Saturday, October 22, 1910
From the west coast of America to Western Europe, the fate of the three missing balloons (the America II, the Azurea, and the Düsseldorf II ) was dissected by the Saturday newspapers. The Times of London ascribed a “feeling of alarm” to the race organizers in St. Louis because “it is believed that they landed on Wednesday night, and that the pilots and their assistants are in distress in the forests of Canada.”
The San Francisco Chronicle, which had hitherto given the race only perfunctory coverage, ran a scaremongering report on its front page, saying that if the crews hadn’t drowned in one of the Great Lakes, then they would most likely be “somewhere in the wilds of Canada, where they may be the victims of starvation before succor can reach them.”
Randolph Hearst’s New York American also took a perverse delight in speculating what might have happened to the men, in a front-page article that was illustrated with photographs of Alan Hawley and Augustus Post in the America II, and Leon Givaudan and Emil Messner in the Azurea. Starvation and drowning were the most probable scenarios, said the paper, though of course they might have frozen to death in “the severe snow storms that have been raging over Canada,” or then again, “they may be destroyed by wild beasts.”
Pessimism laced the rest of Saturday’s newspaper coverage, from the front-page headline on the Boston Daily Globe—FEAR THAT SUCCOR MAY NOT REACH THE AERONAUTS IN TIME—to the World’s NEW YORK PILOTS MAY HAVE PERISHED. The exception was the New York Herald, which felt obliged to strike a more upbeat note as their proprietor had, after all, given his name to the race. In its front-page story the paper said that the missing six men were all “inured to such hardships and privations as may befall them in case they have landed in a wild and uninhabited region.” However, what convinced the Herald that there would be a happy outcome was “that Captain Abercron [in the Germania] landed Wednesday morning but was not able to get into communication with the Aero Club before last night, fifty-seven hours later.”
The confidence of the New York Herald was borne out a few hours later when the Aero Club of America received a telegram from Messner and Givaudan of the Azurea:
Have landed thirty-two miles northeast of Biscotasing. Algoma district. Had three days and one night to work our way through woods, passing Lake swimming. Temperature at night 11 Fahrenheit. Please wire news to Biscotasing. Messner. Givaudan.
From the offices of the Aero Club the news hummed down the wires to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch minutes before they were due to go to press, dashing hopes of a relaxing Saturday evening for the editorial staff. As sleeves were rolled up and fresh coffee ordered, the editor struggled to find Biscotasing on the giant map of the Great Lakes region pinned to the wall of his office. Where the goddamn is it! he yelled.
Someone eventually found it, and carefully the editor measured the distance between the small Ontarian town and his own city—772 miles. Okay, he said, new headline: AZUREA IS DOWN; GERMANIA SEEMS WINNER OF RACE. Time was running out if they wanted to get to press on time, but they had still one thing to do: update the log of the finishing positions with the Swiss balloon. It was a hurried job, rejigging the template at the last minute, and it showed when the paper was bought and read by St. Louisians on Saturday evening. Azurea was spelled Azuria, and its pilot was “Meisner,” not Messner. A small error, however, and one barely noticed by the men and women who were more interested to read that “officials of the Aero Club of America in New York, Saturday, declared unofficially, according to news telegrams to the Post-Dispatch, that they believe the balloon Germania is the probable winner of the race . . . [and] estimate that their distance traveled was 1,200 miles. This would give the Germans the world’s record.”
As for Alan Hawley and Augustus Post, the Post-Dispatch had no news. On a sketch of the Canadian wilderness the paper superimposed a photo of the pair along with a large question mark, as black and forboding as most people’s fears.
The cold woke Augustus Post on Saturday morning, the sort of cold that pierces a man and wraps itself around his bones. He lay curled up in a ball under his blanket, listening to the wind whip the sand against the bivouac. One glance at Hawley’s gaunt face told Post that it had been another wretched night for his companion. His soft jawline was covered in a tabby-colored stubble, and the gentle eyes were rimmed red with exhaustion.
He didn’t lie when Post asked about his knee—it hurt like hell—but he was game to press on. It would soon improve once he’d walked out the overnight stiffness. Post prepared breakfast, a chicken roll for Hawley and a piece of chicken and an egg for himself. It was gone in seconds and neither man felt any the better for it. They set off along the beach “with the weather so cold that at times our clothing was frozen to our bodies.” After a mile or so the sand ended at the foot of a jumble of smooth boulders, clustered together like giant eggs in a basket. Hawley told Post he would give it a go, but as they started to climb over the boulders, “Hawley’s leg hurt him so severely that we could go no farther that day. We forced ourselves back a quarter of a mile to a protected spot we had passed under a bank overhung with balsam and sheltered by the projecting roots of a big white birch.”
The sky was now pencil gray and Post knew more snow was on its way, so while Hawley made a bivouac from the balsam boughs, Post took care of the fire, and “none too soon, for it began to rain, first a drizzle, ending in light snow.”
They remained in camp for the rest of the day, sleeping and sharing the odd chocolate bar as the snow fell. Now and again Post braved the elements to scour the beach for fresh supplies of driftwood with which to feed the fire, and when it was blazing to his satisfaction he and Hawley “talked over the events of the voyage and incidents in our lives.” They buoyed each other with confident predictions that they must have won the race; after all, if their calculations were correct, they had traveled around twelve hundred miles, a new world’s record; they talked of food and described to one another the first meal they would order when back in New York. Post pulled Hawley’s leg about his promise to the Bronx Zoological Gardens to bring back a muskrat from their trip. If we do see a muskrat, Post said to his friend, laughing, we’ll eat it, not carry it.
The snow had turned to sleet by the time the sky turned black, but before the pair turned in, Post fed the fire more logs and Hawley experimented with several positions before settling on the one that caused his knee the least discomfort. Hawley bade his friend good-night and closed his eyes, but long after Post had fallen asleep, he was still awake, wrestling with a dilemma he knew he could no longer postpone. Finally Hawley dozed off, having decided that in the morning if he was unable to continue, he would insist that his companion go on alone, leaving behind half their stash of food, and the revolver.
Rain was still over Belmont Park on Saturday morning, but only a persistent drizzle, not the heavy downpour of a few hours earlier. A stiff breeze carried the rain from the east, past the grandstand, past dead man’s turn, until it lashed the doors of the green hangars at the western end of the track.
Sodden reporters congregated in the press box and told each other it could be worse—at least they hadn’t had to fork out $450 for the privilege of a box in the covered grandstand. They looked out across the course, “at the rain-soaked stretches of the grass field [which] rapidly promised signs of being transformed into a lake,” and shook their heads glumly at the sight of the muddy dirt track over which the likes of Sysonby had once galloped. The national flags that drooped from their poles above the hangars mirrored the shoulders of the few optimists who’d arrived at first light and paid $1 for the privilege of getting soaked in the field enclosure. Some of those bedraggled spectators had bought a cup of coffee for twenty-five cents from a kiosk and were now sheltering under the steel arches of the grandstand, while others huddled under umbrellas, flicking through the official program, which they’d bought for twenty-five cents. They weren’t amused: 114 pages, of which 72 were advertisements. Others unfurled newspapers from inside their thick jackets and caught up with the latest news on the hunt for Hawley and Post. Then they turned their attention to the previews of today’s events at Belmont Park and laughed sardonically as they read the opening sentence of the New York Herald’s front-page story: “At the dawn of the opening day of the great International aviation tournament at Belmont Park auspicious weather is all there is now needed to make the Meet an epoch-making event.”
New York Sun, promising its readers that they were about to witness the best airplane show in the short but exciting history of aviation, The cautioned those intending to attend later in the day that though the meet wasn’t scheduled to start until one thirty P.M., “airmen have a habit of working not only during office hours but before and after as well [so] you’ll run little risk of having time hang heavy by making the early start.”
Not all newspapers were so toadying in their coverage of the tournament. Those spectators who had bought their weekly copy of the New York City Review were surprised to read a venomous piece by Colgate Baker. All the recent aviation hullabaloo had annoyed Baker, who reckoned that the fliers would have people believe there was some great mystery to flying a plane when in fact there was none. Yet they’d fooled the public, and now they were “coining their heroic feats at our expense in greedy and almost frenzied haste.” Baker excepted John Moisant from his polemic, a man he considered frank and honest, and reserved his fiercest criticism for Claude Grahame-White. Baker was sick of Americans fawning over the Englishman and found it distasteful to see him treated as a “conquering hero, followed everywhere by a crowd of adoring flying fans.” Hero? hissed Baker. He was nothing of the sort; while Moisant “is painfully modest and self-deprecating in his manner, avoiding the limelight whenever possible, Mr. Grahame-White . . . delights to bask in the full glare of the calcium and wants all that there is in the game.”
“Look over there!” the cry went up, and all eyes turned toward where the spectator was pointing. The doors of hangar No. 17 were being folded back by two men in damp overalls, and in the next instant the nose of a biplane appeared. “Who’s seventeen?” someone shouted. People leafed through the advertisement-laden program until they found the hangar numbers. Seventeen belonged to Tod Shriver, a former printer from Manchester, Ohio, who had been one of Glenn Curtiss’s mechanics when he triumphed at Rheims in 1909. Earlier in the summer Shriver had qualified as an aviator in his own right, only to break his legs in a crash two weeks later. But here he was, Slim as he was known, in leather coat and well-cut suit, gamely hobbling toward his machine on crutches. He handed the sticks to a mechanic and accepted a helping hand up into the seat. Once he’d made himself comfortable and carried out his final checks, Shriver signaled for his mechanic to start him up. The fifty-horse power engine of his Dietz biplane hummed into life, and the spectators sheltering under the grandstand raced round to see the first flight proper of the Belmont Park Meet.
Shriver took off into the easterly wind and soon passed the grandstand at a height of one hundred feet, the engine now burring contentedly. He banked left, round one of the red-and-white pylons, and flew north for a few hundred meters before negotiating another pylon and turning west, so he was flying parallel to the back straight of the racecourse. Everyone watched as Shriver swung southwest, past hangar row, and toward dead man’s turn. To the spectators standing nearest to the tight corner, the strength of the wind was the same as it had been when Shriver had wheeled out his plane, but a hundred feet in the air there were eddies and gusts, one of which caught the little biplane as it approached the dreaded turn. Shriver’s plane dipped, then listed to the right. A collective gasp came from the press box; one or two of the journalists jumped to their feet, their hands covering their mouths. They could see Shriver tussling with the machine’s controls. “At 50 feet the biplane appeared to have righted itself,” reported the New York Herald, “then it suddenly turned and plunged to the earth. As it struck the machine crumpled up and it seemed that the aviator must have been killed or seriously injured.”
People ducked under the white guardrail and sprinted across the grass toward the wreck. Shriver was pulled out, bleeding heavily from deep wounds to his face and to his hip, where a bolt had gouged out a lump of flesh. He promised he would be back flying by the end of the week, but his helpers knew they were the words of a man whose senses lay among the wreckage of his airplane. Shriver was put in an automobile and driven to Nassau Hospital in Mineola by Mr. Dietz, the man whose machine was now being cleared away by officials.*
Throughout the morning the other aviators began to arrive at Belmont Park. Armstrong Drexel stepped out of his chauffeur-driven automobile, along with his brother and sister-in-law, who retired to the box they had hired for the week. Jacques de Lesseps, reinvigorated after his Canadian tryst, turned up with his brother and sister, and Hubert Latham appeared with his mechanic to see to their damaged airplane. Roland Garros and Edmond Audemars journeyed out together from the Knickerbocker Hotel and tossed a coin to see if it would be the French tricolor or Swiss cross that fluttered above their hangar. Audemars guessed right and the Swiss flag was run up the pole.
John Moisant skipped onto the grounds with all the excitement of a small boy on Christmas Day, thrilled at the prospect of the challenges that lay ahead. He was greeted by his French mechanics, including the faithful Albert Fileux, who had spent the night sleeping in the hangar under the wings of Moisant’s replacement Blériot.
Claude Grahame-White showed up soon after with Pauline Chase, whom he escorted to her seat in the grandstand. Having kissed her goodbye, he walked over to the hangars, stopping for a friendly word outside most, but not the four cavernous tents in which were housed the Wrights’ machines.
Although the rain had started to leak through the roof of the tents, forcing the machines to be covered with tarpaulin, Wilbur Wright was surprisingly unconcerned. In fact, for a man who was usually solemnly reserved, he seemed in singularly good humor. When the correspondent from the Washington Post plucked up the courage to ask why, Wright explained that shortly after breakfast he had received a telegram from his legal team. “All our suits for infringement of patent rights have been decided in our favor in the German courts,” he exclaimed, his hawklike eyes bright with triumph. The suits elsewhere were still pending, he continued, but Wright was clearly “confident that the courts of America and Europe an countries would follow Germany’s lead.”
Word of the decision carried swiftly down the row of hangars, and, said the Post’s correspondent, it “concerned the foreign fliers.” If other countries did indeed endorse the German ruling, then “no Blériot, Cur-tiss, Farman, or in fact any make of machine that has adapted the . . . vital points first worked to a practical solution by the Wrights—which includes every design of air machine in existence—henceforth can legally be flown.”
It wasn’t just the foreign aviators who now faced the prospect of being grounded by the Wrights’ bloody-minded tenacity. Glenn Curtiss, the winner of the 1909 International Aviation Cup, was also embroiled in a bitter legal battle with the brothers, one that was being buffeted from court to court, and although for the moment he was still at liberty to fly and manufacture airplanes, the German decision had worrying implications for his company.
Curtiss and his team of fliers arrived at the racecourse from the Belvedere Hotel, bringing with them on the back of a truck their new airplane, the one that was almost as secret as the Wrights’ and had so excited the New York Herald a few days earlier. Enmity ran deep between the two factions, and the Curtiss aviators received welcoming sneers from the Wright fliers as they approached hangars 5 and 6. Curtiss considered the brothers grasping and dogmatic, while the Wrights let it be known “that they didn’t think the Curtiss planes were any good and that they were dangerous to fly.” Furthermore, Walter Brookins, Arch Hoxsey, Ralph Johnstone, and Frank Coffyn (who had recently retired from flying but who was present at Belmont Park) “were taught by the Wrights that the Curtiss crowd was just no good at all.” Curtiss and his quartet of fliers shut the door of hangar No. 5 and began to uncrate the airplane as the rain continued to drum on the roof. The eldest of the four aviators was James “Bud” Mars, a thirty-four-year-old from Michigan, who had changed his family name from McBride to Mars on joining a circus as a trapeze artist. Further stints followed as a high diver and fairground parachutist, before Mars earned his aviation license in August 1910. Two months later, on October 1, he’d unsuccessfully tried to win the $1,000 on offer for the first man to fly across the Rocky Mountains. He was found by a search party sitting unharmed beside his smashed machine having crashed into a rock face.
Mars was best pals with Eugene Ely, a married man from Davenport, Iowa, who carried the nickname King of the Ozone and was famous for thrilling the crowds with the Ely Glide. Climbing to a thousand feet, he would then shut off his engine and rush down to earth at an angle sometimes as steep as thirty degrees before pulling out of the dive at the last moment.
The other two members of the team were Charles Willard, “Daredevil” to his friends, a twenty-seven-year-old Harvard graduate who seemed to eat nothing but chocolate, and a twenty-four-year-old Canadian, John McCurdy, who had first flown in 1907, a year after graduating from Toronto University with an engineering degree.
As Curtiss and his men started to assemble their new airplane, Wilbur Wright was inviting members of the press into his hangar to view his latest invention. “The cup will remain in America,” said Wright, patting the machine’s yellow-pine propeller. Reporters gathered round the aircraft asking questions as they examined it. It was built of ash and spruce, with the wings covered with bleached cotton. Some of the taller correspondents could reach up on tiptoe and almost touch the top of the six-foot-ten-inch biplane. The New York Herald reporter scribbled furiously as Wright gave the visitors a tour of the machine that he and his brother had christened the Baby Grand. “The exact dimensions of the new Wright racer can now be given,” he wrote. “The planes [wings] are 26 feet long and 3 feet 4 inches wide. They are set 3 feet apart, and the radiator and gasoline tank are placed directly behind the driver. There is only one seat on the racing machine.”
Compare this new compact plane with the traditional Wright biplane, Wilbur said, the wingspan of which was thirty-nine feet. He invited reporters to have a look at the rudder—“hardly larger than a handkerchief”—and he also drew attention to the four-wheeled undercarriage and the antiskidding blinkers on the forward skids, which would increase the machine’s keel. “The engines used are the same that have been used by the Wrights for years,” added the impressed correspondent from the New York Herald, “but they are far more powerful than any so far set up in the Wright factory.” Instead of four cylinders, the Baby Grand had twice that number. Yes, admitted Wright when asked, the sixty-horse power engine was still inferior to the hundred-horse power engines of the Blériot, but that wouldn’t matter come the day of the big race. He paused for dramatic effect . . . before revealing that in a series of trial flights in the Baby Grand, his brother, Orville, had reached a top speed of 72mph. There was an intake of breath from the correspondents. If that was true, then Wilbur was right, the cup would remain in America.
Later in the morning, when the rain had eased, members of the Glenn Curtiss team folded back the doors of hangar No. 5 and bade reporters inside to view their latest innovation. An awkward silence ensued as the newsmen made mental comparisons between what was now before them and what they had just seen in the Wright hangar. The New York Herald correspondent turned a page in his notebook and wrote, “The Curtiss racer, on the other hand, looks like a handkerchief just out of the shop.”
The man from the New York Sun made the mistake of asking Curtiss to describe some of the features of his monoplane; he soon stood corrected. “He calls [it] a ‘single surface’ airplane,” explained the Sun’s reporter, “which at first glance looks like a monoplane. In fact the secondary plane is merely a small auxiliary only 8 feet long and 2 feet wide.”
Other outstanding details noted by the newsmen were the aircraft’s fifty-horse power engine, its tricycle undercarriage, its wingspan of twenty-six feet, and its size, just twenty-five feet from tip to tail. Unusually for a new monoplane, it was a pusher, the name given to those airplanes in which the engine was situated to the pilot’s rear. Most manufacturers had stopped producing pushers after several men had been crushed to death by the engine in crashes they would otherwise have survived. Curtiss shrugged when pulled up on the point and admitted that the plane “has never been flown and is wholly an experiment.” The Sun reporter told Curtiss that a few hangars along, Wilbur Wright was fizzing with confidence about his prospects in the International Aviation Cup, so how did he rate his own chances? Curtiss didn’t want to speculate, and if anything, he sounded rather diffident about his new invention. “Whether it will fly well—or fly at all—remains to be found out at the present meet,” he said.
The first “special” train, laid on solely for the benefit of the meet, arrived at the Belmont Park station at noon and the race-goers were ready with their umbrellas as they stepped onto the platform. Having seen a large white flag atop the 395-foot-high Times Tower on Forty-second Street a while earlier as they made their way to Pennsylvania Station, they were confident of seeing some flying, despite the rain. The owner of the tower, the New York Times, had agreed to a request from the meet organizers to communicate to New Yorkers the course conditions by way of one of three flags: blue—no flight; white—flight probable; red—flight in progress. Thousands of spectators drove from Manhattan, and the prime parking spaces were soon full of mud-spattered automobiles. Local residents were quick to spot the shortage of parking places, and soon signs appeared outside their homes offering the use of their front yards as parking spaces in return for $1.
The entrance to the course was flanked by two lines of gray-uniformed security guards, members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which had been hired to control a tournament that was on private land and thus outside the jurisdiction of the Nassau County police. The guards had an unsmiling swagger, an enjoyment of the power that came with the well-cut uniform, and anyone who was slow in handing over the $1 entrance fee to the turnstile operator was harshly rebuked.
Once inside Belmont Park the whole atmosphere changed, and instead of menacing stares from Pinkerton’s men, the spectators were accosted by myriad “vendors who hawked programmes [sic], sandwiches, aviation postal cards, peanuts and candy . . . and the highest prices possible were asked of the spectators.”
Children pestered their parents for a toy airplane or a souvenir pennant from one of the many kiosks, while their fathers attempted to win choice cigars by knocking down puppets with three balls. Mothers browsed the knickknack stalls for house hold decorations made from smoked glass before the entire family eventually hired a set of camp stools—thirty cents each—and made their way to the field enclosure on the opposite side of the course to the grandstand.
Signs guided the bewildered with arrows pointing to the “popular-priced” restaurants and those, such as the Turf and Field Club, which were affordable only to the affluent. A reporter from the New York Sun stopped outside one of the more affordable restaurants and examined the menu. “Popular prices, eh?” grumbled the man next to him. “Popular with the man who owns the eatables, I guess.” The cheapest food joint was the kiosk under the grandstand where beef stew cost fifty cents, a plate of ham and eggs sixty cents, a roast fresh ham sandwich seventy-five cents, and an apple pie twenty-five cents.
The society correspondents of the newspapers, those same ones who had harassed Claude Grahame-White earlier in the week, had returned in force and were now either besieging the entrance to the members’ clubhouse or commandeering a table in the Turf and Field Club, fork in one hand, pencil in the other, noting which members of the fashionable set were present. There was Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt (recently returned from Europe, where she’d spent $18,000 on the latest Paris fashions) looking resplendent in an “apricot-colored polo coat and bell-shaped blue hat.” Was that a white muff she was carrying? wondered the correspondent from the Sun. No, it was her little white dog. Armstrong Drexel’s willowy sister-in-law, Marjorie, “excited much admiration in a gown of black velvet and a large black picture hat.” Mrs. Sidney Dillon Ripley, who wore a loose-fitting coat and black hat “with two quills jauntily fastened on the left side,” was lunching with Mrs. Tyler Morse, who had come “well prepared for the weather in a white fur coat worn over a checked polo coat.” The Sun’s society correspondent rated Mrs. James Brown’s outfit “one of the most startling costumes” he’d seen in a long time. A flame-colored coat fastened at the bottom with small black buttons was topped off with a black velvet hat adorned with feathers.
The New York Sun’s correspondent next turned his attention to the wisteria gown worn by the wife of General Stewart Woodford. She and her husband were hosting a lunch party in the Turf and Field Club, and so engrossing was the conversation that no one noticed it was nearly one thirty P.M., the hour when the tournament officially began. Over the polite murmur of luncheon chat there came the noise of an airplane engine. On hearing the sound, reported the Sun, General Woodford “became so excited . . . that he ran out of the dining room and carried his napkin along.”
As General Woodford hurtled out of the restaurant, a pall of yellow smoke drifted across the course from the aerial bomb that had just been exploded to signal the meet was under way. The wreckage of Tod Shriver’s machine had been cleared by workmen, his blood washed away by rain, and only a few early-bird spectators were aware he had ever flown.
The engine that had so galvanized the general was Claude Grahame-White’s, and as he continued to warm it up, Peter Prunty used his megaphone to inform the six-thousand-strong audience of the day’s schedule. From one thirty P.M. to two thirty P.M. was the Hourly Distance event; after a break of fifteen minutes, the second Hourly Distance event and the Hourly Altitude event would commence. At four P.M. the twenty-mile cross-country flight would begin, at the same time as the Grand Altitude competition. Prunty reminded spectators that the cross-country race, to a captive balloon ten miles east over Hempstead Plains and back, was dependent on the weather not deteriorating, as otherwise it would be deemed too hazardous.
Now Grahame-White was taxiing across the grass, and Prunty fell silent and watched with the rest of the crowd. In the grandstand Pauline Chase sat with her hands clasped tightly together as her fiancée with “an ever-increasing humming roar crossed the starting line.” He rose into the air as the band at the front of the grandstand struck up “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own,” and the crowd tapped their feet in time to the music. A couple of minutes later Armstrong Drexel was airborne, perched on the hollow body of his Blériot monoplane, which, to the Washington Post, sounded like a “mosquito,” but to the New York Herald correspondent was more like a “bumblebee.”
John Moisant, flying an identical machine to Drexel’s, was next to leave the ground, and he climbed swiftly to two hundred feet, higher than both Drexel and Grahame-White, who chugged slowly round the 2.5 km course, rarely rising higher than the eaves of the grandstand. All three fliers were competing in the Hourly Distance event, the aim of which was to complete as many laps as possible within sixty minutes, but it was also the opportunity to qualify for Thursday’s Statue of Liberty race, a late and controversial addition to the meet’s schedule.
A fortnight earlier a New York businessman, Thomas Ryan, had offered a prize of $10,000 for the first man to fly from Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty and back. What an idea! cried the Aero Club of America. Instead of New York City coming to Belmont Park, Belmont Park will go to New York City. What better way to spread the aviation message? Neither Ryan nor the organizers expected the fliers to take the safe route, across country to the sea and then along the coastline; that was approximately sixty-six miles, whereas the direct route was only thirty-three miles. That was, however, as the New York Times pointed out, “over the populous sections of South Brooklyn.” The New York City Herald thought it a wonderful prospect, a “thrilling event,” but added with a harrumph that Wilbur Wright was “strongly opposed to flying over cities . . . He says that while it is an aviator’s own business whether he decides or not to risk his own neck, he has no right to endanger the lives of others.”
Taking into account the concern of Wright and some other aviators, the Belmont Park organizers had imposed a stringent entry criterion for any aviator wishing to compete for Thursday’s Statue of Liberty race: “The prize will be open to all competitors who shall have remained in the air in one continuous flight one hour or more during previous contests in the meet.”
Thus Grahame-White, Drexel, and Moisant were competing in the Hourly Distance event not just in the hope of winning the $500 on offer, but also to qualify for the Statue of Liberty race. To Drexel, $10,000 (approximately $160,000 today) was small fry, he flew just for the sport; but the sum was large enough to tempt Grahame-White to drop his objection to flying over cities, which he had manifested at Boston. For Moisant, $10,000 would go a long way in bankrolling his next revolution.
For an hour Grahame-White flew placidly but persistently round the circuit. The crowd clapped respectfully, and the man from the Washington Post praised his “workmanlike precision,” but it was hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff. “Here he comes again,” shouted someone in the grandstand, as Grahame-White angled into the home straight past dead man’s turn, “it’s Merry-go-round White.”
Drexel dropped out having completed ten laps in nineteen minutes, and soon Moisant tired of the plodding pro cession and started to lay on a show for the masses, “rising and falling, turning and dipping, as easily and gracefully as a swallow.” Suddenly he swooped down from three hundred feet and shot across the grass as if he were trying to cut it, bringing several hundred spectators to their feet in excitement. And all the while Grahame-White continued on his remorseless way, ignoring the American gadfly, and “turning the corners as closely as a trained race horse.”
Moisant was down after fifty-one minutes with only eighteen laps to his name after all his showboating. He had a small problem with the engine, he explained, but would be back to try again in the second Hourly Distance events. Grahame-White remained aloft the full hour and descended only when he saw his manager, Sydney McDonald, flagging that the time was up. Grahame-White came down smiling; not only had he flown twenty circuits, he’d also qualified for the Statue of Liberty event.
Moisant took off again at two forty-five P.M. in a foul mood, having been docked four laps by the officials on his first flight, “on account of cutting slightly inside a pylon.” What a surprise, muttered some of his rivals, Moisant penalized for cutting corners. His second attempt to qualify for the Statue of Liberty race again ended in failure, this time after forty minutes because of a mechnical problem. His disappointment, however, was small compared to that felt by the Curtiss team when Eugene Ely took the new single-surface machine out of the hangar. Within a few minutes Ely was down with engine trouble, and only one of the Wright fliers, Arch Hoxsey, in an old biplane, could give the crowd their money’s worth. The New York Herald described how he went up “growing smaller and smaller, until he finally disappeared in the fog. He was completely lost to view in the clouds for about a minute. He descended as he had ascended, in great spirals, landing as gently on the turf as a leaf dropping from a tree.” Belmont Park exploded in a cacophony of hollering and hurrahs as Hoxsey, in a black leather coat with fur-lined combination leggings and boots that reached to the hips, jumped down and received the congratulations of Ralph Johnstone.
The fog that had shrouded Hoxsey from view sank lower throughout the afternoon, forcing the organizers to cancel the Grand Altitude Contest. They were about to do the same to the cross-country competition when John Moisant whispered something in Peter Prunty’s ear. The next minute the crowd were on their feet applauding as Prunty announced that Moisant wouldn’t be deterred by a spot of fog: he intended to try for the cross-country prize.
It took him thirty-nine minutes and forty-one seconds to fly the twenty miles to the captive balloon and back. When he landed, he was so cold he had to be lifted from his seat. Later Moisant confessed to reporters that the fog hadn’t troubled him, but he’d been “so blinded by rain that he couldn’t make out the balloon afloat in the Hempstead Plains.”
Moisant basked in the crowd’s acclaim as around him the other aviators packed up for the day unnoticed. The first day of the Belmont Park Meet had ended with no doubt as to who had been its star. Playing to the press with all the adroitness of Grahame-White, Moisant donated his airplane’s propeller to the New York Herald, the most influential newspaper in America as far as aviation was concerned. The paper blushed at such largesse and thanked Moisant, the man whose daring skill “has won for him a host of friends.”
* Dr. John Moorhead, with a corps of assistants from Bellevue Hospital, was in charge of a “fast automobile ambulance,” but this was not yet in place at the time of Shriver’s accident.