Lindberghs

Mrs. Elizabeth Reeve Cutter Morrow hung up the telephone in her Englewood, N. J. home one evening last week and sat down with an anxious smile. She had just heard a man in the Manhattan office of Pan American Airways read her the following message: "DEPARTED BATHURST 0202 GREENWICH EVERYTHING OK KHCAL"

From time to time during the night and the next forenoon Mrs. Morrow heard other excerpts from messages which reached Pan American nearly every 15 minutes:

"PAN AMERICAN BAHIA 1217 N 1750 W 224 TRUE OK KHCAL"

"SKIES EIGHT TENTHS OVERCAST WITH SCATTERED SQUALLS AND VISIBILITY LIMITED TO THREE MILES"

"FLYING UP THROUGH CLOUDS ALL OKAY"

". . . COURSE 224 DEGREES TRUE NINE TENTHS OVERCAST AT 1,000 FREQUENT SQUALLS WIND ZERO"

"1400 GMT 0100 S 3010 W MAKING 100 KNOTS 226 TRUE COURSE . . . SEA LIGHT VISIBILITY UNLIMITED"

"REELING IN"

A few hours after the final message, Mrs. Morrow went to the International Institute in Manhattan to deliver a speech about Mexico. Almost bursting with pride, she began: "As you know, my children, Anne and Charles Lindbergh, have just flown across the South Atlantic. I'm on top of the wave. At a time of such great happiness, it is a wonderful thing to be among old friends, and I know you will forgive me if my tongue slips for joy."

Mrs. Morrow did not need to tell her audience what all the world knew--that the crisply professional wireless messages from the plane had been tapped out by her daughter.* From Natal, Brazil, where they had ended their 1,875-mi. hop from West Africa, Mrs. Morrow's adventurous children flew up the Brazilian coast to Para, thence 900 mi. up the Amazon above lush jungle to Manaos. They proposed to be home in time to spend Christmas with their son Jon whom they had not seen since they left the U. S. last July.

Chief of Airway

A tall, strapping young man in double-breasted suit and soft grey shirt strode from one Department of Commerce conference room to another last week like a chess champion playing five games at once. Secretaries waylaid him. Callers with briefcases plucked at his sleeve. At sight of a new caller the young man's wide mouth widened into a grin. The visitor was also tall, bronzed, handsome. From under his snap-brim hat he regarded his host quizzically as he asked: "How goes it, Gene?"

The young man countered ruefully: "Want to trade places, Colonel?"

The Colonel laughed, replied: "Not by a damn sight. I've a job that will keep me in Florida this winter."

The caller was Col. Clarence Marshall Young, onetime (1929-33) Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics, now working temporarily for Tycoon Henry Latham Doherty as aviation chairman of his Florida Year-Round Clubs. Flying from Florida to New York last week he paused in Washington long enough to go to the bustling Department of Commerce building and shake hands with his successor, Eugene Luther Vidal.

Gene Vidal (pronounced Vee-dahl) would not have traded places with Col. Young or anyone else. As head man of U. S. civil aviation in the New Deal his job was far bigger than that of either of his predecessors. Although his budget was slashed this year from $7,660,000 to $5,172,000, and his own salary cut to $8,000, Gene Vidal had a pot of new gold handy in the form of Public Works Administration money. Never before had civil aeronautics a chance to receive so many millions for subsidy. Not since 1929 had the industry's prospects looked more hopeful.

Variety. Gene Vidal, a onetime Army flyer who looks like an Indian, was born 38 years ago in Madison, S. Dak. His father, a railway engineer, sent him to the State university to study engineering. Though physically lazy, brawny Gene Vidal became a crack athlete, won letters in football, baseball, basketball, track. Entering West Point in 1916 he won still greater kudos. Coaches' fight talks bored him. Once, during time-out in the middle of a furious Army-Navy game, he shocked his teammates by calmly asking where the football dinner was to be held that night. But sport writers still remember how he used to streak down the field to catch Elmer Oliphant's forward passes; how he scored 27 of 30 points against Notre Dame; how he left the Academy, a high-standing graduate in engineering, with four letters and two sabres for all-around athletic prowess. Athlete Vidal went to the 1919 Inter-Allied games in Paris, played on the winning rugby team. Next year he was at the Olympics in Antwerp. An automobile crash had split a muscle in his throwing arm. Ambidextrous, he hurled the javelin with the other, finished seventh in the Decathlon.*

Gene Vidal as Director of Aeronautics flew to Warm Springs last fortnight to show President Roosevelt his "threeyear plan" for aviation. For variety it was an administrative Decathlon. Back at his Washington desk last week as Lindbergh crossed the South Atlantic and started homeward, Director Vidal was stirring the aviation industry as it had not been stirred since Lindbergh first flew into the east.

Program. Some of the Vidal Decathlon was still secret but eight events had already been started or could be discerned on his program:

1) Five new lighted airways, including a northern transcontinental route from Minneapolis to Seattle and a line down the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans ($1,087,000).

2) Blind-landing equipment for six-months' tests at several airports; improvement of all airway radio ($500,000).

3) A small, cheap (perhaps $700) airplane for mass consumption (TIME, Nov. 20). (Substantial rumor: PWA funds to design and develop the plane.)

4) Construction of part of a seadrome to determine if the Government ought to spend $30,000,000 for a chain of them across the Atlantic (TIME, Nov. 27).

5) Airports for small cities and towns on land provided by the municipalities; improvement of faulty existing airports.

All the foregoing had been started. The following projects were in sight:

6) Promotion of proposed close-in landing facilities for large cities.

7) Direct help to the general transport industry by development of more powerful landplanes, seaplanes, engines.

8) Simplification of rules on private flying.

"Start Somethin'." In his Olympic Decathlon Athlete Vidal did not win many events. Nor does Director Vidal expect to win every point in his program. Swinging in his squeaky swivel chair he says in a liquid drawl: "If we can start somethin'--get these things talked about by everybody--get engineers arguin' and figurin' costs--it'll do a lotta good."

"Somethin' " was not slow starting. It came as a shower of objections to Director Vidal's most radical schemes--the seadrome and the cheap plane. The seadrome plan irked Pan American Airways which felt entitled to first call on any subsidy for transatlantic air service. It brought Goodyear-Zeppelin's President Litchfield charging to Washington to ask Director Vidal to get money for a commercial airship and a dock or two instead. Last week Secretary Ickes sloshed more cold water over the seadromes by announcing that none would be built by the U. S. unless foreign powers put up part of the expense as a guarantee of neutrality.

"$700? And How?" So remote seemed the seadrome idea that it stirred little comment from the industry compared to the shrill yelp of suspicion, terror and ridicule aroused by the "flivver" plane plan. Director Vidal was convinced that thousands & thousands of persons would fly if they could afford a plane. He believed the industry could "easily" produce a good little ship, to be stamped out like small automobiles, for $700, about one-half the present average low price, provided an initial market of 10,000 was assured. Thus manufacturers, airports, schools, repair services all would thrive, and the U. S. would gain an army of potential military flyers.* Director Vidal sent a questionnaire to 33,000 pilots, mechanics and students asking if they would buy such a plane. By last week 9,000 had answered "Yes," another 3,000 "Yes" with reservations, 4,700 "No."

Far from pleased, some manufacturers and dealers raged at Director Vidal for ruining their sales while prospective customers awaited a $700 plane which, they insisted, would remain a myth. Cooler heads, convinced that the scheme was not feasible, held their peace rather than bite the hand which, they hoped, might soon offer them a tastier dish. Aeronautics editors leaped to their typewriters. Last week's chorus:

Aviation: "$700? And how? . . . We believe that 10,000 . . . could be built for $700 apiece by a single manufacturer who received a single order for the 10,000 machines. They cannot be built for any such price . . . with about 180 manufacturers scrambling over each other after every individual sale, and with no single factory getting up to a production of more than a few hundred ships. . . . It would have to be turned out in many plants, perhaps with wings built at A and landing gears at B and assembly taken care of at C and D. . . . We don't know that that can be done."

Aero Digest: "The [costs of distribution] subtracted from the $700 mean that actual production cost . . . would have to come nearer to $400."

The Sportsman Pilot: "The questionnaire raised false hopes. It led people to believe that a good low-priced airplane was just around the corner when, as a matter of fact, it wasn't--and, in the circumstances, couldn't be."

The Sportsman: "The real mystery is where 10,000 American pilots are to get hold of $700."

The more criticism he heard, the more Director Vidal chuckled. Some of his answers: Maybe the wording of the questionnaire was hasty but the principles were sound. . . . Even an $850 plane would be a triumph. . . . Sales costs are too high anyway; the lists of prospects gathered by the questionnaire should make selling easy. . . . Planes can be, must be cheaper, and if the aviation industry snubs the idea let it beware of the automobile industry which may snatch it up.

Post Graduate. Gene Vidal's critics in the industry cannot decide whether he is a wild man or a babe-in-the-woods. Like most New Dealers, he regards his job as a problem in economics. He is eager for results, impatient of procedure. And mistakes hold no more terror for him than for his President, whom he hero-worships. Early in his career he made two mistakes, two smart moves.

The first smart move occurred in a Childs' restaurant in Washington late one night in 1919. Lieut. Eugene Vidal, stationed at Camp Humphreys, Va., observed a beauteous, dark-haired girl in a debutante party nearby. Overcoming his extreme shyness he contrived to meet her that night and again next day. She was Nina Gore, daughter of Oklahoma's blind Senator Thomas Pryor Gore. They were married in 1921.

Lieut. Vidal's next smart move was to join the Army Air Corps in which he served five years, learned all about airplanes.

Mistake No. 1 occurred when, having quit the service in 1926, he lost his money in Florida real estate.

Mistake No. 2 came two years later. Returning from Oregon where he had coached football, he invested his new savings in a silent toilet-flusher. The flusher turned out to be noisy.

When Transcontinental Air Transport ("Lindbergh Line") was formed in 1928 Gene Vidal got his first real job. He made a point of working in every department, learned the business from bottom to the level of assistant general manager. Also he made two fast friends in the company: Publicist Amelia Earhart and General Superintendent Paul ("Dog") Collins. In 1929 a merger shook him and Paul Collins out. But before that happened they had hatched the best idea of their careers--a short airway over a heavily traveled route with frequent schedules and low fares. They sold the idea to Philadelphia Socialites Nicholas and Townsend Ludington who backed them in Ludington Lines between New York, Philadelphia and Washington. Placed in charge of publicity was Amelia Earhart. Pinching pennies as no airline had ever dreamed of doing, Vidal & Collins astounded the industry by showing a profit without a mail subsidy. All went well until last year when they rowed with the Ludingtons, who bought them out. The line was absorbed by a competitor. Paul Collins and Amelia Earhart Putnam opened a new line in New England (TIME, Aug. 21). Gene Vidal met Elliott Roosevelt at the swank River Club in Manhattan, talked aviation with him. One day last January he, Elliott, Mrs. Roosevelt and Louis McHenry Howe flew to Warm Springs. Gene Vidal spent three days there, informally expounding his views on aviation to the President-Elect. If Mr. Roosevelt was not impressed by his guest's business record, he could not help being impressed by his first-hand knowledge of the industry, his experience with airline extravagances and economies, his insurgent views on monopolies, his general enthusiasm.

After March 4 Gene Vidal was put into the New Deal as director of air regulation. He was only one of five candidates for the top post of Director of Aeronautics which replaced the Assistant Secretaryship for Aeronautics. Most of his rivals had red-hot political supporters working for them. But Senator Gore, his father-in-law, did not, as many supposed, lift a finger to help him. Gene Vidal was less astonished than his competitors when the final appointment came through.

Director Vidal's two closest competitors became his first aides. Big-framed Major J. Carroll Cone, in charge of air regulation, was a War Pilot, a onetime manufacturer of planes. Rex Martin, directing air navigation, has beetling black Groucho Marx eyebrows and a Mexican bandit mustache, slightly askew, which disguise a gentle, genial manner. His appearance last week was even more arresting because of a towering metal-&-leather collar which holds together a neck broken in a crash last September near Washington. Director Vidal was in the plane before it took off, decided to get out and go to the movies instead.

Director Vidal still adds enough to his 2,000 hours in the air to keep his private pilot's license active. His wife, who can also fly, and their eight-year-old son Eugene Jr. often accompany him. Flying is only one accomplishment of attractive Mrs. Vidal. She has played bits on stage and screen, once wrote Washington chit-chat for Hearst's Universal Service. The Vidals live with Senator & Mrs. Gore in the Gores' spacious house near Washington's Rock Creek Park.

Last week-end Gene Vidal flew to Manhattan to eat wild duck with his friends George Palmer Putnam and Paul Collins. As usual he carried no baggage except a toothbrush and shirt in his pocket. He never wears an undershirt. His hat, a floppy, wide-brimmed Borsalino, bears inside the legend: "The Latch-String Always Hangs Outside,' Amon G. Carter, Shady Oaks Farm, Fort Worth, Tex."

*Observant newsreaders were astounded by a story that the Boston Traveler, having sent a wireless message to Mrs. Lindbergh requesting an interview in flight, received the reply: "Wait a minute, I'll ask Lindy. . . . Anne." According to Pan American's log of Operator Lindbergh's messages she did not use her husband's detested nickname but replied merely: "Sorry. . . . Too busy. . . KHCAL."

*A multiple event in the following order: 100-metre dash, running broad jump, shot put, running high jump, 400-metre dash, high hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, 1,500 metre run.

*Last year's cost of Army Air Corps: $76,800,000; of Naval Aviation: $27,600,000.

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