AIR HEADS Chapter Five

 

I had to do some work to locate the starting point for Bob Fowler’s second attempt at a transcontinental flight. For one thing it has been buried under concrete and asphalt for a century. For another, some histories have mis-labeled it as “Wiltshire Field”, but that seems to have been a "spell check mis-correction" of the name "Henry Gaylord Wilshire".  If you are familiar with Los Angeles at all you recognize that name.  

In 1895 Gaylord bought 35 acres around what would later be renamed MacArthur Park.  Gaylord then humbly allowed the city of Los Angeles to build a road right through the center of his property (above), on the twin conditions that they not lay down any street car tracks, and that they name the street after him. Then he promptly packed up and moved back to New York. He left his name no where else in Los Angles.

Wilshire Boulevard’s beginnings were very humble indeed, bisecting mostly beet fields. In 1910 that made the intersection of Wilshire (above, center) and Fairfax Avenue (above, heading toward mountains) an ideal location for an airfield...

... close to the budding metropolis of Los Angeles (above) - 320,000 citizens already - but open enough to allow pilots to crash regularly without killing the neighbors, because there weren’t any....

...except for a few oil derricks and some deceased Dire Wolves just down the street stuck in the tar of the nearby La Brea Tar Pits (above and below).  And, by the way, "la brea" is Spanish for "tar", so the "La Brea tar pits" translates as 'the tar - tar pits').

There should be a plaque in the sidewalk or something at the corner of Fairfax and Whilshire, because not only did Bob Fowler re-start his transcontinental flight from here on Thursday, 19 October, 1911, but it is also where, in 1921, Amelia Earhart took her first flight lesson, in a Curtiss Jenny. In fact, lots of aviation history happened in and around that corner.

Movie maker C.B. DeMille (below) , in town to direct his first blockbuster “Squaw Man”, operated an airline, "Mercury Aviation", out of there for a year or so - until it went bankrupt. 

Then in March 1921 the land was bought by pilot Emory Roger and his wife, and was renamed “Rogers’ Field” (above).  Emory then started up “Pacific Marine Airways”, in partnership with Sid Chaplin, brother to Charlie Chaplin.  

They flew Hollywood vacationers to and from Catalina Island,  and sold Curtiss sea planes out of a showroom on the field - at least they did until Emory died in a plane crash in November of 1921. Then Emory’s widow ran the field until 1923,  when she sold out to developers, and the airfield disappeared under concrete. That is what happens to everything historic in Los Angeles, sooner or later.

But that was all in the future. On 19 October, 1911 Wilshire Field was just an open space out near the end of Wilshire Boulevard.

Late on that afternoon Thursday, 19 October, 1911, Bob Fowler, at the controls of his new Wright B Flyer, renamed the "Cole Flyer", lifted off and headed east. He made only 9 miles that first day, landing in Pasadena. But the important thing was that he was back in the race.

Bob’s manager,  Reed Grundy, had always wanted him to start the race from Los Angeles because the mountains east of there were so much lower that the Sierra east of San Francisco, and because the Los Angeles Board of Reality was coughing up a $10,000 bonus if Bob Fowler started from L.A. - okay, Grundy mostly liked L.A. because of the bonus.

In fact, early the next morning, on Friday, 20 October, as Fowler was preparing to take off from Pasadena, he was called to the phone.  It was Grundy. He  had just been offered another paycheck if Bob made an appearance down Fairfax Avenue from Whilsire Field at the L.A. Motordrome (above).  But Bob put his foot down and said he’d rather give up flying than start this trip a third time.  Grundy got the message and Bob flew on to Riverside, California, probably spitting and cursing all the way about what a jackass his manager was. I’m sure NASCAR drivers feel the same way about their sponsors, once in awhile.

In two days of flying Bob Fowler had covered only 69 miles. And the next day, Saturday,  21 October,  1911, went even slower, because he was approaching the San Gorgonio Pass (above). The pass is only at 2,600 feet altitude, but it runs 22 miles long between the 9,000 foot tall Mount San Gorgonio and the 11,000 foot tall Mount San Jacinto, making it one of the deepest passes in the United States.  And one of the windiest. The winds in the pass have been used to generate electricity since the 1980's. 

For a 1911 cloth and wood airplane flying at between 2 and 400 feet above the ground, passing between the towering mastiffs meant dangerous cross winds. The Cole Flyer struggled to make progress, and Bob gritted his teeth to keep the sand out of his mouth.

He was flying into some very interesting terrain. To his north was Mount Whitney, standing 14,505 feet above sea level, highest point in the lower 48 states. And just 76 miles to the southwest of his flight path was Death Valley, at 282 feet below sea level. 

Then, having left this geological drama behind him, Bob Fowler was now flying in cool winter temperatures across the Arizona desert basins and 10,000 foot tall mountain ranges. On Wednesday, 25 October he landed in Yuma, Arizona (above) on the Colorado River. Finally, after almost sixty days of starting and stopping and starting and crashing, Bob Fowler had escaped California.

Two hundred miles later, following the Southern Pacific Railroad line, Bob landed at Tucson, Arizona. And there had a brief encounter with a fellow traveler, the only other man on God’s green earth who truly understood what he was going through; Cal Perry Rogers.  They were together barely long enough to shake hands, and nobody had time to produce a camera. And then they separated without so much as a back slap or a pause to compare notes: so much for the brotherhood of the air. After all, there still was a race to win.

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