MAN OF MYSTERY

I shall now relate, as best I can, the true story of the legendary Nicolas Flamel. He may not be the man you expect him to be, the man from the pages of “Harry Potter” or “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. But then I’m willing to bet that you, dear reader, are probably not the person he expected you to be, either.

Nicolas was born about 1335 in village of Pontoise ("bridge on the Oise"), just 17 miles north-northwest of Paris, along the old Roman Road. The village still retained the flavor of a border town, balanced as it was between the "Ile-de-France", where the King of France ruled, and "The Vexin", where feudal lords held sway. They were nominally vassals to the King. But sometimes the King in question was French and sometimes he was English.

It was a very bad time to be growing up French. In the first place the Hundred’s Year War had just begun and was proving so popular among the nobility that it seemed certain to be held over for a long run. Its very name implied optimism. The French ruler, Phillip VI, was a competent King, as far as inbred nobility goes. Unfortunately he was surrounded by a lot of inbred noble idiots. At the battle of Crecy in August of 1346, 35,000 disorganized yet haughty French noblemen charged uphill at 12,000 Englishmen, killing maybe 300 of the sausage eaters, while losing 13,000 of their own blue-bloods. And if that wasn’t bad enough, in 1349 the Black Death descended upon Paris. That year they were burying 800 people a day, peasants and nobility and even clergy. By the time the little bug Yersinia pestis had moved on, half of France had been buried.

In this world of doom and death it would have been no surprise that young Nicolas studied for the priesthood. There were only two ways to get close to God in the Middle Ages, and only one that did not require dying first. I suspect that Nicolas was trained by priests because we know for a fact he could read and write. Those skills in the 14th Century were still restricted by law to members of the church or to the nobility. And most of the French nobility were, quite frankly, not that bright. (See Battle of Crecy, above)

It is also rumored that young Nicolas received a small inheritance. I admit that is a possibility. It is also possible that he stole the money. What we know is that about 1350 he arrived in Paris. There, Nicolas used his precious funds to buy paper and ink and set himself up in business on the street near the Cathedral of Saint-Jacques la Boucherue, (the butcher), as a scribe.

The church was at the center of the Paris market, Les Halles, the “stomach of Paris”. It was also the financial core of the metropolis. And Nicolas, surrounded by butchers, bakers and candlestick makers and buyers of everything from rare silks to local farmers’ produce, wrote and copied letters for a fee. And that made him a Middle Ages high tech worker, a web site designer 700 years before there was a web.

Any merchant wishing to communicate with his clients or suppliers or debtors outside of Paris would pause at the cathedral the same way later generations would visit a telegraph office or an internet cafe. And in time Nicolas moved from being a simple scribe into the greatest and most dangerous profession an ambitious young Christian in 14th century Europe could aspire to; banker.

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“Nicolas Flamel”, she whispered dramatically, “is the only known maker of the Sorcerer’s Stone.”
This didn’t have quite the effect she’d expected.
“The what?” said Harry and Ron.
“Oh, honestly, don’t you read? Look – read that, there.”
"The ancient study of Alchemy is concerned with making the Sorcerer’s Stone, a legendary substance with astonishing powers. The stone will transform any metal into pure gold. It also produces the Elixir of Life, which will make the drinker immortal.”
There have also been many reports of the Sorcerer’s Stone over the centuries, but the only stone currently in existence belongs to Mr. Nicolas Flamel, who celebrated his six hundredth and sixty-fifth birthday last year, enjoys a quiet life in Devon with his wife, Perenelle (six hundred and fifty-eight).”
(Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. pp 219-220. J.K. Rowling. Scholastic, Inc. 1997)
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Nicolas’ entry into banking would have been a natural evolution. When writing a dunning letter for a merchant, or to establish a business agreement, Nicolas would offer to forgo his usual fee in exchange for a percentage of the payment or the profit. In business today this is called a “finders fee”. If the debt was not repaid or the deal not made Nicolas was out just his paper and ink. But by insisting in the letter that any payment be sent to him rather than directly to the illiterate merchant, Nicolas insured that his percentage – often upwards of 50% - was paid before the merchant received so much as a sou.

But anything that smacked of interest charges was illegal. It was illegal because making it so solved a major dilemma for the Christian Church. On the one hand Jesus Christ was on the record as saying some nasty things about rich people. (“Again I say to you that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” Gospel of St. Mark, 12:25.) On the other hand the Christian Church was incredibly wealthy while the peasants were incredibly poor. The Popes in particular liked to wear nice things. In order to avoid the awkwardness of priests extolling selflessness while eating off gold and silver plate, it was decreed that by a “rich man” Jesus was not in fact referring to powerful landowners like Bishops and Dukes. Profit from sweat was godly. Thus being a serf was God like. Even the indirect profit of rent was, thank God, godly. Profit from non-sweat, like, say, interest, was un-godly. It was a fine line but the church happily walked it for seventeen hundred years.

As recently as 1311 Pope Clement V had declared that charging interest on a loan was heresy for a Christian, and punishable by death at the stake. And they really did it. Not as often as the movies might want you to believe, but often enough to serve as a warning to anybody who got on the bad side of the Pope, like say the Knights Temple, or the Huguenots, or the Jews.

It was the function of a Jew in medieval Europe to be the Christian equivalent of a Hindu untouchable. In fact the followers of the Hebrew God were restricted from doing any other business with gentiles except money lending. This left the ambitious Red Sea Pedestrian with little choice as to a career. And this had the added appeal that every time the French nobility found their debts piling up they simply burned a few Jews, forced a few to convert, expelled the rest from the country and seized their property, including their accounting books, as did the misnamed “Phillip the Fair” of France did in 1306. Charles VI if Franch did again in 1394.

In between these persecutions the crown quietly re-admitted the Jews because even medieval economies could not function without bankers. But the persecutions could break out again at anytime, with the slaughter of innocents, whose only crime was that they were easy scapegoats and were profiting doing something the Christian church profited from but disapproved of, at least publicly.

So it was easy for Flamel to keep his business arraignments secret since the merchants involved were Nicolas’ co-conspirators and equally as guilty as Nicolas, in the eyes of the church. As the profits began to roll in Nicolas was able to rent space for a stall that rested against the very columns of the front of the Cathedral la Boucherue.

Now that he had a roof over his head and some privacy when he did business, Nicolas’s profits increased. And Nicolas now had the capital to offer direct loans to tide customers over while they were waiting for their debts to be repaid; more profit for Nicolas, and more risk. He needed a cover story to explain where his growing wealth was coming from.  And it could not be from interest.

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“I, Nicholas Flamel, a scrivener of Paris, in the year 1414, in the reign of our gracious Prince Charles the VIth, whom God preserve; and after the death of my faithful partner Perenelle, am seized with a desire and a delight, in remembrance of her, and in your behalf, dear nephew, to write out the whole majesty of the secret of the Powder of Projection, or the Philosophical Tincture,…”.
The Testament of Nicolas Flamel
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The testament of Nicolas Flamel continues for some 3,000 words, and not one word of it was actually written by Nicolas Flamel, or anybody who knew him. He had no brother or sister that we know of, so he had no nephew. And modern researchers have noticed in the testament the use of words and phrases that were not in use in 14th or even 15th century France.

Nobody even heard of the testament until the 18th century, which is when it was probably written and sold several hundred times over for a tidy profit to those who wanted to believe they were buying the secret of unlimited wealth and life. There are always such people about, ask any Wall Street guru or the merchants of Amsterdam in the 15th century who invested their fortunes in Tulip bulbs. But there is an underlying truth to the so called Flamel testament - with emphases on the lying part.

Nicolas chose as a cover story, alchemy, from the Arabic, meaning “Art of Transformation”. The modern English translation is “con man”, from the criminal code meaning the art of stealing. Alchemy was a shell game, a bunk, a fraud, a card trick where the colored liquids and the incantations and the clouds of smoky incense performed the same function which the modern day scantly clad magician’s assistant performs. What would you rather look at, an egg turning into a dove, or a half dressed woman with a really great pair of legs? Let me rephrase that question; which will you look at? One defies the laws of natures, but the other is natural law. Millions of magicians have built their careers on this equation. You can take that to the bank; they did. And do.

There is no shortage of examples of Alchemist proven to be frauds. Edward Kelly lost his ears in Lancaster, England, for forging title deeds. Only then did he delve into alchemy. He claimed to have learned how to transmute common metals into gold. And yet, somehow, he never got rich from it. He wrote his most famous book, “The Stone of the Philosophers” during one of his jail terms. Biographer Ralph Sargent said Kelly’s career only “…differs from that of an ordinary mountebank by the audacity of his claims and the magnitude of his success.” Kelly’s success ended in 1596 during a prison escape when the bed sheet rope he had knotted together failed to support his rather substantial weight.

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Peter; (to Rafe)
“Alchemy is a secret science. None almost can understand the language of it and it has as many terms impossible to be uttered…If thou have any gold to work on, (my master’s) art is then made for you. For with one pound of gold, he will go near to transmuting it into ten acres of ground….But here comes my Master.
(Enter the Alchemist)
Rafe: (disbelieving)
This is a begger.
Peter:
No. Such cunning men must disguise themselves as though there were nothing in them. For otherwise they shall be compelled to work for Princes, and so be constrained to betray their secrets
“Gallathea” 1592 - John Lyly.
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One more thing: the modern myths about alchemy being a predecessor for chemistry are “merde”, which is modern French for “I don’t think so”, spoken in a bratty voice, slowly, and with thick sarcasm. In fact alchemy is to chemistry what UFO’s are to rocket science. Most rational people in the middle ages, who actually knew real alchemists, knew they were frauds and said so. So why would anybody want to be associated with alchemy?

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“Who in his dusty workshop bending, with proved adepts in company, made, from his recipes unending, opposing substances agree…There was a lion red…a wooer daring, within the Lilly’s tepid bath espoused. And both, tormented then by flame unsparing, by terms in either bridal chamber housed, if then appeared, with colors splendid, the young queen in her crystal shell, This was the medicine – the patient’s woes soon ended, and none demanded – who got well.”
“The Cannon’s Yoeman’s Tale. Canturbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer. 1400
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About 1370 Nicolas married the widow Perenelle. She offered Nicolas emotional comfort and I certainly hope some physical comfort as well – for the both of them. She also probably provided the funds to build the new home they constructed on the Rue des Escrivains. (Hey, if George Washington could marry into Mount Vernon, then Nicolas Flamel could marry into the street of 'fakes'.) They lived frugally in order not to attract attention to Nicolas' business, and because they were both set in their ways and that is the way they had always lived - call it the Silas Marner syndrome. In 1407 Nicolas built a shop at 51 rue de Montmorency (now a restaurant) where he employed other scribes and artists to create illuminated manuscripts. The mafia would call this kind of business a front, or a money laundering scheme. And the most prominently displayed and the best selling books Nicolas sold were, no doubt, the copies of ancient texts on alchemy. Call it the 14th century self help market.

Remember; it was far safer in medieval France to be rumored a magician than to be known as a banker. But is it more logical to believe that Nicolas Flamel turned lead into gold and discovered something which still eludes science, or to believe that Nicolas Flamel knew how to add and subtract the vig and figure the percentages of interest rates? Well, we know which option is the more romantic to read about.

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“It is certain that he had been seen often walking along the Rue des Lombards, and furtively entering a small house at the corner of the Rue des Ecrivains and the Rue de Marivault. It was the house built by Nicolas Flamel, in which he died about 1407, and which, unoccupied ever since, was beginning to fall into ruins, so greatly had the hermetics and alchemists of all countries worn away its walls merely by scratching their names upon them…It was supposed that Flamel had buried the philosophers stone in these cellars, and for two centuries alchemists from Magistri to Father Pacificque, never ceased to worry the soil, until the house, so mercilessly ransacked and turned inside out ended up crumbling into dust under their feet.”
The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Page 134. Victor Hugo. Carey, Lea and Blanchard. 1834.
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On the second and the third floors of Flamel’s bookshop, now the oldest house in Paris, Nicolas sheltered the poor, as he did in several other houses he owned or rented in Paris. But if Nicolas were not a money lender and a secret banker, what fueled all his generosity? If it came from turning lead into gold, why did it ever stop? Have we humans gotten greedier in the last 700 years? I don’t believe we have. If lead can be transmuted into gold, and if Citibank’s International group could lose $20 billion in 2008 and then in 2009 the VP in charge could still expect a $5 million bonus for a job well done, why is gold not as common as lead? The answer screams for your attention.

The visits by Jews and the nobility to Flamel’s humble shop, usually made after dark, were all cloacked in the legends of alchemy. Even a trip Nicolas made to southern France (then under English control) to collect debts fit into the cover story. It was claimed Nicolas had traveled to Spain to learn more about magic from Muslim mystics. But the truth was the faith of Mohammad executed its alchemists just as often as the Catholic Church, and for the same reason; most of the practitioners were frauds and con men.

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True, Sir. The two favorite studies of my youth were botany and mineralogy. I have regretted I were not a man, that I might have been a Flamel, a Fontana or Cabanas” Page 523. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas. Oxford World Classics. 1846
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During his lifetime Nicolas donated large sums to la Boucherue cathedral, and he endowed seven churches, fourteen hospitals and three chapels. The church was no more likely to ask questions about the source of Nicolas’ generosity than a modern politician is prone to inquire about the source of a campaign donation. But sooner or later all donations, like all lives, must be spent. Perenelle died sometime around 1410. Nicolas himself died in 1418. They were both buried in the cemetery “…of the innocents” in Paris.

Nicolas left his substantial fortune to the Catholic Church, which put his name and image on the hospitals and the churches they built with his money. And that is how his name and the mystery of his wealth has survived for 500 years; proof positive that bankers, too, have hearts; at least as long as they are afraid of being burnt at the stake. Remove that threat and they are just as selfish as the rest of us.  And a lot more powerful.

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AIR HEADS Part Ten

I wonder how many people worked in the advertising department at the Cole Motor Company in Indianapolis in 1911? Besides supporting Bob Fowler’s “Cole Flyer” transcontinental flight, they also had a big balloon that made appearances at county fairs, and they contributed a share in the founding of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. As their slogan went, “There’s a Touch of Tomorrow in All Cole Does Today”. Well, the touch was not to last forever. Joe Cole (above) had built a fortune in horse buggies before he borrowed enough cash from Harvey Firestone to start his auto company in 1909. He ordered the parts from other manufacturers and assembled them in the Cole building. “A man’s car any woman can drive.”

Joe offered such innovations as “adjustable door glasses” (i.e., removable windows) a 15 foot long dashboard light and a speedometer that read up to 75 mph; unfortunately the car only went up to 45 mph. Bigwigs at General Motors wanted to buy out Cole, and when Joe wouldn’t sell they just bought up his suppliers 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. In 1924, after he closed up his firm, Joe died suddenly. His family rented out the building (above) in Indianapolis and kept the name, "the Cole Building" into the 1970’s; thus fared the man who sponsored Bob Fowler's flight. 

After he reached El Paso in 1911, it took Bob Fowler(above) a month just to escape Texas. He crash landed in a rice field outside of Seixas, Louisiana, on Christmas Eve. He landed in New Orleans at about 3 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. It took him until February of 1912 to reach Florida. He landed on the sand at Jacksonville Beach on 12 February 1912 -  not that anybody noticed, what with the Titanic going down just two months later.

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. Bob Fowler was a pretty crafty fellow.

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. The engine is still on display at the Exposition Museum in Los Angles. In 1916 Bob started the “Fowler Airplane Corporation” in his home town of San Francisco. He modified and sold Curtis JN-4’s (“Jennys”) to the U.S. Army as trainers, and after WWI he started Bluebird Airways, a passenger service. 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, died in Florida sometime after 1917, allegedly of stomach cancer. 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. Perhaps somebody down in Florida can correct my mistake.

Cal Rodgers was testing a new airplane on Wednesday April 3, 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, crashing just feet from where Cal 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 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 repair car of the “Vin Fiz Special” contained enough spare parts, many of which may have actually flown sections of the transcontinental voyage, to construct a second “Vin Fiz Flyer” and still claim it as an “original.”

Two years after Cal’s death, and after the court battles with Maria had finally been settled, 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 Jimmy Doolittle 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 Nine

I ask you to imagine yourself as the engineer on a westbound freight on the El Paso and Southwest Railroad. It is November of 1911, and the big steam boiler in front of you is a living, soot spewing metal beast with a hot, coal fed craw your stoker has to constantly feed. You climb out of the Rio Grande valley, the empty copper ore cars behind you rumbling around Sierra del Cristo Rey mountain. Then you turn south, coming within yards of the Mexican border at Anapra, before the line swings north again, past “The Lizard”, a basalt dyke basking in the sun on a mountain shoulder (in the distance, above) high above the dieing mining town of Lake Valley. And then, after wending their way between lonely unnamed desert peaks and road cuts, the rails ramp down onto the high Chihuahuan desert floor and the siding and water tower at Mammoth, New Mexico. And that is when you see it. It looks like a giant insect speeding towards you at 40 or 50 miles an hour. But it can’t be. Can it?

In fact it can not. What you are seeing, at a time when most Americans had not yet seen an airplane, is the “Cole Flyer”, piloted by Bob Fowler, using a hand car as a catapult to become airborne, an aviation first. So the engineer can be excused for not recognizing what he saw, as it had never been seen before, ever, in the four billion year history of the earth. It was a desperate measure, tried after Fowler had been trapped in the sand for four days, 16 miles west of El Paso, Texas. The Mexican border was only three miles to the south. And staring head on at the steam engine bearing down on him, Bob Fowler said later he wondered if he was going to become the first pilot in history to crash into a locomotive. Bob lifted off the hand car at the last possible second and became airborne, missing the front of the oncoming locomotive he said, by “…no more than ten feet.” I doubt if the engineer comprehended what he had seen, particularly after it flew off over his head, followed by the shattering crash of the handcar against the breast of the huge iron beast. This makes Bob Fowler the world’s first UFO, if it really happened.

I had my doubts. But according to the New York Times, on July 24, 1904, three New Jersey teenager couples had borrowed a similar handcar for a Saturday night “joy ride”. After some drinking and dancing, at about 11 p.m., they found themselves pumping their way across a bridge over the Delaware River with a Lakawana passenger Express bearing down on them. It sounds like a turn of the century version of “Saturday Night Fever”. All the couples jumped to safety, with only one male, Albert Jones, suffering injury, a broken shoulder. According to the Times, the express “barely escaped being wrecked”, but it did escape. So I guess it could have happened the way Fowler tells it. Bob would use a handcar catapult to launch himself three more times on his journey to the Atlantic Ocean. But he would never again come so close to being killed by a locomotive.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angels, Cal Rogers was slowly recovering from his injuries. Propped up in a wheel chair, with both legs in casts, his wife hovering on his right, his mother perched judgmentally to his left and his brother standing back out of the line of fire between them  (above), Cal assured the doubtful reporters, “I’m going to finish this flight, and I’m going to finish it with the same machine.” It must have been a contentious press conference, since everyone in the photo looks as if one of them has just stepped in something very unpleasant. I wonder who that could have been?

Cal had, by my rough count, crashed 70 times in crossing the country, (23 times in Texas alone!) or about once every 43 miles. His sponsors must have been fed up with the repair bills. And with all the engine problems of late, Cal must have been a bit uneasy about trusting his life to the skills of the 17 year old Charlie “Wiggie” Wiggen, his new chief mechanic (with Cal, below), since Charlie Taylor had opted out of the little opera being staged aboard the “Vin Fiz Special” back in Texas.

Poor old Cal. One great-grandfather, Oliver Perry, had been the hero of the 1813 battle of Lake Erie. His other great-grandfather, John Rogers, had been captain of the USS Constitution. His great-grand-uncle, Matthew Perry, had sailed four warships into Tokyo Bay and opened Japan to trade in 1853. But Cal’s own father had turned away from the sea and became a cavalry officer, with a rather less distinguished record. He had fought bravely against the Cheyenne in the freezing rain at Slim Buttes in 1876, and even against the Nez Pierce in 1877. But his career had come to a shockingly less than glorious conclusion on August 23, 1878, when he was struck by lightening.

You might say his father's demise left the young Cal with a bit of a negative buzz about him. And then there was the deafness thing, and his mother’s remarriage. So his family history may explain why Cal was so determined to make it to Long Beach, no matter what the obstacles. He explained, in an interview he gave just after reaching Pasadena, “I am not in this business because I like it, but because of what I can make out of it.”

On December 10, 1911 Cal hobbled out to the Vin Fiz one last time. He lashed his crutches to the wing strut, checked his lucky soda bottle and waited while Weggie primed his propellers. Then he rolled (Weggie having replaced the skids with wheels) across the Compton field where he had crashed weeks before, and rose into the air. Twelve miles later he settled down in front of 50,000 people in Long Beach.

After landing, Cal had his plane pushed forward until the wheels were in the surf. Cal Rogers had said he would reach the Pacific Ocean, and now he had. But whether it was in the same airplane was debatable. The only parts that remained of the “Vin Fiz Flyer” that had taken off from Sheepheads Bay, New York on September 17th. were one vertical tail rudder and the oil pan. Nobody was even willing to claim it was the same Vin Fiz bottle hanging off the strut.

On New Years Day, 1912, Cal made a few hundred dollars flying over the Rose Parade (above) and dropping rose petals. He needed the money. Cal and Mable Rogers were now flat broke. Congratulations, to the Winners!

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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 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 last crash,. 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 Fowler 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 right 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. An explosion of estrogen in the Pullman Car of the "Special" had driven master mechanic Charlie Taylor to quit and 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. 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 more 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 sand. 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 him with an American flag (above), and posed him next to the “Rubenisque” 1912 Rose Queen, Miss Ruth Palmer . 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 the photo below.

Cal’s personal victory came a week later, in the Maryland Hotel, when he met with a representative for Mr. W.R. Hearst. W.R.'s 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, Heast wanted to present Rogers with a trophy, a loving cup.  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, without it.

Unnoticed by the press was that Mr. J. Odgen Armour, owner and head 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 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, an injured back and burns. But his lucky bottle of “Vin Fiz” was still undamaged, hanging from the broken wing strut. By now Cal must have really hated that bottle.

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. Finally, on 10 November, a two man Santa Fe work crew appeared over the horizon, pumping a handcar. 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 a 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 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 (below). 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 tracks. Instantly Bob realized he was on a collision course with a steam locomotive, headed straight for him. 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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AIR HEADS Part Seven

I am impressed with the level of cupidity among the participants in this amazing air race. (It means they were avaricious.) Certainly the pilots, Bob Fowler and Cal Rodgers, were risking their lives day after day and deserved some reward for that risk. And now that the prize which had inspired it all had been withdrawn, they had to work for it. At Dallas, where Cal stopped on the night of  17 October, and at Fort Worth, where Cal put in two days of flights before 75,000 at the state fair, he sold photo’s and autographs, as Bob Fowler did at his stops - just as musicians do today at personal appearances. And there were always the “Vin Fiz” coupons Cal was still dropping over unsuspecting soda drinkers in cities where he did not land. The Waco Texas Young Men’s Business League offered Cal an impressive fee, so on 20 October,  he took a long detour south and did several loops (below) around the cities’ sky single sky scrapper.

Even Mable Rodgers had gotten into the act. Dear, sweet, shy, retiring and innocent Mable Rodgers 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 money making 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 over sized “Vin Fiz Flyer” and “Rodgers Aerial Post” stamps, to be sold at a quarter apiece once the Flyer had crossed into Texas.

Buyers would still have to affix official U.S. postage stamps to have anything delivered, and the stamps had been ordered with no glue backing, but Mable was at least 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. And I’m certain that Cal's mother, Maria (ne Rodgers) Sweitzer, was certain to reminded poor Mable of her financial gaff, at every opportunity.

Tension was also building 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 and imagined), criticism and denunciations (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 for a few days. But at Kansas City she rejoined the caravan, only to disembark yet again at San Antonio.  The lady was up to something.

Perhaps the expense of printing up the stamps that would not stick came up once too often in the conversations. But whatever the cause, when Maria rejoined the train outside of El Paso, Texas she brought reinforcements – 22 year old Lucy Belvedere, a reputed heiress, and at least in Maria’s mind, an improvement over Mable.  I'll bet 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 sign of that increasing drama , as he approached El Paso, Cal had a near-miss in mid-air with an eagle, or maybe it was a vulture. In any case, on the 24th of October, at Spofford, Texas, Cal’s attention slipped enough to allow his right propeller to strike the ground, sending him into a ground loop that broke the wing and “splintered” both props (above). 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, the object of this maternal verses matrimonial completion, landed at the corner of Duval and 45th street in Austin, Texas (above). 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 right then, trapped aboard the sleeping car with her mother-in-law and a woman her mother-in-law clearly saw as her replacement.  I wonder if Mable noted ironically to herself that one of the things still holding Cal in the air was her corset, strapped into an upper wing as a repair.

In Deming, New Mexico (above), on Halloween, Cal’s ignition system went on the fritz. Can it be any wonder? 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 by car to the ball park where Bob Fowler’s "Cole Flyer" had landed. They shook hands, but Cal was so rushed the photographers had no time to snap a picture. Being in the air, seated directly in front of a pounding engine hour after hour, must have been the only peace the boy had. But help was at hand. This time Mable would finally showed a nerve equal to her Cal’s. This time she wasn’t waiting to be rescued.

After the refueling stop at Wilcox, Arizona, Lucy Belvedere discovered that her entire trousseau was missing from her compartment. As Mother Maria and Lucy digested this horrifying disaster, and pondered who could have absconded with her frillies and lace, shy little Mable quietly informed them that the luggage was not really missing. It was perfectly safe, she said, aboard the baggage car of the east bound train they had just passed back in Wilcox. The trousseau had been placed there by "Wiggie" on shy little Mables' instructions. It was a display of verve and determination that mother Maria had not expected out of her husband's shy little wife.  And while Cal struggled for fame and fortune above the unforgiving desert of Arizona, Lucy Belvedere gathered her few remaining belongings and retreated from the “Vin Fiz Special” via the next east bound passenger train, chasing her corsets and her frillies back into Texas, and out of the pages of history.  It seems that at some point in this desert crossing, little Mable had taught herself how to swim.

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