DESIGNER OF DISASTER

I would like to introduce you to Mr. Andrew William Mellon, a scarecrow of a man whose life reads like a Balzac novel. He is virtually forgotten today, but he should be remembered. First, he is one of the men who brought you the Great Depression; second, he is the man who invented “trickle down economics”, which is trying very hard to bring you the next depression; third, his name has appeared on more dollar bills than anyone, with the possible exception of Alexander Hamilton; and fourth, his obsession with money was so great that its poison has leached into our own time, for Andrew William Mellon is the 'prater profectio' of the “vast right wing conspiracy.” Suffice it to say that if Freud had ever met Andrew Mellon, psychiatry would be a recognized science today.

Andew was lucky enough to be born in Pittsburg during the latter half of the ninteenth century – “hell with the lid off as the town was described”.  And he was born to  a Scrooge-like father who disapproved of those with..."festive dispositions”. His father was a successful banker, and when Andrew was 17 he loaned the boy enough cash - at reasonable interest rates - so that he could found his own lumber company. He ran the firm following the mantra, “What would father do?” After paying daddy back and making a small fortune of his own, Andrew sold out. He felt the market was about to take a downturn – which it promptly did. Andrew then joined with his father and brother in founding a bank, T. Mellon & Sons. In 1882 Andrew became the President and primary shareholder. Using it as a base, and his connections with the Pittsburg elite of Carnegie and Rockefeller, Andrew helped found ALCOA, B.F. Goodrich, Gulf Oil, Heinz Foods and dozens of other corporate giants of the dawning 20th century. And he took a share in the stocks of every one of them.

Andrew (above) was, by 1899, the fourth richest man in America. But he was still living with his parents and eating porridge for dinner. Did life have anything to offer Andrew other than an “Oedipal competition” which he could never win? It turns out it did. But Andrew screwed it up.

In 1900 the 45 year old Andrew tried to escape his desolate fate by marrying the vivacious 19 year old Nora Mary McMullen (above), "The prettiest woman in London", and heir to part of the Scottish Guinness Brewing fortune. But instead of Nora providing Andrew with a way out, he dragged her into his miserable life. She tried to make dirty, foul Pittsburg a home. The couple had a daughter in 1901 and a son in 1907, but Andrew became convinced that Nora was seeing a certain debonair and dashing cavalry Captain, George Alfred Curphey - who had already been named as co-respondant in the South African Vivian divorce case of 1907. Perhaps Nora was having an affair. But the microphones Andrew had hidden in their home failed to produce any evidence of it. So Andew smashed 12 of them with an axe. For a decade Nora pleaded with Andrew for a divorce, but Andrew wanted custody of the children, and she didn't want them trapped as Andrew was. Finally, in 1912, he actually charged her with adultry in court papers. Nora strongly denied the accusation and a special master who carefully examined Andrew's evidence, rejected his claim. However , Nora had suffered enough. In exchange for a $2 million settlement and her freedom, Nora did not fight Andrew when he demanded primary custody of the children. But that merely meant that now the children would be just as miserable as Andrew was.

By 1920 Andrew had become so brittle that one writer would described him as a “dried-up dollar bill waiting to be blown away”. And this was the man the new President, Warren G. Harding, named as his Secretary of the Treasury. And why not: if you believed in the power of unfettered capitalism, what better man to guard its future than one of the most devoted and disciplined unfettered capitalists in the world? After resigning as director from the sixty corporate boards he sat upon, Andrew accepted the post. Of course he still maintained close contact with the family bank, now under his brother's stewardship.

The entire modern Republican economic game plan was on display while Andrew Mellon (above, center) ran Treasury through the terms of Presidents Harding, Calvin Coolidge (above, left)  and Herbert Hoover (above, right). Through the entire decade of the 1920’s the economy grew at 7% per year, while unemployment remained between just three and four percent.

Mellon moved to quickly retire much of America's World War One debt, cutting it by $10 billion. He also pushed hard to cut the upper income tax rate from 77% to 24%, and cut taxes for middle class Americans at the same time, although by not nearly as much. He reduced the Estate Tax, (known in current Republican circles as the “Death Tax”). But more importantly, he moved to improve the “efficiency” of government. Remember this was when the largest civilian department in the government was the Post Office.

In 1920 the federal government was providing $1,329.77 per person per year in benefits to its citizens. By 1927, after seven years of Andrew Mellon 'efficency' at Treasury, that spending had fallen to $180.57 per citizen per year - for the Post Office, the Navy, the Army, food inspectors, for everything.

So if Mellon was making government so efficent by 1929, what went wrong? As one historian has explained, “Between 1923 and 1929 manufacturing output per person-per hour increased by 32 %, but workers’ wages grew by only 8 %. (Meanwhile) corporate profits shot up by 65 %" (Sound familar?) "… In 1929 60% of families were living on less than $1,500 a year….” (equal to $18,500 in 2012)

And then in the Revenue Act of 1926 , pushed hard by Andrew Mellon, taxes were cut for those making $1 million or more a year by more than 2/3rds. As a result, by 1929, the top 1/10th of 1% of Americans had an income equal to that of the bottom 42% of Americans. Another historian has observed that, "The Mellon tax policy, placing its emphasis on relief for millionaires…made the mal-distribution of income…even worse."

By 1929 the American middle class was being squeezed out of existence. (Sound familar?) And since the economic health of the nation became dependent solely on the swing of business cycles, without consumers, there was not much of a swing left. The M-1, the money supply in circulation, had contracted past the point where the economy could recover from the next stumble.

And when the next "stumble" came, without cash moving through the system; “Industrial production fell by nearly 45% between the years 1929 and 1932. Home-building dropped by 80%...” The stock market simply followed suit. It fell from a high of 294 points in early October 1929, to 230 points at the end of the month. Does any of this sound familiar?

One wag put it to verse; “Mellon pulled the whistle, Hoover rang the bell, Wall Street gave the signal, And the country went to hell.” Mellon saw what was happening, but favored what he called a “liquidationist” approach to the problem. (Sound familar, again?) Mellon believed that weak banks (like weak insurance conglomerates, weak car companies and weak hedge funds today) should always be allowed to fail. Mellon called it “weeding out”. What that strategy produced in 1929, and in 2008, was panic selling, when over-confident investors suddenly realized that actually applying the rules of capitalism to them meant that, actually  the odds were they would be the next loser. Realizing this, they then acted accordingly. They got out of the market. Fast.

In the public’s mind, Mellon, who was by then 70 years old, had become the face of the “old system”. During 1930 and 1931 Herbert Hoover saw to it that Andrew Mellon spent much of his time out of the public purview, in Europe, with the thankless job of trying to get America's ex-allies to repay wartime debts. But since they were also suffering in the Great Depression, they could not.

It was during these years that the Hoover administration, still following Andrew Mellon’s theories, drove the economy from a recession into a depression, eventually dropping the market, on July 8, 1932, to an all time low of just 41 points. And rightly or wrongly, in the public’s mind, Andrew Mellon as well as Hoover bore the responsibility for the disaster.

Capitalism had reached such a point of concentration of capital that while the millionairs still had plenty of money, there was no where for them to invest it. (This is true again today, except today big banks can invest their money in each other, trading vast fortunes and claiming imaginary profits by doing so)  There was no consumer demand in America because the consumers had been "weeded out" of Mellon's system. What was needed was what Roosevelt called "priming the pump", but such ideas were anathama to Mellon's economic thinking, and anatham to Republicans today.

Finally, in February of 1932, with Hoover looking for some way to get the disgraced economic mastermind out of the public eye before the November elections, Andrew agreed to step down from Treasury, and accept the post of Ambassador to England. He served for just one year, and performed such assignments as introducing Emilia Erhart to the King of England (above). And then he resigned.

In 1937 the Roosevelt administration opened “The Mellon Tax Case”, investigating Andrew's  ties with the family bank while he was serving at the Treasury Department. Eventually the Mellon Bank settled for $668,000 (the equivalent to $10 million, today).

But by then Andrew had died, on August 27, 1937. And though his estate had been hurt by the massive tax settlement, and even though Andrew had spent the last years of his life giving away much of the wealth he had accumulated, Andrew still held so much personal wealth, that in 2007 (seventy years later!) the various trusts that Andrew created saw that his grandson,...

 ...75 year old Richard Mellon-Scaife, was still collecting about $45 million a year from them. Scaife used some of his unearned wealth to finance the impeachment campaign against President Bill Clinton in 1998, and the idea that Barak Obama didn't have a valid U.S. birth certificate in 2008. It is as if this part of the family, and the Republican Party, is still trying to prove that old man Andrew Mellon was right back in 1929,  and that the Great Depression did not really happen.

As Honor de Balzac wrote in his novel, “Father Goriot”, “Behind every great fortune…is a crime that has yet to be discovered.”

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FUMBLE

I think the second most important man in the history of American football was a dictorial opera-loving control freak, who began each training camp by warning his players that it was “Better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.” He described his ideal coach as “...severe, arbitrary and little short of a czar” and proceeded to live up to that image. His teams' diets were heavy on raw meat, and devoid of apples. John Heisman (above) found football a brutal, violent ground game that killed 44 players in 1904, and was filled with arcane idiosyncratc rules, such as a team just scored against could chose to either kick or receive. It was John Heisman who invented the forward pass, the hidden ball play and dividied each half into quarters. And it was John Heisman who led the Georga Techology Institute “Engineers” to the most decisive victory in the history of the game. Of course, he had a little help.

Twenty miles east of the metropolis of Nashville, in the picturesque village of Lebanon, is tiny Cumberland University (above). In the decades around the dawn of the twentieth century its prestigous School of Law graduated more future Congeressmen than any other school in the South – impressive, with a student body of less than 1,000. In the more significant aspects of college life, the 1903 Cumberland football team had a championship 7-1 season, and a post season Thanksgiving day 11-11 tie against a Clemsen team coached by John Heisman.

In March of 1916 Cumberland signed a contract to play a fall game against Georgia Tech in exchange for at least $500 from the ticket sales. Then, over the howls of dissappointed students and alumni, hard economic times forced acting President Dr. Homer Hill to choose academics over football. New student manager George Allen was told to cancel all football contracts. Except John Heisman, now in his second year coaching at Georgia Tech, and who depended on ticket proceeds for a portion of his income, refused to cancel their game. Also, there had been a “misunderstanding” the previous summer over some alledged “professional ringers” in a baseball game between the two schools, and Heisman, who was also the Georgia Tech baseball coach, had insisted on adding a $3,000 penalty to their football contract, which Cumberland had been forced to agree to. So, if a Cumberland football team did not suit up on Saturday, November 7th, the small school would have to pay Georgia Tech today's equivalent of $60,000.

The burden for preventing the bankruptcy of Cumberland University fell to acting coach and law student Ernest “Butch” McQueen. Promised half of the $500 guarantee, he recuited a squad of 20 volunteers (mostly from his Kappa Sigma fraternity) and put them through some trough scrimmages. Gentry Dugat, who had played football once in high school, agreed to join the team only because the overnight trip to Atlanta would be his first ride in a Pullman sleeping car. There had been hopes of recruiting more “ringers” from the Vanderbilt team while changing trains in Nashville, but none could be obtained. In fact, three of the Cumberland volunteers missed the train to Atlanta, cutting the roster avilable for the game to just 17.

Waiting for the Cumberland Bulldogs on Georgia Tech's three year old Grant Fied was a squad of 40 highly motivated dedicated players, who in their season opener a week earlier had demolished Mercer College 61 to zero. Also waiting was Coach John Heisman, who had found a new enemy to motivate himself; sportswriters, whose habit of “totaling up the number of points each team has amassed...and comparing them with one another” annoyed him  To prove their reasoning was specious, Heisman had decided “...to show folks it was no difficult thing to run up a score in one easy game.” And the Cumberland Bulldog stand-ins were going to be the his stand-ins, too .

There were 1,000 fans in the grandstands the students had built to watch Georgia Tech win the coin toss. In what must be viewed as almost his only act of mercy that afternoon, Heisman decided his team would kick off, and defend the north goal line. The festivities began when Jim Preas kicked off for Georgia Tech. “Morris” Grouger caught the ball at the Cumberland 25 yard line and got not much closer to Georgia's goal line. On their first play Cumberland quaterback Leon McDonald handed the ball off to Grouger again, and he made three yards against Georgia's left tackle. On second and seven, McDonald was stopped at the line of scrimmage. The Bulldogs also failed to advance the ball on third down. On Fourth down McDonald punted – sort of. His kick covered less than 20 yards and was caught by Georgia quarterback Jim Preas. Cumberland finally tackeled Preas on their own 20 yard line. On Georgia's first play Junior halfback Evertt “Strupp” Strupper went around the left end for the score. Jim Preas kicked the extra point , and that quickly it was Georgia 7 and Cumberland zero.

This time Heisman picked Tommy Spence to kick off. Again it was “Morris” Grouger who caught the ball, this time at the five yard line. And this time he made five yards before he was tackled. With the ball on their ten yard line, McDonald handed off to running back George Murphy who went to the right side, where he was hit and coughed up the ball. It was picked up by "Engineer" Marshall Guill, who ran the ten yards for Georgia's second touchdown. Preas again kicked the extra point; Tech, 14. Cumberland, 0.

What followed was either depressingly predictable or delightfully surprising – depending on which team you were rooting for. Preas kicks off, Grouger received at the 20 and returned ten yards to the Cumberland 30 yard line. On first down quarterback McDonald fumbled behind the line, and it was recovered by “Hip” West for Georgia at the Cumberland 20. Strupper made fifteen yards on the first down, and Jim Preas went the last five for the score. He then kicked the extra point; Georgia Tech, 21, Cumberland, zero. Preas kicked off, and it was received by McDonald at the ten, who made it to the 20 yard line before being tackeled Morris Gouger tried the left side and was thrown for a 5 yard loss. McDonald tried a pass, but it was incomplete. Out of frustration, McDonaled punted on third down, putting it out of bounds on the Cumberland 35. On the first down for Georgia, Buzz Shaver hit the left side of the Cumberland line for twenty five yards. Halfback “Strup” Strupper went the remaining ten yards for the score. Preas kicked the extra point; Georgia, 28, Cumberland, zero.

Desperate to try anything, Cumberland decided to use the obscure rule that allowed them to kick off. How this was supposed to help the Bulldogs is unclear, in part because it did not.  McDonald got a good foot on the ball, and it was received at the Georgia 20 by Buzz Shaver, who ran it back 70 yards to the Cumberland 10 yard line. Strupper could have scored on the next play but he grounded the ball on the one yard line. The Georgia Tech team had decided that guard J.S. "Canty" Alexander should be allowed to score the next touchdown. But “Canty”was worried that his teammates might be setting him up. He admitted 70 years later that on the hand off, “I was so busy watching to make sure they blocked, that the ball hit me in the chest and I fumbled. But I picked it up on the five and pranced across like a debutante.” Preas hit the extra point. The score was now Georgia Tech, 35, Cumberland zero.

Again Cumberland chose to kick off. Walter “Six” Carpenter caught the ball on the Georgia 35 and was stopped after just a five yard return. Things were actually looking up for Cumberland for a moment, and then on the next snap, “Strup” ran it for sixty yards and the score – after Preas conversion, it was now Georgia, 42, Cumberland zero. Again McDonald kicked off . Again Carpenter caught the ball. This time he made a ten yard return to the Georgia thirty-five. Then “Buzz” Shaver got twenty-five yards over the right side, Ralph Puckett made five up the middle, and Spence went thirty-five for the score. Preas hit the eatra point; Georgia, 49, Cumberland, zero.

Cumberland gave up the idea of kicking off, and McDonald received at the Cumberland ten. He then tried three passes, before punting. “Strup” Strupper returned the kick thirty-five yards for another touchdown, and Preas kicked the etra point; Georgia 56, Cumberland, zero. Cumberland decided to try kicking off one more time. Tommy Spence returned it ninety yards for a trouchdown, and Preas kicked his ninth extra point – Georgia, 63, Cumberland, zero. Georgia let Tommy Spence kick off, and Morris Gouger caught it at the fifteen and returned it to Cumberland twenty-five, before losing five yards on the first play from scrimmage. McDonald then lost more five yards, before trying two passes in a row. Then, mercefully the whistle blew, signiffying the end of the first quarter – just three more to go. And Everett “Strupp” Stupper had already scored four touchdowns

Cumberland started the Second quarter with a very respectable fifty yard punt by McDonald, but Charlie Turner for Georgia returned it forty-five of those yards, back to the Cumberland twenty. On the very next play Jim Senter scored. Preas kicked the extra point; Georgia, 70, Cumnberland, zero.

Cumberland actually made nine yards on the next series of downs, but that triumph was overshadowed when McDonald's weary foot could punt the ball just eleven yards. Two plays later Preas ran the ball in from the fifteen. Preas kicked the extra point; Georgia, 77, Cumberland, zero. Preas kicked off, Grouger returned to the Cumberland twenty, McDonald threw an interception to Marsall Guill who scored. Preas kicked the extra point; Georgia 84, Cumberland, zero. Preas kicked off, George Murphy received for Cumberland and was nailed at the ten yard line. Charles “Eddie” Edwards then fumbled for Cumberland and one play later George Griffen scored. Preas kicked the extra point; Georgia, 91, Cumberland, zero.

At some point during the endless horror of that second quarter, members of the Cumberland team contend that they made a major football innovation. Between plays, in an attempt to find a way to survive the overpowering Georgia line, they gathered together, and thus invented the huddle. Maybe – but the half did finally, mercefully end; Georgia Tech, 126, Cumberland, zero.

John Heisman found a way to give a half time pep talk to his Georgia team. “You're doing all right, team,. We're ahead. But you just can't tell what those Cumberland players have up their sleeves. They may spring a surprise. Be alert, men! Hit 'em clean, but hit 'em. Hard!” He also agreed to reduce the torture to just 12 minutes each for the two remaining quarters.

But even the shorftened third quarter was no better for Cumberland than the previous two. According to Grantland Rice, who was covering the game for the Atlanta Journal, “Cumberland's greatest individual play of the game occurred when fullback (George) Allen circled right for a six-yard loss.” It was only a slight exaggeration. Cumberland did complete one six yard forward pass, but they never got the ball into Georgia territory. So crushing was the Georgia Tech line, that when yet another Cumberland fumble rolled toward Cumberland Bulldog B.F. “Bird” Paty, he froze. Shouted the man who had lost the ball, “Pick it up!” Paty shouted back, “Pick it up yourself, you dropped it.” Wrote Rice, “As a general rule, the only thing necessary for a touchdown was to give a Tech back the ball and holler, “Here he comes' and “There he goes'”.

The other Atlanta Journal writer in attendance, Morgan Blake, noticed that the Cumberland team “... couldn't run with the ball, they couldn't block and they couldn't tackle. At spasmodic intervals they were able to down a runner, but they were decidedly too light and green to be effective at any stage of the game.” Near the end of the Third Quarter, Georgian quarterback Geroge Gariffin discovered two Cumberland Bulldogs sitting on the Georgia bench. Heisman yelled at them to get back on their own side of the field. One of the interlopers pleaded, “Don't make us go back. We'll have to go into the game.' “

Morris Grough later claimed he had saved the Bulldogs from even more grief. "I called for a quarterback sneak on fourth down late in the final period. We needed 25 yards and were deep in our (own) territory. I made it back to the line of scrimmage and saved us from really ignominious defeat. If we had punted, as we should have, Tech would have blocked the kick, made another touchdown and the score would have been 229-0.” On the last play of the game, Cumberland lost 5 yards. The final result was awinspiring; Georgia Teach, 222, Cumberland, zero. Georgia's wooden scoreboard barely had enough room for the numbers

The Georgia Tech Engineers gained 1,620 yards, 978 of it during their own 28 offensive plays, the other 642 by their defense on turnovers. They scored a record 32 touchdowns – 10 on first downs and 14 by their defence and speciality teams. They threw not a single forward pass. They gained 220 yards on punt returns – scoring five TD's - and another 220 yards returning kicks – producing 1 TD. The only issue of concern, if you could call it that, was the two “points after” that they missed. Of course that was 2 out of 32 attempts. They also set records for the most points kicked after touchdown by one player -18 by Jim Preas - most points scored in one quarter – 63 - and most individual players scoring touchdowns - 13 . All of those records still stand.

Meanwhile, Cumberland's offensive total was a minus 42 yards. They threw 18 times, gaining a total of 14 yards through the air. Their receivers held onto only two of those passes. They were intecepted six times, and gave up 9 fumbes. Their longest play of the game was a ten yard completed pass. It would have been a first down except it came on fourth and 22. In the entire game neither team scored a first down from scrimmage. Cumberland couldn't, Georgia Tech didn't need to. At the end of the game, Coach Heisman handed over the $500 check to Butch McQueen, adding,  “Maybe we can get together again next baseball season.”

Cumberland did not field another football team until 1920. Shortly thereafter they built a new football field,  Kirk Field, to ensure the teams continued existence. And except for a short dissapearence during the Great Depression, it worked. In 1929 Georgia Tech made their first appearance at the Rose Bowl, and about the same time they ceased to be the “Engineers” and became the “Yellowjackets”.

Coach John Heisman coached at Georgia Tech for three more years, to 102 wins, 29 losses and 7 ties, a 77% winning percentage, and a national championship in 1917. Heisman and his wife devorced in 1919, and he left Atlanta. He coached at Pennsylvania University, and then Washington and Jefferson College, and ended his coaching career at the Rice Institute. In his later years he was hired as a trainer for the Downtown Athletic Club in Manhatten. After his death in 1936 the club created a yearly award to the top college football player – The Heisman Trophy. John Heisman is also remembered for an American football addage, a piece of advice which has guided American business leaders and politicians for the last century; “When in doubt, punt”

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AIR HEADS - Part One - A FRESH WIND

I suppose it seemed like a good idea in the beginning. There were three serious contestants, and a $50,000 first place prize. But in retrospect, it should have been obvious that nobody was going to collect a dime of that money. It was 1911; flying was still brand new and the world’s first two pilots were still flying - Wilbur and Orville Wright - and still learning The world's third pilot was Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, and he had died on September 17, 1908, in a crash that also badly injured Orville. The second pilot to die was Charles Rolls (of Rolls-Royce fame), in a 1910 crash. Considering there were only about 100 men (and one woman) with flying licenses in America in 1911, two percent was an appalling death  rate, bad enough to make you wonder why anybody would have wanted to even try flying, let alone try it from coast to coast.

The world’s 49th licensed pilot was a shy, cocky, 6’4” thirty-something, cigar smoking, playboy and adrenaline junkie with a hearing loss named Calbraith Perry Rogers(above -right). He was a romantic who favored action over words, as proven by the way he met his wife, 20 something Mabel Groves (left). He saw her drowning, jumped in, pulled her to safety and later married her, despite the hat. He approached flying with the same spontaneity. Having seen his first airplane on a visit to Dayton, Ohio, in June of 1911, Cal took the full Wright Brother’s flight course, all 90 minutes of it. Then he talked his mother, Maria, into loaning him $5,000 so he could buy a Wright Model B Flyer “E-X”. The "E-X" was for experimental – which was a joke because every “aeroplane” was experimental in 1911. But Cal may also have been the origin of the phrase to “take a flyer”, because just two months later, in August, he entered his new Wright Flyer in an air show in Chicago and took home third prize, worth $11, 285.  Not bad: Cal had been a pilot for 60 days and already he had made six grand profit. He suspected there might be money in this flying thing. And this was confirmed in October of 1910 when the Hearst newspaper chain had offered $50,000 to the first pilot to make it across the continent in 30 days or less. The offer was set to expire on October 10th , so with his self supplied confidence, Cal decided to go for it. 

 What Cal needed, as any NASCAR driver can tell you, was a sponsor. He found his ‘sticker sucker’ in a new soft drink called “VIN FIZ”. Allegedly it was grape favored soda water but one critic thought it tasted more like “…a fine blend of river sludge and horse slop” With a product like that the Amour Meat Company, proud owners of Vin Fiz, were going to need a heck of an advertising campaign. Enter Cal and his flying bill board.

With a guarantee of $23,000 from Amour, which also provided a three car support train (complete with a repair car and a reservoir of spare parts, an automobile to track down Cal whenever he crash landed, and sleeping car accommodations for Mable, Cal’s mother Maria, his cousin, his head mechanic Charlie Taylor, two other mechanics, two assistants and assorted reporters from the Hearst news service). Cal figured he had it all figured out. The first problem was that, before Cal even got airborne, his "Vin Fiz" was already in third place.

First off, from Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, was motorcycle racer Bob Fowler (above). There were 10,000 cheering people there at 1:35 P.M., on September 11th to see Bob takeoff.  Like Cal, Bob was piloting a Wright “B” Flyer, except his sponsor was the Cole Motor Company, of Indianapolis, Indiana, and they had supplied him with one of their engines and a little cash. The Cole engine was more powerful than the Wright engine, but it was also 200 lbs heavier. Worse, the Cole Motor Company was only paying Bob $7,500.00 for the whole trip. He had no train, and no traveling support group. Making an average speed of about 55 miles an hour, Bob reached Sacramento in just under 2 hours, and after schmoozing with California Governor Hiram Johnson, Bob flew on to Auburn, for a total distance on the first day of 126 miles. On September 12th he reached Alta, California, where he crashed into some trees. Bob was now out of the race until repair parts could be rushed out from Frisco.

Second to start was James J. (Jimmy) Ward,  pilot's license #52, and previously a jockey. He was flying a Curtis Model D with floats. Jimmy took off from Governor’s Island in New York harbor on September 13th. He immediately got lost over New Jersey, and made only twenty miles before crash landing. Then he too had to wait for repairs. The basic tempo of the race had thus been set right from the start; take off, crash, wait for repairs, take off, crash, wait for repairs, and repeat as necessary for 3,000 miles. It was going to be very hard to finish this race, let alone win it.

Before starting himself, Cal Rogers tied a bottle Vin Fiz to one of his wing struts (white circle on the left), “for luck”. For reality, he tied a pair of crutches to another strut. Before a paying crowd of 2,000, a chorus girl poured a bottle of grape soda over the landing skids and proclaimed, “I dub thee “Vin Fiz Flyer””. Cal actually called his plane “Betsy” but he recognized the value of naming fees even back then.

Cal took off from the race course at Sheepshead Bay, Long Island at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 17th. And if anybody noticed that it was the third anniversary of the crash that had killed Lieutenant Selfridge, they were polite enough to keep it to themselves.

After take off, Cal buzzed Coney Island and dropped coupons for free Vin Fiz soda. Then he flew across Manhattan as the breathless reporters breathlessly reported, “…with its death-trap of tall buildings, ragged roofs and narrow streets”.  Cal landed safely in Middleton, New York that night to a cheering crowd reported as 10,000 – not to be bettered by San Francisco. He had made all of 84 miles that first day.

That night the reporters wrote that Cal claimed he would be in Chicago in four days. But Cal  rarely talked to reporters because he often barely heard their questions, the byproduct of a scarlet fever attack in his childhood. So it was easier if the the reporters just made up heroic quotes for Cal. They invented more heroic quotes for him the next morning when, on take off,  the "Vin Fiz" hit a tree and ended up in a chicken coop. The bottle of Vin Fiz was miraculaously undamaged but now it was Cal’s turn to wait for repairs. The race was on!

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NEXT WEDNESDAY

AIR HEADS Part Two - Headwinds