I would say there are really four truly amazing things about Cal Rogers’ transcontinental flight of late 1911. The most amazing thing 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 they get them all? How was he still breathing when it was all over, after inhaling all those engine 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 can’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 airborne just three days, ten hours and four minutes of actual flying time, giving him an average air speed of about 53 miles per hour. That means that he was “grounded” for forty-five days, sometimes because of bad weather, but mostly because of mechanical problems and 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 after his crash in Arizona, Cal had 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. Without warning the Number One cylinder in his Wright engine exploded catastrophically. It blew out the entire left side of the engine block, and Cal’s right shoulder and arm were peppered with shrapnel. Screaming pain tore at his consciousness, and Cal’s arm was almost useless. Somehow, he 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 (above), but the “Vin Fiz Special” carried a spare, which “Weggie” was able to install. It took a little longer because the crew was short handed. The master mechanic Charlie Taylor had left the flight crew back in Texas and gone ahead to California.
The next day Bob Fowler 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, just 16 miles outside of El Paso, Texas. Mastadon was just a water tank where the single rail line and a siding ran between sand dunes, and 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 just 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 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 sand and sagebrush. Bob Fowler would have to wait for a shift of the wind. Except it didn’t shift.
Cal didn’t even wait for his wounds to heal. Early on the morning of the 5th, wearing an arm sling, he made the hop from Imperial Junction through the San Gregorio Pass to Banning, and from there to Pomona, where he made a last refueling stop. And finally, at 4:08 p.m. on Sunday November 5, 1911, Cal Rogers landed at the Tournament of Roses Park, on the current grounds of Cal Tech. He was met by 10 to 20,000 screaming 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 amongst all of the cheering and back slapping, poor deaf Cal kept asking, “I did it, didn’t I? I did it?” 
They draped him with an American flag, and posed him next to the “Rubenisque” 1911 Rose Queen, Miss Ruth Palmer . And almost nobody who was in that crowd cheering Cal Rogers had any idea that a deaf man had just flown coast-to-coast, alone. 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 the photo below.
Cal’s personal victory came a week later, in the Maryland Hotel, when a representative for Mr. W.R. Hearst , burning from the negative publicity over his refusal to extend the prizes' time limit, presented the aviator with a loving cup. And Cal turned it down. He still wanted the money. And he wasn’t going to let W.R. off the petard he had hoisted himself upon.
Unnoticed was that the Armour Meat Packing Company had spent $180,000 (including Cal’s fee of $23,000) to support the flight, and all this to sell a really crappy soft drink that quickly disappeared after the publicity of the flight died down. Then, on November 10th, the "Vin Fiz Flyer" was in the air again. The city of Long Beach had offered Cal $5,000 to complete his journey right up to the Pacific Ocean, in their town. The flight was going fine until half way there when the engine quit. Cal landed, fiddled with the Wright, and started again. And again, the engine coughed and died, this time over Compton. And this time Cal plowed into the ground. And this time he did not walk away. He was pulled unconscious from the wreckage, with a concussion, a broken ankle, broken ribs, and injured back and burns. But his lucky bottle of “Vin Fiz” was still hanging, undamaged, from the broken wing strut. Cal must have hated that bottle by now. 
Meanwhile, out in the wilds of Mastodon, New Mexico, Bob Fowler was still stuck in the sand and beginning to think he would never get out. But then, on the 10th, a two man Santa Fe work crew appeared over the horizon, pumping a handcar. And Bob had an idea. He talked to the railroad and they agreed to help him out. Using railroad cross ties they fashioned a platform to sit atop a hand car, and struggled to secure the “Cole Flyer” atop the platform. On the morning of Monday, November 13th, the entire contraption was pushed from the siding onto the main line. Bob Fowler clambered into the pilot’s seat. The motor was started. And with railroad workers running alongside to stabilize the wings, the “Flyer” began to move along the track. 
And just as the Flyer began to pick up speed Bob looked ahead to see a column of smoke rising from the tracks. Instantly Bob realized he was on a collision course with a steam locomotive. The two objects quickly ate up the ground between them, heading for the most unlikely collision in railroad history! 
NEXT TIME; AN ASIDE
- 30 -
But acquisitiveness was evident amongst everyone associated with the race, and even Mable had gotten into the act. Dear, sweet, shy, retiring innocent Mable Rogers had tried to convince the United States Post Office that the historical nature of the race warranted creating her a special “Post Mistress”, so that she could stamp “Postmarked Vin Fiz Special” on cards and letters bought from her while en route, for a small fee, of course. But when that moneymaking idea failed to inspire Congress to act, and after W.R. Hearst had abandoned the race (and her husband) in Missouri, Mable sent Cal’s brother Robert out ahead to Kansas City to order unofficial oversized “Vin Fiz Flyer” and “Rogers Aerial Post” stamps, to be sold at a quarter apiece once the Flyer had crossed into Texas. Buyers would still have to affix official postage to have anything delivered, and the stamps had no glue backing, but Mable was trying squeeze every penny out of the insanity she was caught up in. 
It’s difficult to know if enough stamps were actually sold to cover the cost of printing them, but we do know that only thirteen “Vin Fiz” stamps still survive, eight on postcards, one on a letter and four “off cover”, meaning individually. One of the “off cover” stamps sold in 2006, when the world was still drunk, for $70,000. That amount could have financed the entire flight back in 1911. I guess Mable had the right idea, just bad timing, as I’m willing to bet Maria (ne Rogers) Sweitzer, Cal’s mother, reminded her at every opportunity.
Avarice of all kinds was on view in the hothouse of the 66 foot long by 8 ½ foot wide pressure cooker of the “Vin Fiz Special” Pullman sleeping car, with wife and mother-in-law cooped up for endless days together on the endless stretches of track between the way stations of civilization across the American West. The air must have been thick with slights (real and imagined), invective (real & imagined), criticism and denunciations, both real and perceived. The two ladies endured each other for Cal’s sake, from New York to Chicago. Then mother Maria found an excuse to leave the train. But at Kansas City she rejoined the caravan, only to disembark yet again at San Antonio. Perhaps the expense of printing up the stamps came up once too often in conversation, because when Maria rejoined the train outside of El Paso she brought reinforcements – 22 year old Lucy Belvedere, a reputed heiress, and at least in Maria’s mind, an improvement over Mable. For example, I presume that dear Lucy could swim.
It would appear that Cal was somewhat distracted by the drama building in the Pullman car. In what can only be seen as an omen, as he approached El Paso, Cal had a near miss in mid-air with an eagle, or maybe it was a vulture. On the 24th of October at Spofford, Texas, Cal’s attention slipped just enough to allow his right propeller to strike the ground, sending him into a ground loop that broke another wing and “splintered” both props. Through yet another Herculean effort Chief mechanic Charlie Taylor and his first assistant, Charlie “Wiggie” Wiggin, were able to get Cal back into the air the next morning. Then, just before noon on Friday, October 29th this object of maternal v matrimonial completion landed at the corner of Duval and 45th street in Austin, Texas. Three thousand came out to cheer the hero. And Mable was quoted by a local reporter as saying, “Sometimes I suspect that Calbraith thinks showing affection to a woman would be unfaithful to his machine.” Yes, that was Mable’s concern, her husband’s attachment to his machine. I wonder if she noted ironically to herself that one of the things still holding Cal airborne was her corset, strapped into an upper wing as repair.
In Deming, New Mexico, on Halloween, Cal’s ignition system went on the fritz. Still he persevered. He refueled at Wilcox, Arizona on November 1st, and took the short hop from there to Tucson, where he paused just long enough to travel the six blocks from his landing spot to the ball park where Bob Fowler’s "Cole Flyer" had landed, and shake his hand. In fact Cal was so rushed the photographers had no time to snap a picture. It seems that Mable had finally showed a nerve equal to her Cal’s, and this time she wasn’t waiting to be rescued.
After the refueling stop at Wilcox, Arizona Lucy had discovered that her entire trousseau had been stolen from her compartment. As Mother Maria and Lucy digested this horrifying disaster, shy little Mable quietly informed them that the luggage was not missing. Rather it was perfectly safe...aboard the east bound baggage car of the train they had just passed at the station back at Wilcox, placed there by "Wiggie" on Mables' instructions. It was a display of verve and determination that Maria had not expected out of Mable. And while Cal struggled for fame and fortune above the unforgiving desert of Arizona, Lucy gathered her few remaining belongings and left the “Vin Fiz Special” via the next east bound passenger train, with her tail between her legs, chasing her corsets and her luggage back into Texas, and out of the pages of history.
It seems that at some point in the cross country adventure little Mable had taught herself how to swim.
Wilshire Boulevard’s beginnings were very humble indeed, bisecting mostly beet fields. In 1910 the intersection of Wilshire Blvd. and Fairfax Avenue was an ideal location for an airfield, close to the budding metropolis of Los Angeles (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 deceased Dire Wolves stuck in the tar of the La Brea Tar Pits, just down the street. (BTW: "la brea" means tar in Spanish - so the "La Brea tar pits" translates as 'the tar - tar pits'. 
Then in March 1921 the air field was bought by flyer Emory Roger and his wife, and renamed “Rogers’ Field”. Emory then started up “Pacific Marine Airways”, in partnership with Sid Chaplin, brother to Charlie Chaplin. They flew to Catalina Island and sold Curtiss airplanes 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. That is what happens to everything historic in Los Angeles, sooner or later.
Late that afternoon 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 financial backer, Reed Grundy, had always wanted him to start from Los Angeles because the mountains Bob had to cross here were so much lower that the Sierra and because the Los Angeles Board of Reality was coughing up a $10,000 bonus if he started from L.A. - okay, mostly because of the bonus. In fact, early the next morning, October 20, Grundy called Pasadena and begged Bob to fly back to Wilshire Field to collect another paycheck for an appearance down Fairfax Avenue at the L.A. motordrome with Barney Oldfield and company. 
But Bob put his foot down and said he’d rather give up flying all together than start this trip three times. 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 covered only 69 miles. And the next day, October 21st, went even slower, because he was approaching the San Gorgonio Pass. The pass is only at 2,600 feet altitude, but it runs 22 miles long between the 9,000 foot tall Mt. San Gorgonio and the 11,000 foot tall Mt. San Jacinto, making it one of the deepest passes in the United States. For a cloth and wood airplane flying at between 2 and 4,000 feet above the ground, passing between towering mastiffs meant dangerous cross winds. The Cole Flyer struggled to make progress, but Bob kept going. 
Just as the 14,505 foot tall Mount Whitney stands just 76 miles west of Badwater, Death Valley, at 282 feet below sea level, Mount San Jacinto stands less than 100 miles west of the Salton Sink, at 220 feet below sea level (far upper right in photo). The line from the Gulf of California, through the Salton Sea, Death Valley (and north to Mono Lake) is the joint where California is being twisted, torn apart, bent and broken along the San Andreas Fault and a newly forming rift valley. Someday, in fourteen or fifteen million years, this is going to be the new west coast.
Two hundred miles later, following the Southern Pacific Railroad line, Bob landed at Tuscon, Arizona. And there Bob had his brief encounter with a fellow traveler, the only other man on God’s green earth who truly understood what he was going through; Cal 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 backslap or to compare notes: so much for the brotherhood of the air. 
When daddy George Hearst died in 1891, W.R. convinced his dotting mother to sell off the mining properties on which the family fortune had been built to finance his acquisition of the “New York Morning Journal”, where W.R. repeated his recipe of success - which he had learned, by the way, during a summer internship under Joseph Pulitzer. And then W.R. began to buy newspapers and magazines, (eventually 42 newspapers with 30 million + readers) where he could syndicate his well paid writers and increase his advertising revenues, which he used to promote and publicize his runs for congressman (two terms) and as governor and mayor of N.Y.C. (three tries and no wins). Everything W.R. did was ultimately to promote and publicize W.R., including the Hearst Prize. 
W.R.’s interest in flying was typically mercenary. When his editors had approached him with the idea of offering a $50,000 prize for the first transcontinental flight experts like Glenn Curtiss and Wilbur Wright, warned W.R. that aviation was too young to achieve such a lofty goal. In 1910, when the prize was offered, no plane could stay airborne longer than two hours at a time, and none could travel faster than fifty miles an hour. Airplanes were still made out of wood and wire, for crying out loud. But W.R. was not particularly interested in promoting flying. He was interested in promoting himself. And offering the prize would fill his newspapers day after day, with articles about how it could it be done, who could do it, who didn’t think it could be done, and how many would die trying to do it. And speaking of publicity, W.R. was awarded a medal from the Aeronautical Society of America for even offering the prize. And W.R. loved to get medals. And that’s what offering the prize got for W.R. Whereas, actually awarding the prize would sell papers for one day only. And that was why the Hearst Prize had contained a time limit in the first place. The prize was set to expire on October 17, 1911. And when Cal Rogers’ telegram arrived begging for an extension, W.R. was in no rush to respond. 
Cal waited in Chicago for two days for the telegram from Hearst, and he began to suspect he had been had. Then, on October 10th he flew across the flatlands to Springfield, Illinois, then on to Marshall, Missouri. As he arrived in Marshall, far away from any Hearst newspapers, Cal found a telegram from Hearst waiting for him, letting him know there would be no extension. Cal had now flown 1,398 miles since leaving New York, which gave him the record for longest continuous flight. But there would be no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, just a bottle of Vin Fiz - yuck.
A mercenary element now entered Cal’s romantic soul. When the city of St. Louis withdrew its offer of a thousand dollars for landing there, Cal bypassed the town, and its Hearst newspaper. Instead he flew on to Kansas City, landing in Swope Park. 
The sexy leather outfit was born out of necessity. The Wright Brothers were Midwestern stick-in-the-muds who did not approve of teaching women to fly and who strongly disapproved of anybody who did. And there were darn few people in the flying business in 1911 who did not pay attention to what the Wright brothers disapproved of. So when Harriet Quimby convinced John Moisant to give her flight lessons, he insisted on secrecy. Whenever they took off she wore a hooded leather suit to hide her femininity. 
Her family had owned a rock farm in upper Michigan in the 1870’s, and her mother, Ursula, had supplemented their income by selling “Quimby’s Liver Invigorator” by mail, complete with imaginary testimonials. In the 1880’s the farm went bust and the family moved to the central coast of California, and then in the 1890’s they had moved again to San Francisco. There her father, William, dispensed herbs and twenty-something Harriet invented herself as an “actress”, in the nineteenth century definition of that term, as a beautiful bobble on the arm of men who could afford her. People asked. Her mother said she had been college educated "back east". But no college ever had a record of her attending. Still people wanted to know because she was famous. Her nude portrait even hung in the sophisticated “Bohemian Club”, until it was destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. But by then Harriet had reinvented her self again; writing articles for the “San Francisco Bulletin”, and, in 1903, moving east to New York City to become the theatre critic, feature writer and photojournalist for “Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly”. But who was Harriet Quimby, really?
She wrote the odd and off-beat stories; “A Woman’s Moose Hunt” and “Hints to Stage Struck Girls”, “Household Hints”, the habits of Chinatown, the life of acrobats and comics and the evils of childhood labor. In a decade she wrote more than 250 stories, many under nom de plumes. She even wrote screenplay melodrama shorts for D.W. Griffith’s “Biograph Studios” in New Jersey; “Sunshine Through the Dark” (a blind princess has her sight restored by a poet’s kiss), “His Mother’s Scarf” (Two brothers battle over a girl), “The Broken Cross” (boy finds girl, tramp tricks boy, boy goes back to girl) and “Fisher Folks” (a crippled girl marries a fisherman, and heartache ensues.) None of these were cinema masterpieces, or would make film history. But they paid the bills. And they gave Harriet a taste of the movie business. She even acted in one film for D.W. But who was Harriet Quimby, really? 
She was vivacious, ambitious, alive and enchanting. Bonnie Ginger, a friend and fan wrote, “Miss Quimby has…a low voice and a brilliant smile and she runs strongly to overhung bonnets and antique ornaments…She probably wears this sort of thing because she can do it so well”. Harriet lived in a suite at the Victoria Hotel, and kept a suite for her parents there as well. She bought a powerful yellow sports car (her one ostentatious purchase) and sped around town in it. When she completed her flight training, Harriet wrote that she “…walked over to one of the officials, looked him in the eye, and said ‘Well, I guess I get my license”. She did, Number 37. It was, she said, “Easier than voting”, which was quite a joke since women did not yet have the vote. “Was it worth the effort?”, she would write for Leslies, “Absolutely. I didn’t want to make myself conspicuous, I just wanted to be first, that’s all, and I am honestly and frankly delighted.” Was this who Harriet Quimby really was? 
As for the romance of flight, Harriet was brutally honest in describing the experience to her Lesilie’s readers… “Not only the chassis of the machine, but all the fixtures are slippery with lubricating oil, and when the engine is speeded a shower of this oil is thrown back directly into the driver’s face.” She plotted carefully to be the first woman to fly the channel, but on the morning after her flight word of the Titanic sinking drove her adventure out of the headlines. So she came home to participate in an air show in Boston, and it was there she took a passenger for a ride in her new French built two seat monoplane. 
The Vin Fiz girl was dead, five months after the plane ended its endeavor. But who had she been, really? 
