Chasing Icarus Read Online Free PDF Page B

Theater.

    A month later, on the morning of Saturday, October 15, Grahame-White had banked his Brockton check for $50,000 and was a member of the three-man British team that would contest the International Aviation Cup against America and France at Long Island’s Belmont Park racecourse. † He intended to leave Washington, D.C., in a couple of days, once he’d fulfilled his engagements, among them an appearance as the guest of honor at a party thrown by Mr. and Mrs. John Barry Ryan at the Cosmos Club that evening.
    The six weeks he had thus far spent in the United States had been an unalloyed success. Aside from the money he had made and the women he had wooed, Grahame-White had enjoyed the American attitude to life. The Americans’ hard-nosed approach to business and their straight-talking was more in tune with his own personality than that of the pettifogging bureaucrats and out-of-touch imperialists who, in his opinion, held back Britain. He was in a sunny mood when he arrived at the Benning racetrack for another day’s flying. A reporter told him that the airship America was under way.
    What did Grahame-White think of its chances? “I think Walter Well-man has every chance of success,” he replied, adding, “If I should say what I really think about the future of aeronautics, people would laugh at me. I believe that the time will come when the public will look back upon such men as I am and wonder how we could have been so foolish as to trust our lives in the airplane of today . . . the time will come when transatlantic airships will be as common as steamers are today, perhaps more so.”

    A similar question was being asked that same day approximately seven hundred miles west of Washington in St. Louis, Missouri, by a reporter for the city’s Post-Dispatch newspaper. The respondents were some of the principal players in the field of American aeronautics, gathered in St. Louis either because they were aviators flying in the meet or because they were balloonists preparing to take part in the Fifth International Balloon Cup race. Harry Honeywell and Alan Hawley fell into the latter category, but neither could rustle up much enthusiasm for Wellman’s chances. “I hate to make a prediction,” said Hawley, who then didn’t and mumbled only, “I wish him success but . . .”
    Honeywell was hardly any more enthusiastic, musing that he wouldn’t fancy being in Wellman’s shoes if the airship’s motor should pack up. Fortunately for the reporter, one of the aviators flying for the Wright brothers’ exhibition team was more forthcoming. “Wellman is taking an awfully long chance,” reckoned Arch Hoxsey. “He may make it, if he doesn’t encounter storms and if his equipment is absolutely perfect.”
    It was Hoxsey’s twenty-sixth birthday and he could look back on the past year with pride. In January he had been one of the thousands riding the train from Los Angeles to Aviation Field to gape in awe at Louis Paulhan and Glenn Curtiss. That had been Hoxsey’s first sight of a flying machine, but just as Grahame-White had been mesmerized by his encounter with Wilbur Wright in France, so Hoxsey had undergone an epiphany. He had quit his job as a chauffeur to Los Angeles millionaire John Gates, kissed his widowed mother good-bye at the home they shared in Pasadena, and headed east to Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wrights. Orville and Wilbur had had their share of cranks turning up on their doorstep begging them to teach them how to fly, but Hoxsey was different. For a start he had studied automobile mechanics during his youth, which had led to a stint as a racing driver in Europe. Then there was his appearance, his cheerful blue eyes behind a pincenez balanced on a prominent nose. Marguerite Martyn, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , who had visited the St. Louis Meet earlier in the week to see if any homegrown aviators were capable of giving Grahame-White a run for his money, described Hoxsey as “severely