AIR HEADS Part Ten

I wonder how many people worked in the advertising department at the Cole Motor Company in  1911?  They only built 860 luxury cars that year. But then J. J.  Cole had always been more interested in sales than in engineering. 

Besides supporting Bob Fowler’s “Cole Flyer” transcontinental flight that year, the Indianapolis based company also had a squadron of racing cars which toured the country, and a big balloon that made appearances at county fairs. "Joe" Cole even invested in the founding of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  As their company slogan went, “There’s a Touch of Tomorrow in All Cole Does Today”. Well, maybe. But the touch was not to last forever. 

Joseph Jarrett Cole had built a fortune in horse buggies before he borrowed enough cash from Harvey Firestone to start his auto company in 1909. He believed in the "Standardized Car" principle.  

The Cole plant built nothing, but rather assembled what J.J. considered the best parts from other manufacturers and put them together in the Cole building. “A man’s car any woman can drive.”

In 1911 Joe used an "L" head 4 cylander engine from the Northway Engine Works in Detroit.  And his cars featured such innovations as balloon tires, “adjustable door glasses” (i.e., removable windows),  a 15 foot long dashboard light and a speedometer that read up to 75 mph; unfortunately the Norway engine only produced 30 horse power, and flat out the Cole Model 30 and model 40's  could only reach 45 mph.  Bigwigs at General Motors wanted to buy out Cole, and when Joe wouldn’t sell they just bought up his suppliers - including Northway -  and gradually cut him off. 

With the post war recession of 1920-21 Joe realized the jig was up and began a careful liquidation of his company.  Ten months later, on 7 August, 1925, at the age of 56, he unexpectedly died of a heart attack.   His family kept the name on The Cole Building  and rented it out  into the 1970’s. Thus fared the man who sponsored Bob Fowler's flight. 

After he finally reached El Paso in 1911, it took Bob Fowler(above, right) a month just to escape Texas. But he made a lot of money there. On Christmas Eve he  crash landed in a rice field outside of Seixas, Louisiana.   Having lost the race to Rodgers, and prefeering to spend the winter in warmer climes, Bob took a couple of days to film floods in the east Texas and southern Louisiana carry. He carried a cameraman aloft (above) and made movie history.  He landed in New Orleans at about 3 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. 

It took Bob Fowler until February of 1912 to reach Florida. He landed on the sand at Jacksonville Beach on 12 February 1912 -  becoming the second man to cross the nation by airplane. Not that very many people noticed. 

Bob would later observe with understatement, “I was the first to start and the last to finish.” It had taken him 116 days and 72 hours of actual flight time to cover the 2,800 miles across America. The very next year Bob Fowler made the first non-stop transcontinental flight – and the shortest. Just 36 miles across the Isthmus of Panama. 

He filmed it, of course. Bob Fowler was a pretty crafty fellow. Except he was immediately arrested. The defense department wanted him charged with espionage, for filming the Panama Canal. But eventually cooler heads prevailed.

Bob sold The “Cole Flyer” in 1912, and after being used in the movie business for a few years, it was sold again, this time for scrap wood. The engine was the only part saved, But after his flight Bob traded the Cole 4 engine for a new model Wright engine, and that is still on display at the Exposition Museum in Los Angles. So nothing remains of the Cole Flyer.

In 1916 Bob started the “Fowler Airplane Corporation” in his home town of San Francisco. He modified and sold 125 Curtis JN-4’s (“Jennys”) to the U.S. Army as trainers, and after WWI he started Bluebird Airways, a passenger service around the bay area. He retired to San Jose and died in 1966, at the healthy old age of 82.

Jimmy Ward (above), the ex-jockey who had the good sense to drop out of the Hearst race, suffered a great tragedy.  His wife Maude Mae died in a hotel fire,  and Jimmy was so devastated he lost his mind and never got it back.  Eventually Glenn Curtiss helped him get admitted to a Florida mental hospital. He died there in 1923, at the age of 37.  He was buried in an unmarked paupers grave. Some of his fellow aviation pioneers collected money to give him a more respectful funeral, but I can find no record of that ever happening.

The confident Cal Rodgers was testing a new airplane on Wednesday  3 April, 1912, just off shore of Long Beach, California, when he ran into a flock of sea gulls. The plane banked sharply 45 degrees and slid into the surf,.

Cal had crashed just feet from where he had posed grinning in the surf with the “Vin Fiz” the previous December.

The engine broke loose from its mounts and crushed Cal, breaking his neck. He was still breathing when swimmers pulled him from the water, but he died soon after. Cal Rodgers was the 127th pilot's death since the Wright Brothers flight in 1903, and the 22nd American aviator killed. Considering the number of people flying in 1912, those were still terrible odds.

Cal's mother, Maria (Rodgers) Sweitzer, took procession of her son’s body and had it shipped back to Pittsburgh. There Calbraith Perry Rodgers was buried in Allegheny Cemetery under an elaborate tombstone (above), marked with the words “I Endure, I Conquer.”

Cal’s brother John took procession of the “Vin Fiz Flyer” and had it shipped back to Ohio, to the Wright Brother's shops, to be repaired. He offered the Flyer to the Smithsonian, but they already had a Wright B, so instead, in 1917, the Flyer was donated to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In 1934 the Smithsonian changed their minds and bought the “Vin Fiz Flyer”.  Refurbished and rebuilt, that is the plane that hangs from the ceiling in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

And little Maude was determined to endure and conquer as well. After lengthy court battles with her ex-mother-in-law in California, Maude was awarded legal possession of the “Vin Fiz Flyer”. How could this be? Wasn’t the Flyer back in Ohio, being rebuilt? It was. But the contents of the “Vin Fiz Special” hanger car contained enough spare parts, many of which had actually flown sections of the transcontinental  odyssey, to construct a second “Vin Fiz Flyer” and still claim it as the “original.”

Two years after Cal’s death, Maude married Charlie “Wiggie” Wiggin, who had shown such faith and devotion to her Cal; two lonely souls who shared an adoration of another man. “Wiggie”, had, by this time, acquired his own pilot’s license. And Maude and Wiggie made a living for a few years barnstorming their “Vin Fiz Flyer” around the country. And then they quietly faded out of history.

It would be ten years later when U.S. Army Air Force pilot Jimmy Doolittle (above) would cross the continent in less than a day - 21 hours 19 minutes, with just one stop for fuel

And as you sit in your tiny passenger seat, crammed four to an aisle, held prisoner on the tarmac for endless hours, forced to use a toilet designed for a diminutive Marquise de Sade, charged extra for a micro-waved “snack”, a pillow, a blanket, a soda or a thimble full of peanuts, even the privilege of using the rest room...

...consider the sacrifices of those who suffered before you; landing in chicken coops, landing in tree tops, landing in barbed wire fences, landing in Texas for day after day. And remember the immortal words of Cal Rodgers; “I am not in this business because I like it, but because of what I can make out of it.” It has become the mantra of every airline passenger world wide.

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AIR HEADS Part Eight

 

I would say there were four truly amazing things about Cal Rodger(above) s’ transcontinental flight of late 1911. The most amazing thing (to me) is that Cal smoked 19 cigars a day during the 49 days it took him to cross America: that's 931 cigars in total. Where did he get them all?  How was he still breathing when it was all over, after inhaling all those exhaust fumes and all that tobacco smoke?

The second most amazing thing is that he burned 1,230 gallons of gasoline to cover 3,220 miles, for an average of 38 miles per gallon; not bad! Detroit couldn’t match that a hundred years later.  

The third most amazing thing about the flight of the “Vin Fiz Flyer” is that during those 49 days Cal had been actually airborne just three days, ten hours and four minutes of total actual flying time, giving him an average air speed of 51.59 miles per hour. That means that he was “grounded” for a total of forty-five days, sometimes because of bad weather, but mostly because of crashes. 

And that brings me to the fourth amazing thing about Cal Rogers’ flight. Despite all the bandages he had adorning his body and the leg cast he was wearing at the end,  Cal survived. He even survived when his engine exploded less than 200 miles from the finish line.

It happened on November 3rd, the day after Cal’s brief meeting with Bob Ward in Arizona. Cal had just left a refueling stop in the desert at Imperial Junction, California, (meaning he had crossed his last state border!) and was climbing out over the expanse of the Salton Sea (above), aka the Salton Sink..

Without warning the Number One cylinder in his Wright engine exploded catastrophically. It blew out the entire left side of the engine block (above), and Cal’s right shoulder and arm were peppered with shrapnel. Somehow, with his right arm almost useless, Cal executed a banking turn over the salt waters and glided the “Flyer” back to Imperial Junction. He managed to land safely, again, with just one arm: Cal had become quite a pilot. After two hours of surgery a doctor was able to remove most of the metal from Cal’s arm.

The engine was destroyed of course, but the hanger car of the “Vin Fiz Special” carried a spare which “Weggie” and the team of mechanics (above) was able to quickly install - and enough parts to assemble a couple of more.  It took a little longer this time because the crew was short handed. An explosion of estrogen in the Pullman Car of the "Special" had driven master mechanic Charlie Taylor to jump ship back in Texas. The man who had built the original engine for the Wright Brothers had set out alone for California.

The next day Bob Fowler, heading the other way, was almost across New Mexico when he ran into his own mechanical problems. A clogged fuel line chocked off his engine near the isolated water station of Mastodon, 16 miles lonely outside of El Paso, Texas and just north of the Mexican border.

There was no town at Mastadon,  just a water tank where the single rail line and a siding ran between sand dunes, and it was a very lonely place at the time. It still is, especially since the railroad has "moved on". On satellite photographs today it looks like a drawing, all straight lines through a tan background. It was only a little less lonely in 1911. New Mexico wouldn’t even become the 47th state for another 68 days. 

Once he was safely down, Bob Fowler cleared the clogged fuel line, restarted his motor and tried to get airborne again. But the the Cole Flyer couldn’t break free of the sage brush and rocks. Bob would have to wait for a shift of the wind. Except, it didn’t shift.

Meanwhile, still headed west, Cal didn’t even wait for his wounds to heal. Early on the morning of 5 November,  wearing an arm sling to match his leg cast, he made the hop from Imperial Junction through the San Gregorio Pass to Banning, and from there on to Pomona, where he made a last refueling stop. 

And finally, at 4:08 p.m. on Sunday 5 November, 1911, Cal Rodgers landed at the Tournament of Roses Park, on the current grounds of Cal Tech.  He was met by 10 to 20,000 cheering people, most of whom had paid a quarter apiece to be there. The New York Times reported, ''...a maelstrom of fighting, screaming, out-of-their-minds-with-joy men, women and children.'' Cal was loaded into a car and driven around and around the stadium. And among all of the cheering and back slapping, poor deaf Cal kept asking, “I did it, didn’t I? I did it?”

They draped Cal with an American flag (above, left), and posed him next to his mother (above) and in his shadow, (above, center), Marie.  

And almost nobody who was in that crowd cheering Cal Rodgers had any idea that a deaf man had just flown coast-to-coast. It was quite an achievement. 

And nobody was prouder of Cal than Mable, unless it was "Weggie", his faithful mechanic, beaming up at him in a photo.

Cal’s personal victory came a week later, in the Maryland Hotel (above), when he met with a representative for Mr. W.R. Hearst. The newspaper mogul pride was burning from the negative publicity over his refusal to extend the $50,000 prizes' time limit.  So in an attempt to soften the blow  to his reputation, Hearst wanted to present Rogers with a loving cup trophy. 

Cal turned it down. He wanted the money. And he wasn’t going to let W.R. off the petard he had hoisted himself upon, without it.  But like most rich people, Hearst didn't care what people thought of him, as long as they thought of him as rich.

Unnoticed by the press was that other rich man, Mr. J. Odgen Armour, owner of the Armour Meat Packing Company, had spent $180,000 (including Cal’s fee of $23,000) to support the flight. And they had paid all this to sell a really terrible soft drink that quickly disappeared after the publicity of the flight died down.

Then, on 10 November, the "Vin Fiz Flyer" was in the air again.  The city of Long Beach had offered Cal $5,000 to actually complete his journey right up to the Pacific Ocean, in their town.

This final flight was going fine until half way there, when the engine quit. Cal landed, fiddled with the Wright engine himself, and started again. 

And then again the engine coughed and died, this time over Compton (above). But this time when landing, Cal plowed into the ground.

And this time Cal did not walk away. He was pulled unconscious from the wreckage. 

But his lucky bottle of “Vin Fiz” was still undamaged, hanging from the broken wing strut. If you believed the publicity agents. 

Cal suffered a concussion, a broken ankle, broken ribs, an injured back and burns. . By now Cal must have really hated that damn bottle of "Vin Fiz.

Meanwhile, out in the wilds of Mastodon, New Mexico, Bob Fowler was still stuck in the sage brush and beginning to think he would never get out. Finally, on 10 November, a two man Santa Fe work crew appeared over the horizon, pumping a handcar (above). And that gave Bob an idea. He talked to the railroad men and they agreed to help him out. 

Using railroad cross ties they fashioned a platform to sit atop the hand car, and then struggled to secure Bob's  “Cole Flyer” atop that platform. On the morning of Monday, 13 November, 1911,  the entire contraption was pushed from the siding onto the main line. Bob clambered aboard. The Cole Flyer's motor was started. 

And with railroad workers running alongside to stabilize the wings, the “Flyer” began to move along the track . This was much like the system the Wright brothers had used to launch their original flyer, back in 1903.

 And just as the Cole Flyer began to pick up speed, Bob looked ahead to see a column of smoke rising from the single tracks stretched out before him. Instantly Bob realized he was on a collision course with a steam locomotive.

For a moment it seemed a variation of the joke about the first two automobiles in Kansas running into each other. The massive engine and the fragile airplane quickly ate up the ground between them, heading for the most unlikely collision in either aviation or railroad history!

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