The Races

Never has a U. S. aviation meet had such brilliant prospects as the National Air Races which opened at Cleveland Municipal Airport last week; and rarely has one been cursed by so inauspicious an opening.

On the first day, a mushy sky spilled rain on a crowd of 3,000, scattered through grandstands built to hold 60,000. Layers of grey soup stretched to Wheeling, W. Va., delaying overnight a score of pilots in the William B. Leeds and Charles Lanier Lawrence Trophy Races which had started that morning at Roosevelt Field, L. I., and were supposed to finish that afternoon. Because those entrants were late, the only closed-course race on the day's program had to be canceled.

Next day, just as the show was becoming exciting, some 52 pilots held an indignation meeting, served notice on President L. W. Greve that they would fly in no more events unless the total prize money for closed-course races was upped from $28,000 to what they said the committee had advertised, $100,000. Barked Pilot Benny Howard, whose small, home-made racers Mike and Ike had taken first & second places in a 50-mi. event that day: ''Why, there'll be $50,000 worth of planes cracked up before the end of the week!"

Into the judges' stand trooped the irate 52, to fight it out with Managing Director Clifford W. Henderson and Contest Chairman Ephraim Watkins ("Pop") Cleveland. As their leader, the pilots delegated Designer E. Matthew Laird. Said Pilot Howard afterward: "If Mattie says we fly, we'll fly. If he says keep the ships on the ground, well do that." Both sides agreed to arbitrate. Meanwhile the racers flew.

No outsider knew all that went on within the judges' stand. But any airman could have recognized one calm voice, twangy and slightly stammering, as that of lanky, moose-eared ''Pop'' Cleveland. He is ringmaster, troubleshooter, rules arbiter for Impresario Henderson. Apparently nerveless, he is a genius at soothing down temperamental pilots, settling quarrels, salving wounded vanity. As familiar to race followers as the pylon in front of the grandstand is "Pop's" ungainly figure striding across the field with his colored starting flags tucked under one arm--red for "all clear," white for "go," checkered for "last lap." Usually he has a cigar in the side of his mouth, always he wears a ten-gallon hat, even when he flies, which he does with grandmotherly caution.

Last week's crowd caught its first glimpse of "Pop" Cleveland greeting each woman pilot in the Cord Cup Race with an enormous hug & kiss. Fifty-nine planes had set out from Washington and Los Angeles a week earlier, their paths converging at Bartlesville, Okla. into a home stretch to Cleveland. As it was scored by lap-points, everyone knew when the racers reached Cincinnati that Roy Hunt of Oklahoma would win in his slow Great Lakes Trainer.

In the Leeds Trophy race for sportsmen pilots, Felix William ("Bill") Zelcer, proprietor of Manhattan's famed White Horse Tavern, whipped his Laird in to win. Of five entrants in the strictly amateur derby for the Lawrence trophy, only C. M. Taylor of Little Rock, Ark. crossed the finish line.

First spectacular race of the meet was the free-for-all for the $15,000 Bendix Trophy, Los Angeles to Cleveland. For that race, as for the Thompson and Aerol Trophy races at the end of the meet, designers had been working for a year, building fat little craft with stubby low wings. Into the California dawn roared five such craft: Clair Vance's Flying Wing, Jimmy Wedell, Jimmy Haizlip and Roscoe Turner in Wedell-Williams Speedsters, Lee Gehlbach in a stubby "Gee-Bee" (Granville Bros.). Over the Mojave Desert Vance had to drop out his cockpit awash with gasoline from a leaking tank.

Diminutive Jimmy Haizlip swooped across the Cleveland finish line to win the Bendix prize, then sped on for a coast-to-coast record. When he set his little plane down on Floyd Bennett Field, N. Y., he had spanned the Continent in 10 hr. 19 min., nearly an hour faster than Major Doolittle's 1931 record. No sooner had Jimmy Haizlip landed than Roscoe Turner roared down on the field, 39 min. behind but still far ahead of the Doolittle time.

Transatlantic

"Familia Volano." George R. Hutchinson was a bookkeeper in Philadelphia six years ago when, aged 24, he took up flying. He barnstormed for a time, sold planes, became part owner of William Penn Airport. Often on pleasure hops he would take his pretty wife and two small daughters. The flurry caused by their appearance at airports gave Pilot Hutchinson an idea. He capitalized the novelty of a "flying family" by undertaking smallscale "goodwill flights." carrying greetings from one booster organization to another, making speeches before luncheon clubs.

The Hutchinson plane is a black-&-silver Sikorsky amphibian named, of course, The Flying Family with the Italian Familia Volano* painted on either side of the nose. Also painted on the fuselage is a white winged circle enclosing the heads of a man, a woman and two children.

Excepting the DO-X, the Hutchinson party was the largest yet to attempt a transatlantic crossing in one plane. Besides the four Hutchinsons there were a navigator, radioman, mechanic, and an RKO-Van Buren cinematographer. On their take-off from Floyd Bennett Field. N. Y., the Hutchinsons--George, 30, Blanche, 28, Kathryn, 8, Janet Lee, 6--were uniformed in brown sport coats, buff polo shirts, suede riding breeches. So were the dolls, Kathryn's Patsy Joan and Janet's Patsy Lou.

Easily the Sikorsky flew to St. John. N. B., thence to Anticosti Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence where bad weather disposed of a tentative plan to reach London in five days via Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Edinburgh. Pilot Hutchinson was emphatic in stating he would take as long as necessary to insure safety. Nevertheless the Detroit Free Press fiercely flayed the "inhumanity" of Mr. & Mrs. Hutchinson in "compelling their two children to share their perils."

"B'Gosh." Clyde Allen Lee, 24, a lank youth of Oshkosh, Wis., solicited a few hundred dollars from local merchants to help him fly his Stinson monoplane, with Oshkosh B'Gosh painted on its fuselage, nonstop to Oslo, Norway. The scheme fell through. Pilot Lee flew east, got natives of Montpelier and Barre, Vt., to pay to have Oshkosh B'Gosh erased and Green Mountain Boy painted instead. He picked up a mechanic named John Bochkon, a towheaded Norwegian who used to be known as "The Swede" when he was a night watchman at Curtiss-Wright Airport, L. I. On the day The Flying Family left New York, Green Mountain Boy took off from Barre. It was refueled at Harbor Grace, N. F., roared out over the Atlantic with fuel enough for 37 hours. Two days passed, three days, four days and it had not been seen again.

Enna Jettick. Having spent the last cent he owned in the world before his takeoff, Mechanic Bochkon telephoned collect from Barre to a New York newsman for a weather report and to ask "what them other squareheads are doing?" The "other squareheads" had taken off from Floyd Bennett Field five hours earlier. They were Thor Solberg, 38, who was a motorcycle racer in Norway before coming eight years ago to the U. S.: and Petersen, 35, able radioman who accompanied Amundsen to the North Pole, Byrd to the Antarctic. They too were bound for Oslo. Their plane had been provided largely by Shoeman F. L. Emerson, in whose honor it was named Enna Jettick. Enna Jettick did not get as far as Harbor Grace. In a snowstorm near Darby's Harbor, N. F. the engine failed. Pilot Solberg just missed crashing into a hill, plunked the ship down into Placentia Bay.

*Volano is the colloquial name for a play in Shuttlecock.

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