The many aviation parties in Manhattan were already in full swing by the time Ralph Johnstone got back to the Hotel Manhattan and the warming embrace of his wife and son. Armstrong Drexel and Claude Grahame-White were guests of Jay Gould and his wife at their Fifth Avenue mansion, and Count de Lesseps was the host of a sumptuous banquet at the St. Regis Hotel for the French aviators. Red roses adorned each table—a celebration of his love for Grace McKenzie. Colonel John Jacob Astor had commandeered another of the St. Regis’s private dining rooms, and he and his guests—including members of the Guinness family—were discussing the day’s events at Belmont Park. The dining room of the Hotel Astor had been decorated to reflect New York’s modish mania for all things aeronautical, with souvenir pennants from Belmont Park, model balloons and biplanes, and even airplane-shaped ices for dessert.
Amid the festivities only a spoilsport would have drawn attention to the evening papers and the news that another aviator—the third in as many days—had been killed.* The unfortunate man, Fernard Blanchard, had dropped to his death from one hundred feet during a Paris air show.
* Was his stamina innate or induced? Throughout his flying career, Grahame-White was a regular user of Phosferine, an opiate marketed as a liquid “tonic.” Along with stars of cricket and soccer, Grahame-White appeared in a Phosferine advertising campaign in 1910, saying that it was “most effective in preventing and overcoming the effects of nerve strain and exposure. Phosferine braces and tones the system until one is capable of exceptional endurance.” Phosferine was later banned in the UK.
* Astor married Madeline in September 1911, and to escape the disapproval of New York society they fled to Europe on tour. In April 1912 they returned, on board the Titanic. The pregnant Madeline survived, but her husband went down with the ship.
* A German called Monte had been killed on a Wright biplane during a meet in Germany on Tuesday.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
There’s Always a Chimney for a Man
to Hang On To
Thursday, October 27, 1910
Charles Heitman had been packing a few essentials into his valise on Wednesday afternoon when he heard a knock on the front door of his Manhattan home. He presumed it was his chauffeur, come to drive him to Grand Central Station so he could take a train to Canada to help in the search for his missing friends. But it wasn’t his chauffeur, it was a messenger boy, and he handed the maid who answered the door a telegram for her master. When Heitman opened the message, he cried out in astonishment.
LANDED PERIBONKA RIVER. LAKE CHILAGOMA, NINETEENTH. ALL WELL. HAWLEY.
Within minutes Heitman’s chauffeur had arrived, but instead of driving his master to the station, he was ordered to deposit him at the headquarters of the Aero Club of America in the Engineering Society’s Building at 29 West Thirty-ninth Street. Once there Heitman “began sending messages to all points where searchers were busy, advising them of the safety of the men they sought.”
Edward Stratton of the Aero Club received the news in Ottawa, where he had established a control room to liaise between the club’s New York HQ and Lewis Spindler, who was in the isolated Ontarian town of Chapleau, 350 miles northwest of Toronto. Stratton gave a joyful shout, then rushed over to the “huge map of Ontario and Quebec” in his office on which were plotted the routes of the other nine balloons. The Düsseldorf II was represented by a circled 9 on the map; it lay east of Kiskisink, and south of Lake St. John. Stratton checked the telegram in his hand. He hadn’t been mistaken, the America II had landed north of the lake. He banged the map in delight and hollered, “He wins the cup!”
William Hawley had been so overwrought when Heitman broke the news over the telephone, all he could muster in response was “My God.” A few minutes later, however, his own telegram arrived, and he stared in mute wonder at the piece of paper that proved his brother’s survival. Later, speaking from the doorstep of the apartment he shared with Alan, William described how his brother had conditioned himself prior to the contest. “For two weeks before leaving for St. Louis he planned his days with reference to the strain that would be placed upon him during the race,” William said. “He retired early, almost at sundown, and gave himself time for all of the sleep which nature would accept. He was under a rather nervous tension for a few days preceding the race, but physically was in superb condition.”
“Overjoyed” was the reaction of Samuel Perkins to the news, at least according to the New York Herald, when it called on him in New York. By then he’d had time to compose himself after the shock of receiving Hawley and Post’s teasingly terse message. Perkins showed the Herald a facsimile of the telegram he had sent to St. Ambroise (with forwarding instructions):
Indications are that you have beaten the world’s record for sustained flight in a balloon. Please accept my sincerest congratulations on your success. You are the only ones I would be glad to see win outside myself. I know from my own experiences what you must have risked to make such a trip.
Charles Heitman had telephoned the news to Belmont Park, and the message was taken by the committee’s treasurer, Charles Edwards, who “immediately dropped the telephone receiver” and rushed into the office of J. C. McCoy, chairman of the Belmont Park committee. McCoy was deep in discussion with Cortlandt Bishop and Allan Ryan about what to do if the blessed wind didn’t die down, but Edwards didn’t care. He threw his hat to the ceiling and shouted, “Hurrah, Hawley and Post are safe and are returning.” After a round of hearty rejoicing, Bishop addressed the assembled reporters outside the clubhouse and explained that Hawley and Post’s disappearance had “cast a gloom over the international meet, which will now be removed.” A few minutes later Peter Prunty broke the news to the crowd, and for the next hour everyone forgot about the wind as Hawley and Post “became the sole topic of conversation” in Belmont Park.
The cartography skills of the American press left a lot to be desired when Thursday’s newspapers were published. Or perhaps something had been lost in communication with all the telegrams buzzing between Canada and the United States. But no two publications could seem to agree on exactly how far the America II had traveled. The New York Herald credited Hawley and Post with 1,460 miles, but the New York Times was sure it was 1,450 miles. The Daily Picayune of New Orleans considered it more like 1,350 miles, while the New York Sun’s distance of 1,300 miles was the most conservative. Newspapers in Britain, such as the Pall Mall Gazette and the Daily Mirror, alighted on 1,355 miles, the number supplied to them by the Post-Dispatch.
Yet despite all the discrepancies in distance, Thursday’s newspapers were as one in making the “back from the dead” heroics of Post and Hawley their headline story. Everything else was reduced to a few paltry paragraphs at the foot of the front page—the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the subsequent death of two hundred Italians in the Bay of Naples; the confirmation that Dr. Hawley Crippen intended to appeal his death sentence passed by a London court earlier in the week; the escalating violence in Jersey City between police and several hundred striking express workers.
One notable feature of all the hyperbolic newspaper coverage was the ignorance displayed of the region from which Hawley and Post had emerged. The New York Herald described it as a “jungle”; the New Orleans Daily Picayune said the two balloonists were on their “way back to civilization”; and the New York Times commented how fortunate it was that the two trappers (few papers bothered to mention Joseph Pedneaud and Joseph Simard by name) had been “friendly.” To city-dwelling Americans in the early twentieth century, any area without stores, bars, and picture houses was wild and uncivilized, inhabitated by grunting Stone Age creatures. For them the way of life of Simard and Pedneaud was as inconceivable as the Sioux’s had been to Lewis and Clark a century earlier.
Of course, what most aroused the newspapers was that the America II had broken all existing balloon distance rec ords, further proof of man’s advancement. Maps showing the balloon’s route proliferated on the pages, and from coast to coast peo
ple read the interview with Augustus Post that had been telegraphed late on Wednesday night by the lucky reporter from the Associated Press.
The World newspaper described how its representative had spent Wednesday evening at the headquarters of the Aero Club of America with “an excited group” that included Colonel Theodore Schaeck and Paul Armbruster of the Helvetia. When Clifford Harmon arrived from Belmont Park, he had been only too happy to tell the paper how glad he was that his pessimism had proved groundless. “I am frank in saying that I never expected to see either Post or Hawley again,” he said. “It took men of the greatest courage to do what they have done, and ordinary courage is not enough. I know the character of that country well and I would not venture into it . . . I am mighty glad they are safe and they deserve all of the glory.”
The joy of sleeping in a warm bed was short-lived for Augustus Post. At six o’clock on Thursday morning, six hours after he had bidden the reporter good-night at the Château Saguenay hotel, Post was woken by Joseph Guay, the hotel manager, who reminded him that the train for Quebec City left in an hour. Post had to summon all his willpower to slip out of his bed and into the clothes loaned him by Guay. He shaved and tidied up his goatee, then descended into the dining room, where he and Hawley breakfasted on trout and another moose steak. There was plenty of hot coffee, too, the surest sign that they were back in the benign embrace of civilization.
They boarded the train at seven o’clock with their dirty clothes folded into their ballast bags and with a small brown leather valise given them as a farewell gift by Guay. The train stopped for lunch at Kiskisink, and Hawley and Post were wined and dined by the division superintendent at the station restaurant. It escaped neither of the balloonists’ attention that Kiskisink was close to where Samuel Perkins had come down, “believing that he had won the race.”
Post and Hawley slept off their lunch on Thursday afternoon as the train puffed south toward Quebec. Fifty miles outside the city they pulled into a station, where waiting on the platform was Lewis Spindler, who had dashed east from Ontario the moment he heard the news. He found the pair “well but somewhat fatigued but [they] have one predominant joy—we hold the cup.” Spindler accompanied Post and Hawley on the final leg of their journey, explaining on the way that they would have four hours in Quebec City before catching a sleeper to Montreal at eleven P.M. In the intervening hours an informal dinner had been organized at a nearby hotel by the American counsel, Mr. Gebhard Willrich. Spindler also laughingly warned them to expect a monumental reception when their train arrived because Canada had gone “balloon crazy.”
Police had thrown a cordon around the platform by the time the train carrying Post and Hawley reached Quebec at six forty P.M. They were greeted by Willrich and “several prominent men of the city,” but the hoipolloi were held back, and reporters could only stretch up on tiptoe over the policemen’s heads in a vain attempt to have their questions answered. The two men were escorted to the Château Frontenac hotel and “made comfortable in a room, the luxurious arrangement of which must have furnished a striking contrast to the wilderness of the Canadian bush.” At dinner they were presented with a tottering pile of telegrams, among which were messages from Count Zeppelin, Cortlandt Bishop, the Campfire Club of America, and Walter Wellman. August Belmont, owner of the eponymous racecourse, extended his heartiest congratulations and hoped the pair “may join in the last days of our meeting and receive the homage of your expectant associates of the air and of a proud and admiring community.”
After supper Post and Hawley sat before the newsmen and gave them the story of their adventure. The dozen or so reporters may have been scooped by their colleague from the Associated Press, but that made them no less attentive as Hawley spoke: “There was never a time when I considered that our lives were actually in danger, but our food supply was very short, and I consider that we were very fortunate in reaching Jacques Maltais’s cabin [sic] in the woods when we did.” Nonetheless, butted in a reporter, it must have been a harrowing ordeal. Hawley shook his head. “Taken altogether it was not a disagreeable experience.”
Post took the newsmen back to the beginning, that long-ago afternoon when they had departed. With his logbook on his lap for reference, Post described their forty-six hours in the air and summed up their descent in a single sentence: “We made a good landing in the trees and had no difficulty in getting to the ground.” Post then elaborated on their plight through the wilderness—“the baffling thicket of brambles . . . branches standing out at every angle and interlacing.” Hawley interjected only when his companion told of his fall. “I can stand a good deal of pain,” said Hawley, looking around at the faces of the reporters, “but I never had anything take hold of me like that.”
What about the America II? one of the correspondents asked when they had finished their tale. Post said that the owner of the hotel in Chicoutimi had promised to try to retrieve the balloon, but if he didn’t, they wanted it known that they would pay $300 to any person or persons who brought it back. However, added Hawley, if it was lost, then “it’s lost in a good cause. We have without doubt beaten the world’s record by more than two hundred miles.”
The euphoria that had greeted the news of Hawley and Post’s reappearance on Wednesday afternoon had vanished, blasted miles across the Hempstead Plains by the keen southwest wind that violated through every nook and cranny of Belmont Park on Thursday morning. What do you reckon it is? the reporters sheltering in the press stand asked one another: 30 mph? 35 mph? maybe even 40? No one wished to hazard a guess, but with the flags atop the hangars “bent before it like reeds,” the wind was considerably more than a zephyr and likely to scupper both the Statue of Liberty race and the elimination trial for the U.S. team.
The meet’s nine A.M. start was too early for the special aviation trains laid on by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which didn’t start running for another two hours, so instead the die-hard fans bought tickets for Jamaica Station, the main hub of the Long Island Rail Road, and completed their journey in trolley cars and hacks. Elsewhere the “roads swarmed with automobiles, a long motor caravan threading across the bridges.”
The signal bomb was exploded, but the doors of the hangars remained resolutely closed. Men and women sat in their seats, grappling with the pages of their newspapers as they tried to read of Hawley and Post’s miraculous resurrection. The band played, but no one listened; it was too cold, too windy, too depressing. The aviators refused to budge from their hangars, except one or two who, “heartbroken at the gale, took trains into town.”
At least it was a bumper day for the society correspondents, all of whom were kept busy by a steady stream of illustrious arrivals. Baron von Hengelmuller, the Austrian ambassador, was a guest in the box of Mr. and Mrs. August Belmont, and the novelist Rex Beach “attracted much attention in a sort of Richard Harding war correspondent’s suit.” The sister of Count de Lesseps, the Countess de la Bergassiere, was wrapped up warm against the elements in a full-length sealskin coat and large beaver hat, while nearby the wife of Cortlandt Bishop amused herself with some crochet work. Vincent Astor returned for another day’s aviation, minus his father, and Mr. and Mrs. Morris Kellogg made their first appearance of the week, having just returned from their wedding trip. Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt swanned into her box in a tailored suit of London smoke frieze and large velvet hat of the same color, but Eleonora Sears was conspicuous by her absence. Perhaps she had been grounded, so to speak, speculated the correspondents, by her concerned parents. But she soon arrived, and what a sensation when she did. It wasn’t what she wore that sent a hurricane of gossip ripping through the Turf and Field Club—although the skirt of the blue serge suit was considered a fraction short by some—it was that, as the New York Evening Mail reported, “she reached Belmont Park with Claude Grahame-White in the latter’s limousine.”
Reporters and spectators alike watched in astonishment as the brazen pair collected Grahame-White’s fan mail and “sat on the clubhouse steps readi
ng 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.”
Chasing Icarus Page 22
