by T. E. Cruise
And there were photographs of his family: Erica in her helmet and goggles, smiling triumphantly from the cockpit of her Curtiss biplane racer after participating at an air race at Santa Monica’s Clover Field; Erica horseback riding in Wyoming. There was a photo of his two kids at the beach, with the nanny.
It was funny how there were no pictures of the family together…
His office had a view of the bay. The windows were open, and the tangy wind blowing off the sea was fresh and clean. He shielded his eyes as he stared enviously out at the blue water flecked with golden light, dotted with fishing boats being escorted by blizzards of gulls. The fishing boats trailed white, foamy wakes as they placidly chugged along. Life out there looked very peaceful and simple…
He went into the washroom adjoining his office and rinsed his face with cold water. He was twenty-seven, but he looked much older, and very tired, as he stared into the mirror. He smoothed down his moustache and thinning hair, straightened the knot in his necktie, and then went back for his suit jacket. He left the office the back way, so that he wouldn’t encounter any employees on his way out to the parking field, where he got into his Stutz Bulldog Tourer.
Gold had coveted a Bulldog ever since he’d first laid eyes on the roomy convertible built on the frame of a Stutz Bearcat. Nineteen eighteen was the last year in which Stutz had built them, so Gold had been forced to settle for used, even though he could afford most any new car. He’d bought this one last year, plunking down twenty-eight hundred for the trade-in, at the Stutz dealership on Wilshire Boulevard. With Teddy’s help he’d lovingly refurbished it and then had the Stutz repainted his colors: lacquered turquoise, with scarlet fenders the velvety hue of fine Burgundy.
As Gold drove to the airfield he couldn’t help thinking back on the last few years, on how hard he’d worked to build something good. Now it looked like it might all crumble away…
That first year he and Erica lived in a small bungalow apartment within walking distance of the trolley line to Mines Field. Gold had been in the cockpit of one of his De Havillands, somewhere in the air between Frisco and Los Angeles, when Erica went into labor. A message had been waiting for him when he landed in Los Angeles. His wife was at the hospital. By the time he got there, Erica had given birth to a daughter. They named her Susan Alice, after Erica’s two grandmothers.
In those days, Gold, along with Hull and Les, took turns doing the flying on their single L.A./Frisco mail route, but as the business expanded to include mail and cargo delivery routes all along the West Coast, Gold found himself increasingly desk-bound. He put Hull and Lester Stiles behind desks as well, in charge of recruiting and supervising the pilots who flew the military surplus airplanes that Gold gradually added to his fleet.
Gold Express really began to prosper when it began to haul passengers. Most of them were Hollywood people, the movie stars whose inscribed photos were not on his office walls. The flight accommodations were spartan. Passengers would dress in fleece-lined overalls supplied to them at the hangar/terminal. Once aboard the modified surplus bombers, they would squeeze themselves in as best they could among the mail sacks, to peer out through the porthole-like windows that had been installed in the fuselage.
Fortunately, show business people were game to try anything new, especially when it might get their names in the newspapers. Gold got the idea to have the fleece-lined overalls dyed turquoise, to have “Gold Express” stitched over the breast pocket, and his trademark centaur embroidered across the back. He let the passengers keep the overalls as a souvenir. Quickly it became a status symbol in Hollywood to have a pair. The publicity garnered more business for Gold Express, allowing Gold to pay off the balance of his original fifteen-thousand-dollar business loan.
He also bought a house, a real house, not a junky little bungalow shoehorned in among its neighbors on some treeless, sunbaked tract. He put down ten thousand cash, taking out a twenty-five-thousand-dollar mortgage on a sparkling white Spanish Colonial on a quiet street, lush with jacaranda trees and desert palms, in small-town Pasadena, ten miles to the east of downtown Los Angeles. The day he and his family moved in was one of the most satisfying in Gold’s life.
Keeping on top of his business had forced Gold to drastically curtail his own flying, but Erica was spending enough time in the air for both of them. She’d taken flying lessons at Santa Monica’s Clover Air Field. She’d quickly won her license, in the process becoming good friends with another of her instructor’s pupils, a young woman named Amelia Earhart, who was always looking for extra money to pay for her flying. Occasionally, once Amelia had her license, Gold let her fill in flying mail and cargo when he was short a pilot.
It was Amelia who encouraged Erica to take part in a few local air meets. Erica did well and was bitten by the racing bug. She badgered Gold into buying her a racer; Gold got a good deal on a state-of-the-art Curtiss Navy Racer that had been almost totaled in a crash. Once his people had the Curtiss back together, Gold assigned Erica a mechanic full-time to take care of the plane. A nanny was hired to care for Susan so that Erica could be free to haul her race-bird up and down the West Coast. She rarely won a competition, which was fine with Gold, since the pilots who won the most were also the pilots who suffered the most accidents, but Erica almost always placed well in the pack. That, in itself, was a notable achievement for a woman racing against men. Soon she had a sizable collection of plaques and trophies. The fact that Erica was involved in a terribly risky sport such as airplane racing upset Gold. On the other hand, he knew that he’d married a daredevil.
Meanwhile, Gold Express kept growing, especially the passenger side of the business. Gold needed bigger, more comfortable planes: paying customers couldn’t be expected to perch on mail sacks forever. The Stout Company of Dearborn, Michigan, manufactured a suitable airplane, but its entire output had already been spoken for by Henry Ford, who was running a mail delivery and passenger service out of Michigan. Gold looked to Europe, where the commercial airline business was thriving, especially the German lines run by the huge Spatz aircraft manufacturing company. When the Versailles Treaty forbade the Germans from building warplanes, Spatz gave up its fighter line and concentrated on designing larger aircraft suited for commercial uses. Gold had not flown any Spatz-built fighters during the war; they were used mostly by the ground-attack squadrons; but he had total confidence in German engineering. He had his eye on the Spatz F-5, a four-passenger transport monoplane. It was a lovely bird, thirty-two feet long, with a fifty-eight-foot wingspan and a shiny skin of corrugated duralumin. It was powered by a silky B.M.W. engine, and cost fifteen thousand dollars.
Gold went to Lane Barker, argued that his company’s newly expanded feeder routes to Catalina Island, and as far east as Salt Lake City, warranted renewed and expanded financial confidence, and came away with a seventy-five-thousand-dollar loan. He spent thirty thousand on two Spatz F-5s. He now owned twelve airplanes. He used the rest of the money to make good on an old promise he’d made to Teddy Quinn, and to himself, by establishing a design and manufacturing facility in a warehouse in Santa Monica and allowing his chief engineer a fat research and design budget.
Gold changed the name of his company to encompass the expanded potential symbolized by his new Santa Monica headquarters. Gold Express became Gold Aviation.
Someday, he vowed, he’d be selling airplanes to Europe, and not the other way around.
In 1924, a second child was born. It was a boy, whom they named Steven, after Erica’s brother who was killed in the war. Soon after, Teddy and his engineering team gave birth to a creation that brought Gold almost as much pleasure as he was receiving from his new son: the initial design for a new monoplane, dubbed the G-1 (Gold 1) Yellowjacket.
The new plane was going to need an engine. Gold talked to a number of established firms, but was intrigued by a small but promising San Diego company, Rodgers and Simpson. He liked their ideas, and the fact that they were young and anxious to do great things, like himself. He ga
ve them the job, pumping cash into their endeavor to build a suitable power plant for the G-1.
About that time Spatz came out with a new, structurally strengthened version of the F-5— the F-5a—capable of taking a larger engine, which meant increased cargo and passenger capabilities. The F-5a cost twenty thousand dollars. Gold bought three, by selling off six of his older, smaller, military surplus airplanes to free up ten thousand in cash, and going back to Lane Barker to borrow another fifty thousand. His turquoise and scarlet fleet was now shrunk to nine airplanes, but five of them were large, modern aircraft that could more efficiently move an increased number of passengers and larger shipments of mail and freight. Gold came up with cabin and engine modification ideas that would allow him to further increase the F-5a’s capabilities. He put Teddy in charge of carrying out the modifications ASAP; Gold couldn’t afford to allow sixty grand worth of airplanes to lie idle for long.
It seemed to Gold that the bigger he got, the thinner were his operating margins. The money was flowing out as fast as it came in; faster, actually, considering the loans outstanding. Gold would periodically worry about it, but then put it all out of his mind. He was receiving all the credit he asked for, so he had to be doing something right. Anyway, his secretary was in charge of bookkeeping. Ledgers were boring, and pilots couldn’t abide being bored.
He told himself that he had no worries because he had no competition. Whenever a Johnny-come-lately outfit tried to muscle in on his territory Gold would temporarily cut his rates on that particular line, letting his other routes take up the slack. Invariably the fledgling competition would shrivel up and die.
In February of 1925, with the full cooperation of the U.S. Post Office, Congress passed the Kelly Air Mail Act, which was intended to gradually take the government out of the air transport business by allowing private enterprise to take over the main transcontinental mail route. The Kelly Act turned out to be both less, and more, than Gold and the other private carriers had hoped. In July, the U.S. Post Office announced that it would temporarily keep control of the main transcontinental route, and, to Gold’s dismay, that control of the feeder lines would now be officially assigned according to bids submitted through the local postmaster, with the process open to any interested party. The post office would pay a standardized rate for carrying the mail, but each contractor could charge what he wished for hauling passengers and private freight.
Gold quickly began preparing his bid to hold on to his routes. Meanwhile, he nervously waited for the other shoe to drop, and, a couple of weeks later, it did.
A pair of ex-postal service fliers, backed by an investment group, had formed an outfit they’d dubbed Southern California Air Transport to go after Gold’s routes. SCAT’s underwriting financiers were spreading the word in the business community—which, in turn, would most certainly influence the local postmaster’s recommendation—that SCAT would fly cargo more cheaply than Gold Aviation. Gold had countered by promising to match the competition’s low-ball bid to the private service sector. He had also reminded the business community of the post office’s announcement that when the bids were opened on September 15, control of the Contract Air Mail routes—CAMs—would be awarded on the basis of financial stability, safety, and general moral fitness.
Gold, remembering the lesson taught to him by his father-in-law, had from the very beginning of his business career found the means to donate substantial sums to local charities and causes, establishing a solid reputation for himself as a philanthropist. He was confident that plenty of important people would attest to his moral fitness.
He also had been able to boast that dependability and safety were the hallmarks of Gold Aviation. At least they had been until today.
He turned right, onto the approach road to Mines Field. A couple of miles ahead an oily, black cloud was hanging like doom over his hangar/terminal facility. Even from this distance Gold could smell the stink of gasoline and burnt rubber. The opposite side of the road was clogged with fire-fighting vehicles leaving the scene. Several ambulances were also coming from the crash site. They seemed in no hurry, and their sirens were not howling.
Police were at the chain-link gate to his facility, holding back the reporters and the inevitable, morbid curiosity seekers. He beeped his horn and the cops cleared a path for him.
“Any comment, Mister Gold?” a reporter shouted as Gold drove through the gate. “What do you think caused the accident?” another reporter chimed in.
Gold ignored the questions, annoyed that the news photographers holding their cameras high over their heads were clicking his photograph like he was some sort of gangster. Once he was through the gate he stopped the car to summon over the uniformed sergeant in charge of the police detail. “See that those newshounds are kept out,” he ordered.
“Yes, sir, Mister Gold.” The cop nodded.
He drove up to the simple, corrugated steel building that was his hangar/terminal, and parked. As he got out of the Stutz, his flight operations supervisor, Bill Tolliver, came scurrying over.
“I don’t know what happened, Mister Gold,” Tolliver said quickly.
Gold noticed the other employees at the hangar watching him out of the corners of their eyes. They were giving him a wide berth as they went about their business, tending to his airplanes.
“She was coming in fine and all at once she exploded,” Tolliver was saying.
“Before she even touched down?” Gold muttered, and then shook his head, perplexed. “Okay, Bill,” he sighed, and then added sharply, “I don’t want you making any statements to the press—”
“No, sir!” Tolliver said, sounding affronted. “I’d never do that, Mister Gold.”
Gold smiled wearily. “I guess you wouldn’t, Bill. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to take this out on you. It’s just that I…”
“Sure, Mister Gold, no problem,” Tolliver said softly. “I understand. All them people, and Les…”
“What?” Gold felt dizzy. “What about Les?”
Tolliver paled. “You didn’t know?”
Gold’s eyes began to blur with tears. “Les was crewing on that plane?”
“I’m awful sorry,” Tolliver whispered.
“But he wasn’t on flight duty—He’s been off it for years, goddammit!”
“He insisted,” Tolliver said quickly. “The scheduled pilot took sick, Les couldn’t find a replacement, so he took the flight. I’m awful sorry, Mister Gold, but I don’t have rank over him. I couldn’t do anything about it.”
Gold felt numb. “Where’s Hull?”
“He went to tell Les’s wife.”
Gold nodded. “I’m expecting Teddy,” he managed, wiping his eyes. “When he gets here, please have—”
“He’s here already, Mister Gold,” Tolliver said. “He was out here running a routine check on another airplane when the accident happened.”
“Where is he?”
“Out on the field.” Tolliver shrugged. “Looking at what’s left…”
Gold walked around the hangar/terminal and out onto the field. He saw Teddy Quinn, his fedora pulled low on his brow, his suit jacket and striped necktie snapping like flags in the breeze, wandering amidst the smoldering wreckage of the Spatz. Twisted chunks of metal were scattered all across the runway.
Gold paused to gaze at the crumpled tail assembly of the plane. His trademark was still recognizable on the vertical tail fin, but that scorched centaur against its field of blistered yellow no longer looked so proud now that it was lying in the oil-soaked mud.
Gold walked over to Teddy. “Enough here to tell us what happened?” he asked.
Teddy shook his head. “There isn’t even enough left intact to tell us that this was an airplane.”
Gold nodded. “Doesn’t matter. We know what happened, don’t we?” Teddy didn’t reply. “We know what caused this.” He paused, and then added bitterly, “Or should I say who caused it?”
“Come on, Herm,” Teddy grumbled. “That isn’t going to help any
thing.”
“Bullshit!” Gold exploded. “Les was my friend! We went back a long ways together! Once he even saved my life! Did you know that I’d shot him down during the war? I didn’t kill him then, but I sure as hell did today—”
“This is not your fault,” Teddy said calmly.
“Yes it is, and you know it!” Gold replied. “This happened because I was in such a goddamned hurry to get these planes modified and into service! I wasn’t thinking clearly, or responsibly. I was too anxious not to have to cancel our flights.”
“With good reason. Canceling flights at a time like this, when our routes are up for grabs, would have looked very bad.”
“Yeah,” Gold sneered in disgust. “I wonder how my burning ten people to death, one of them one of my best friends, is going to look.”
“You didn’t burn anyone!” Teddy quickly said. “Don’t forget, I triple-checked every modification made.” Teddy took a crumbled pack of Luckies and a lighter out of his coat pockets. “I gave my approval.”
“I bullied you into that—” Gold said fiercely.
“You’re full of shit, Herm, if you think I would ever let you bully me into something like that!” Teddy replied, angry now. With shaking fingers he extracted a smoke from the pack and cupped his hands against the wind to get it lit. “Why, you even piloted the modified prototype on its test flight, goddamn you!” Teddy continued, exhaling smoke. “You risked your life, because you didn’t feel it would be appropriate to ask one of our pilots to do so. I stood down here, biting my fucking nails, thinking about how I was going to break the news of your death to Erica, while you put that fully loaded plane through every maneuver it was capable of, and some stunts it wasn’t capable of, trying to get it to misbehave, but it didn’t.”
