On April 19 the shocking-pink Antarctic sun set and would not be seen for another 125 days.
Billy’s old friend George Tennant, a teetotaler, was among the men to winter over, as the cook from the flagship, Sydney Greason, had become a notorious drinker by February. From safe inside the mess hall, Tennant rustled up meals for the hungry, sun-starved men: biscuits and bacon, griddle cakes, oatmeal cakes, ham and eggs, peanut butter sandwiches, soup, chocolate, steaming coffee, and ice cream made from powdered milk, dehydrated eggs, sugar, and melted snow. The barreled beef brought from New Zealand had gone rancid, but luckily there was penguin and that other Antarctic bird, skua, that he had thought ahead to preserve in ice. There was mutton from New Zealand, and very local whale and seal—used in recipes such as whale meatballs and crabeater seal cooked in tomato sauce. Vegetables were another matter. The dehydrated vegetables were inedible, it was later learned, for good reason: they had been dehydrated a decade earlier back in World War I.
Although many days were spent inside, there were memorable peeks at the aurora australis—the southern lights—glowing midwinter skies of purples and yellow-green.
Russell Owen covered it all in his cable dispatches back to New York:
Thirty-three-year-old Norwegian sea and ski man Christoffer Braathen (who, in winter months, was in charge of the oil hut and thus called the Oil King) passing his 1,500 hours of spare time building a miniature model of the New York out of parts carved from wooden engine crates. The model would later go on display at the Biltmore Hotel.
Ice pilot Sverre Strom, the man who first caught Billy aboard the flagship, constructing spare dogsleds.
Into Owen’s reports went unusual beard contests and an Antarctic Follies performance featuring “chorus girls” and musicians in blackface, meant to amuse one another and those Americans following along. “Medicinal” alcohol was mixed with lemon powder for a local specialty they called a blowtorch. Byrd even went a little wild himself, dressing—according to aerologist Henry Harrison’s one-volume diary, held in the US National Archives—as a “perfect waterfront dollar whore” during a football game in the mess hall. However, Owen apparently considered it beneath mention that Bennie Roth became the first to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Passover on the ice. (Why is this night different from all other nights? Because it’s fifty below freezing.)
The men would while away the months, captive beneath the snow, until the return of the sun.
SEVEN
THE STOWAWAY REPORT
There were girls in Dunedin. But Billy was told by Lieutenant Harry Adams, For godsake, go home for a year and have fun! Visit your worried parents. Do some public relations; a shrewd young man like you should capitalize on your popularity.
Adams would go with him. After eight months away, he would see his wife.
The journey, mercifully, was uneventful—the dozen men just ordinary passengers on the Union Line mail liner the SS Tahiti—but the relationships forged on this return trip would be among his closest for years to come, especially his connection with Adams. Still, there was a curious silence during this stretch, with not even a letter to his parents. Perhaps Billy was ashamed.
The twelve explorers returned stateside during the late-April week that a large scenic area in Utah was designated Arches National Monument (expedition geologist Laurence Gould having advocated for this decision earlier in the decade) and a postal worker foiled an assassination attempt on Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. The men arrived in San Francisco to a still-booming economy now under the presidency of Herbert Hoover, who had replaced fellow Republican “Silent Cal” Coolidge a month prior—in 1929 presidents were still inaugurated on March 4, not January 20. (No one on the expedition voted, this being decades before absentee ballots came into use.) Among the returning, trumpeted the press, was “Bill Gavronski”—still misspelled and to his annoyance identified always as “the stowaway” instead of fireman or even seaman.
But the stowaway’s viewpoint was the most interesting angle! For many Americans, Billy’s narrative became the first account they heard from a true member of the expedition—not a designated reporter such as Russell Owen or Joe de Ganahl. As soon as he landed, the interviews began, and touched on matters he wouldn’t even necessarily know anything about. He had been there, so suddenly he was an expert: “Gavronksi says that Commander Byrd has already accomplished enough scientific work to justify taking the eighty-two men.”
Billy’s parents scooped him up when he returned by hitchhiking to the East Coast. His mother couldn’t stop kissing him; his babcia would not stop holding his hand. Rudy marveled at how tall he had become in his months away—maybe even two inches more a man. He was fatter, too, his father teased, and Billy confessed he had special privileges due to his friend the cook. His voice no longer cracked.
To Billy’s amazement, Byrd had made good on his promises: the eighteen-year-old was already widely advertised to appear on WOR Radio, the newly powerful radio station of the New York area, with millions of listeners for highly publicized events—and indeed millions of listeners tuned in to hear him speak on April 24. Harry Adams, Billy’s friend and mentor, joined him on the air, and joked with his pal that although higher in rank, he did not get nearly as much publicity as the reformed roustabout.
Billy gave his highly anticipated speech, prepared by Byrd’s PR team, at six forty-five in the evening, proclaiming the expedition’s (perhaps premature) success. It had been deemed beneficial to present the expedition as idyllically egalitarian. And so Billy spoke of Little America as a utopia, insisting (somewhat fibbing) that in Little America, class distinctions did not exist. It made a great story: college professors passing coal and tugging at ropes with high school dropouts. “This is the one democracy in which each is each other’s keeper,” Billy promised listeners, “where the comfort of each is the concern of all. The motto of this expedition is one for all, and all for Commander Byrd. The commander is a man to inspire youthful imagination, and the gods of fate have enabled me to serve him.”
The exciting broadcast, listed in papers as “The Byrd Expedition,” featuring the famous stowaway was immediately followed by “Rutgers University Music Night.”
“Byrd ‘Boy Stowaway’ Lauds Spirit of Men.” The radio address, said the New York Times in a significant page two feature, was a notable and widely listened to event, followed by a celebratory dinner at the Polish National Home, the Dom, at 19 St. Mark’s Place. Billy was the guest of honor in a standing-room-only banquet hall filled with the most visible members of New York’s Polish American community. The host for the evening: the stowaway’s once-infuriated father, who introduced his son with the most extraordinary pleasure. Toastmaster was Austin Clark, the assistant principal of Textile High School. Aged sailmaker John Jacobson, who had first greeted Billy that August day the boy scouted his hiding spot on the City of New York, and now very much a friend, knocked the hell out of the audience with outrageous tall tales of penguins lined up in drill and marching to a lead penguin’s command, and about chef Tennant’s whale steak tasting like the finest dish at Delmonico’s restaurant. Sydney Greason, the chief steward, spoke of what a fine lad Billy had become. There were more ready to toast the hometown hero, including Frederick Meinholtz, in charge of the New York Times’s radio plant (transmission station) and the wire services coming in from the Antarctic, and Edward Rybicki, president of the Council of Democratic Clubs and a loyal Polish Falcon like Billy’s father.
The hero’s welcome made being absent from the southernmost village in the world perhaps not as bad as Billy had thought it would be. Especially when the alternative was hibernating under the snow for four months, playing cards and reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea with taxidermied penguins for company.
But that’s not to say it was easy. During Billy’s year away, his half sister Stefanie, now twenty-two, had left Poland for Bayside, and there was considerable shock at no longer being an only child. But Stefanie was quickly
involved with men and hardly company. Billy visited his friends from school and the old neighborhood, but there was only so much they wanted to hear about his adventures. They had read plenty, they assured him. Old news. Besides, they were in college now: it was May, they had exams. (Was this . . . jealousy? In the years to come, he would learn which stories not to tell in front of friends, many of whom wouldn’t learn he was the youngest member of Byrd’s expedition until he died.)
The news cycle had moved on, and Billy was no longer needed for interviews. After several weeks of loafing around, he decided he might as well get some paying work before heading back to New Zealand in the fall. He took a subway to the expedition office, now at 2 West Forty-Fifth Street, suite 1508, and asked if he might have a letter of recommendation. Harry Adams, temping as an administrator there (when he wasn’t writing up his memoirs), was thrilled to see Billy and wrote the letter himself: “I would select him for any duty in which character, hard work, and intelligent application are required.”
• • •
Bob Lanier, newly acquitted of attempted assault, left New Zealand on the ocean liner Niagara on June 4, arriving in Hawaii two weeks later. (The New Zealand government paid his fare.) Soon he was in Los Angeles, his surreal arrest behind him, Antarctica dreams quashed once again. He made his way north to the Hotel Mars in Oakland, on Seventh and Filbert Streets, and eked out a living making those wax paper flowers he’d sold on the Auckland docks. “Someday I’m going to get back to the South Pole,” he told a reporter. “I’d dare anything to see the South Pole and prove that a black man can stand that climate.” He continued north by foot, hitchhiking his way through Oregon and Washington and then out of the United States. In Vancouver, Canada, he (rather unbelievably, but this is true) attempted to go back to Antarctica by pleading unsuccessfully with more ship captains. His optimism astounded editors and readers alike. “I don’t know just how,” he was quoted as saying, “but I’m going to the South Pole this time for sure. I’m still on my way.”
• • •
To drum up excitement for the Paramount documentary scheduled for release upon Byrd’s return in the spring of 1930, a model of Little America opened that summer in New York’s ziggurat-shaped Paramount Building, accompanied by pictures of commercial airlines of the future. Billy visited with his family; his father stopped to tell a few people who was there, eliciting gasps. People called out to other visitors: “Come meet the stowaway!” Eager to report back to Byrd that he had bedrock loyalty, Billy stopped to shake hands with the steady stream of visitors. Who better to point out the main buildings, the masts of the radio station, the meteorological observatory? Was he one of the miniature men in the scene? Billy laughed along, a fine ambassador.
Before long, he left the city again. He and Harry Adams had made plans to ship out from Los Angeles the last day of October, time enough to get to Dunedin before the New Year and rescue the overwintering party in the first days of 1930. But with no leads on a promising job that paid—he certainly wasn’t going to spend the summer helping with his father’s interior decorating business for free—Billy, restless and drifting, shoved off in late July. He would head down south by train, amble through the Southwest, and end up in San Francisco—classic eighteen-year-old stuff—a little jaunt presumably financed by his parents. From there he was sure he could get a lift, hopefully, to Los Angeles. (Anyone who has been a teenager exposed to freedoms away from home and then forced to return might find it hard to criticize Billy too harshly. Staying in Bayside meant living under his father’s rules again.)
Nothing major was going on in the world when he first wrote home, except mild concern about falling stock prices. Always the optimist, Billy told his father he was sure the economy would self-correct.
By the end of his gallivanting, disaster was afoot. On October 18, a Friday, Wall Street investors traded sixteen million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a day—an unprecedented sign of economic anxiety. Panic struck. The following Wednesday, stocks plummeted 6.3 percent. The next day, 11 percent. There was so much active trading that it caused an elongated tickertape delay. Spooked investors wanted out.
Billy’s letter to his folks that Friday was endearing: “Oh! Before I forget, I bought an armadillo in El Paso and sent it home. Hope you received it in one piece—Tee Hee!” A self-portrait was included—Billy as a haloed angel—and he joked unconvincingly that everything he experienced in his side trip through the seedy border towns of Mexico was perfectly innocent. But tucked in with the anecdotes and the cartoons was real financial concern. It all was going to turn out okay, right? Then he begged his mother not to write so tiny and promised he would send a letter from Frisco.
Things did not turn out okay. Despite a grand effort by Wall Street leaders to steady the market by investing enormously in steel and other blue-chip stocks—a stopgap tactic—the market nose-dived again the next Monday. Still, who in 1929 would have foreseen the troubled decade to come? Surely the recession would last a few trifling months.
The stock market reeled yet again on Black Tuesday, October 29—closing at 230 after having soared high at 381 less than two months before. Two days later, Billy, in California now, had the gall to ask his folks for money, as he was “ebbtide low.” He was wired the funds and rented the cheapest room he could find, which he called a “cootie garage,” for fifty cents. He couldn’t even afford the YMCA. Billy apologized for his impertinence but explained that he had to obtain a new passport after being told unexpectedly that his sailor’s passport was worthless. (He would be traveling as a passenger.) With everything finally sorted out, he got to the ocean liner Cora at one thirty, a half hour before departure.
Another letter arrived at the Gawronski home in Bayside, midtrip. Their gadabout son seemed to be having an altogether pleasant journey. The food was pretty good—not excellent, but better than none—and a small swimming pool had been set up on deck as relief from the heat; no arduous coal passing in the broiling stokehold this time. Old seaman that Billy was, he was happy to miss out on the Neptune rituals, writing cheerfully, “God help the landlubbers.”
Despite the worsening economy, the mood aboard the ship was festive. Billy was friendly with the other passengers, and there were some old pals from the expedition, too. Harry Adams was still sneaking notes on the funny former stowaway for his book. Another ship, the schooner Bretagne, had wrecked off the coast of Oregon, and the French consul arranged for her Tahitian crew to be transferred to the Cora for the journey home. In the evenings, the rescued Tahitians took out their guitars and sang and danced. Billy added some Tahitian profanity to his vocabulary and taunted his mother with news of a church service he’d missed for a siesta. “But don’t worry mama!” he wrote, “I’ll go next Sunday! Pop is always saying put things off to next Sunday.”
Like many teenagers bailed out by parents over the years, Billy added a guilty coda: “I really can’t express my deepest gratitude for the $.” He promised to buy his mother a grass skirt and beads in Papeete in thanks.
• • •
As Billy sailed the Pacific, Bill Haines, the trusted forty-one-year-old meteorologist from the US Weather Bureau who had overwintered on ice, finally okayed flying over the South Pole. After four months of darkness, the sun had risen again toward the end of August, spending a little longer in the sky each day. Before long, Laurence Gould shoved off on a two-and-a-half-month, 1,500-mile dogsled expedition into the Queen Maud Mountains to provide ground support and possibly emergency assistance during the coming flight. He and his five companions also took the opportunity to conduct the first geological and glaciological surveys of the region. The layered sandstones they found at the peak of Mount Fridtjof Nansen helped corroborate that Antarctica was linked geologically to the rest of the continents, which had been an issue of contention within the geological community.
By late November, it was light enough for a good, long flight. Haines waited a week for a blizzard to pass before issuing an optimistic forecast
: November 29 was the day. The plane for the historic trip would be the Floyd Bennett, named after Byrd’s all too recently deceased friend, his pilot to the North Pole, whom he had expected to join in his glorious flight over the South.
Bernt Balchen, a Norwegian all of twenty-nine, and a former middleweight boxing champion, did the actual flying. The aircraft was powered by three engines: one Wright Cyclone and two Wright Whirlwinds. Thirty-three-year-old Harold June, a strong chess player with a calm demeanor, served as copilot and radioman, with thirty-two-year-old Ash McKinley from Missouri the lucky aerial surveyor tapped as cameraman. A fine photographer, he served as stand-in for the Paramount documentary filmmakers, who were absolutely not allowed in the aircraft. Byrd was a mere passenger, yet he would get most of the glory.
Russell Owen had real news again, reporting that the cargo on the Floyd Bennett included skis, snowshoes, an aerial camera, food prepared by the kitchen staff, the pemmican (their Danish-made stock of survival rations), and gasoline—all in case of an emergency landing so that the four passengers could survive until rescue. Two unlucky spare pilots were staying behind at the base camp, just in case.
The flight from Little America to the South Pole, one that Byrd had waited almost a year for on ice, took less than a day. He was there and back in eighteen hours, forty-one minutes.
The Floyd Bennett made a six-mile circuit of the pole, reaching an elevation of 11,500 feet. (To clear the peaks, they had to discard a 250-pound bag of food.) If there was no sign of new species, at least the vista was breathtaking from above, revealing mountains never seen before. A standard compass was of little use so close to magnetic south, which is where a compass would routinely point, as opposed to the entirely separate geographical South Pole, so the team waited as Byrd used a sun compass and his self-invented bubble sextant to calculate their position. (The sextant, which determined the angular distance between objects, allowed the user to obtain an artificial horizon when the actual horizon was not in sight.) Publicists said that navigation, not flying, was Richard Byrd’s true skill—ironic given the popular belief that he either fudged or botched the coordinates of his North Pole flight.
The Stowaway Page 14
