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Airship itself.
    If not, light up a Hindenburg, relax, and enjoy the ride.
    Yet LeRoy was not satisfied with this advertisement:
    It lacks substance. It says very little about what I call “the Zeppelin Experience.” We need to tell people what it must be like up there, floating through the sky, drinking and playing bridge with earls and princesses, all the swells, while the map unrolls down below. Gliding along far above the cares of the world, above the clouds. Like being God. The Zeppelin brochures make it sound just peachy.
    Somehow we need to convey all that in our cigar ads. I think I must give it a whirl myself. I’ll take passage on the Hindenburg and keep a detailed journal.
     
    LeRoy Badcock boarded the
Hindenburg
in Frankfurt, on May 3, 1937. It was of course the great airship’s last voyage. The following entries from his journal detail the trip:
    May 3
. Boarded the great ship at Frankfurt-am-Main. They keep it in a huge hangar, with the tail sticking out. The tail fins are decorated with huge swastikas. The steward tells me the Nazi Party paid the company a lot of money to put them up there. The great airship wasflown on propaganda flights over Germany, dropping pamphlets and showing the flag. I wonder if we couldn’t pay more, and get them to take the big swastikas off the tail fins and put up
GST
instead. It’s a thought…
    You just walk up a gangplank and there you are. They make you hand over your matches and lighter when you come aboard. That irritated me – the Germans are good at giving irritating orders – so I kept back one box of matches – how would it look, the president of a tobacco company not having a light! Evidently this has something to do with the ship being filled with hydrogen, not helium as planned. I don’t understand all that chemical mumbo-jumbo. There was some problem about buying helium from America. Political stuff again. I don’t understand all that political mumbo-jumbo, either. I’ll wager the big swastikas didn’t help. Anyway, they assure me we will be able to smoke in the Smoking Saloon.
    They also make you hand over your camera, but the steward says we’ll get them back after we get past the three-mile limit and head out to sea. Mean-while, we watch from the windows while a hundred little men pull ropes and somehowback us out of the hangar. They play some music for the occasion. It really is all very smooth, no bumps or noises at all. Nothing like a ship. Then we are on our way!
    My cabin is tiny, but adequate. I took a stroll around the ship, looking over the rather luxurious Dining Saloon, Drawing Room, and Reading and Writing Room. Then I descended a wide staircase to the Smoking Saloon. I thought to myself, this airship has everything you might expect on a luxury liner, but I will be in New York in two and a half days.
     
    May 4
. In the morning, took a tour of the ship. We were shown the bridge with all its fascinating controls. The braver souls were taken up a ladder to walk along a dim corridor and look at the huge gas bags.
    At lunch, met a pretty Bavarian woman named Diesl, an English tennis player named Hatney, and a large, red-bearded fellow with a monocle who introduced himself as Count Exon Waldiz. Some kind of Ruritanian aristocrat or something.
    Count Waldiz joined me later in the Smoking Saloon, where I was enjoying aperfecto and a glass of whiskey. He seemed to be drinking absinthe. “Two days of boredom,” he said, and suggested we play cards for money. I explained that I know no games but “SlapJack.” We played that for an hour, and I lost over $800.
    In the evening, I watched the stars with Fräulein Diesl. She says she lost over 4,000 marks to Count Waldiz, betting on the relative speeds of two ships down below.
     
    May 5
. Read a few cables in the morning and sent off replies. In the afternoon, I took a brisk walk with Mr. Hatney. He says he lost over £750 to Count Waldiz. The Count had bet he could seduce Fräulein Diesl before we