy. All of the intensity, money, and interest he had poured into the industry abruptly dropped off. Dick always felt personally responsible for the crash, and carried the guilt of it for the rest of his life.

  In October of 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed in Winston-Salem’s Miller Field. Of the two brothers, only Smith was there to meet him. Two years later, Dick sold Curtiss Field for a large profit. Over the course of the next four years, Reynolds Airways moved its headquarters to Winston-Salem and would expand to Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Myrtle Beach, but Dick was rarely around to see it. The airline was almost entirely run by Dick’s employees.

  After the St. Louis incident, Dick faltered for his next move. Looking back on it, he concluded that if he could go to such extremes to get away from the press, his family, and his obligations, it was time for a dramatic change. He vowed not to return to Winston-Salem for seven years until he would get his full inheritance, which was growing by $1 million in stock dividends each year.

  Dick moved back to Europe straightaway.

  Dick in Paris and London

  Dick returned to his apartment in St. John’s Wood and took up another apartment in Paris. He spent time drinking and playing dominoes in Paris’s most fashionable cafés and was a regular at Chez Fred Payne’s on Pigalle’s rue Blanche and Harry’s New York Bar on rue Daunou. Fred Payne used to joke that he always knew Dick was coming by the noise of his Bugatti and his bellowing laugh, which could be heard halfway up the street. Although he tried to escape, the news agencies followed him there, too. He was
still cursing Broadway and the fuss over his disappearance, saying he was “fed up” with the failures of the Broadway shows he financed and complaining about the man-hunt. When asked if he was interested in getting married and settling down, he said, “Nothing doing.”

  Although Dick renounced Broadway, around this time he met a German dancer named Johanna Rischke and promised her a career in the theater in New York. Rischke, probably one of Dick’s girlfriends, took Dick seriously and at his urging quit her job and prepared to move. She obtained a visa and later moved to America, along with a shaky contract that Dick set up with a dance company in New York.

  Meanwhile, Dick loved life in Europe and spent more time cruising the Riviera in his boat. In spite of himself, Dick continued to be an accidental supporting character in the middle of major historical events. He returned to England when Amelia Earhart landed the Friendship in Southampton, and he greeted both Earhart and his good friends Wilmer Stultz and Lou Gordon upon their arrival. Dick was lucky enough to be a guest of honor at the Royal Aero Club in London when Wilmer Stultz spoke of the amazing experience of flying with Earhart. Earhart later sold the plane in England and gave Dick the aluminum pontoons for safekeeping. She couldn’t have known that Dick was not the best guardian of precious artifacts. He stored them in a warehouse by the Southampton shipyard, but they disappeared before he could donate them to a museum as he’d intended. The pontoons were not the first and certainly would not be the last items of value lost to Dick’s carelessness.

  Dick continued to shuttle between London and Paris and sailed whenever he had the chance. As he developed his drinking habit, he also engaged in more peculiar behavior. He was seen hanging out in London’s impoverished Limehouse neighborhood for weeks, dressed up as a beggar himself and calling himself “Jack Ashore” as he drank and cavorted with the locals. Sometimes he even rescued poor prostitutes who worked the Thames Embankment. He would give them money for a tryst, but instead of taking advantage of them he let them go. But Dick would soon learn that drinking and alcohol were not without their consequences—not even for a privileged young heir like himself.