The Bergdoll Boys, page 16
And, perhaps, as Rodman Wanamaker prophesied, even flying an airplane across the Atlantic.
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1 Grover’s flying escapades are described in newspapers, Alfred’s diary-manuscript, government documents, and aviation club newsletters. Family photographs of airplanes and Eagle Field helped define the events further. The Smithsonian also provided photographs of Eagle Field, taken by William Sheahan. Details about Grover’s flight school in Dayton are attributed to John Carver Edwards’ book, Orville’s Aviators. Additional flying information is from a short biography of Grover by Harold E. Morehouse at the Smithsonian.
2 The Bryn Mawr Hotel and horse show dell later became The Baldwin Prep School for Girls.
3 As early as 1912, flight certification from a sanctioned organization was needed to enter international flying competitions. Otherwise, Grover needed no special approval to fly his own airplane. It was unregulated activity.
4 The Bergdoll boys’ homemade airplane design appeared similar to a Blériot but matches none of the commercially available airplanes of 1907–1908. It supports the theory that Louis Bergdoll took an early interest in French monoplanes over the American bi-planes of the Wright Brothers.
5 Prior to this event, most of the exciting news about aviation came from the balloon and motorized airship flights, which initially attracted the Bergdolls but proved to be too slow.
6 From an online article, The United States Army Buys Its First Aeroplane, 1909, by National Archives senior archivist Dr. Greg Bradsher, March 19, 2019—Textual Records Division at the National Archives.
7 This demonstration plane was known as a Wright Model A. With more revisions, the design became the Wright B Flyer.
8 Violet Douglas Marie Cruger had previously been engaged to railroad executive and yachting sportsman, Harold Stirling (Mike) Vanderbilt. Each of the men in her life were worth millions.
9 The Anzani engine was developed by Italian, Alessandro Anzani, with production factories in Italy, France, and England. Anzani lived in France and supervised the ignition and proper fuel-oxygen mixture in the engine on the morning of the Bleriot Channel flight.
10 In August 1909, Glenn Curtiss won the International Cup of Aviation, better known as the Gordon Bennett Cup, when he smashed the speed record at the Rheims, France, air show covering 12 miles of flight in just under 16 minutes. He flew a biplane with a design remarkably similar to the Wright Brothers. He beat Blériot, who also set a record for a single lap, by five seconds.
11 The boast about Bergdoll being the first American sportsman with a monoplane may have been hyperbole. Other newspaper articles of November 1909 listed several wealthy American sportsmen who were buying or building their own airplanes. Three of them were listed as owning Blériots or having contracts to purchase Blériots when they were built in France. Bergdoll, however, may have beaten them all, becoming the first to buy and take delivery of a Blériot monoplane in America.
12 Hugh de Laussat Willoughby was another wealthy sportsman aviator of the era who was born near Philadelphia and lived in Brooklyn and Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island, where he used a beach as a landing strip. He began flying at age 53 and held several patents on airplane devices. In 1909, he worked alongside Orville Wright, demonstrating the flight of a Wright Brothers biplane for the Army and President Taft.
13 The First Air Races.net and California Center for Military History, Mark J. Denger.
14 Hoxsey, who worked for the Wright Brothers, was killed in a plane crash on December 31, 1910, while trying to set another altitude record.
15 United Press, May 1910. From a caption to a newspaper drawing of a photograph.
16 This hangar would eventually be built at Eagle Field, housing Louis’ Blériot XI and Grover’s Wright B Flyer.
17 On opening day of the Point Breeze event, altitude record holder Ralph Johnstone crashed his Wright Flyer in Colorado, killing him instantly. He was in the same type of plane to be later used by Grover.
18 No records are available to suggest this feat was accomplished. If it had been achieved, it most likely would have made headlines. The first airplane to launch from a ship had only recently been achieved by the U.S. Navy in November 1910.
19 In 1910–1911, Grover and his brother, Erwin, focused more on automobile racing than aviation. No evidence can be found that Grover was flying Louis’ Blériot in 1910 or 1911, whether a few feet off the ground or high in the air. The smallest of the Blériot airplanes had only enough space and engine power for one person. Despite other pilots of this era learning to fly independently, it appears that Grover did not pilot a plane off the ground at a significant altitude until his formal Wright School of Aviation flight lessons in April 1912.
20 Today, the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge is called Walkway over the Hudson.
21 Pilot Calbraith P. Rodgers achieved the coast-to-coast flight in his Wright B “Vin-Fiz” Flyer, but he missed the October 1, 1911 deadline by a wide margin.
22 Arthur L. Welsh was an early Wright Brothers-trained pilot and a member of the Wright exhibition team before his death in a Wright C biplane in Maryland on June 11, 1912. Wright State University.
23 Details from Harold E. Morehouse Flying Pioneers Biographies Collection, Smithsonian Institution.
24 The 1911 Wright School of Aviation class had included notable aviators like Harry N. Atwood, Henry (Hap) Arnold, Welsh, Oscar Brindley, and Calbraith Rodgers.
25 Learning to Fly the 1911 Wright Type B Airplane, by Dr. Richard Stimson.
26 Capt. Thomas Scott Baldwin was a Civil War-orphaned circus performer turned daring balloonist and airplane pilot known for flying under bridges and for the first parachute jump from a balloon. His 1885 jump sounds remarkably similar to Alfred’s account of Grover’s boasting about the Bergdoll boys parachuting from a balloon. Baldwin’s airplanes were named “Red Devil,” the same name Grover chose for his first car. National Aviation Hall of Fame.
27 Whether Orville signed off on Grover’s final training flight and the date of Grover’s first solo flight is unknown. If Grover had trained himself to fly on Louis’ Blériot XI, it might have hastened his lessons with the Wright school. Years later, Orville would describe Grover as one of his best early students.
28 A copy of the April 1912 receipt for Grover’s purchase of the Wright B Flyer is still in Bergdoll documents stored at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania archives.
29 Upon returning from Ohio with his new airplane, Grover flew from Eagle Field, allowing its use by the Aero Club. In November 1913, he purchased the field from his brother, Charles, for $11,700. However, because he was a minor at the time of purchase, and Charles was his legal guardian, a court later nullified the transaction until Grover turned 21.
30 The distance from the Bergdoll farm and Erwin’s shop to Eagle Field was about a mile.
31 Following the railroad tracks was one of Grover’s favorite navigation techniques and he loved to race the trains, always beating them to the next station. It also publicized his daring flights as passengers arrived in Philadelphia spreading the news about the exciting birdman. Even students at Haverford College refer to lazy early summer days on campus along the Main Line railroad tracks as “drowsily watching Bergdoll sail over.”
32 Description in the Chester Times, June 3, 1912.
33 A photograph of Grover’s Wright B with BERGDOLL painted under the lower wing was used in a newspaper advertising campaign for manufactured homes in the 1980s. “Would you fly in a plane that wasn’t built in a factory?” it asked.
CHAPTER SIX
Grover’s Historic Flight
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1912–1913
Rising early on August 16, 1912, Grover and Charles Kraus drove the short distance on West Chester Pike from the Broomall farm to the Eagle Hotel. Warming the Wright B Flyer engine, Grover positioned himself in the pilot’s seat. At the same time, Kraus made last-minute inspections of the plane’s canvas, guide wires, and connections to the warping, rudder, and elevator levers.
At 5:55 am in the cool August dawn temperatures, the pair lifted into the air and turned eastward over the pike for the 69th and Market Streets’ Union Station.1
Upon reaching downtown Philadelphia and City Hall, Grover climbed the Wright B to more than 800 feet. Then, dropping a bit to about 550 feet, he circled closely around the statue of William Penn atop City Hall. From there, Grover and Kraus could see the Pennsylvania founder’s outstretched arm closely, and his gaze pointed toward the Delaware River upon which Penn arrived in 1682.
The roaring of the Wright B’s vertical four-cylinder engine caused pedestrians to crane their necks and watch, some in disbelief.
From a summer of press about Grover Bergdoll’s new toy, Philadelphians immediately knew the Birdman was flying again.
Then turning eastward again for the ferry terminals along the river, Grover and Kraus were guided by the white spire of Christ Church towering over the grave of America’s founding father, Benjamin Franklin. Crossing the wide ship channel with its jostling ferries and many fingers of wharves in a line toward soup-condensing plant #2 of the Joseph Campbell Preserve Company and its neighbor, the Victor Talking Machine Company with its four riverfront smokestacks in Camden, New Jersey, Grover, and Kraus picked up the eastward line of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway, Atlantic City branch, and flew onward toward the rising sun.
Gradually ascending as they cruised at up to 40 miles per hour, by Berlin, New Jersey, their barograph recorded a peak elevation of 8,000 feet. They could see the vast blue of the Atlantic Ocean and the many rivers, inlets, and bays surrounding the New Jersey shoreline communities.
It was a sight few had seen before.
In August, the boys stuffed old newspapers under their wool coats for insulation to stay warm at high elevations. The next day’s edition would have their pictures in it. They circled cotton wraps around their pantlegs in a style popular with military uniforms. Their newsboy caps were turned backward so the wind would not catch the bills and blow them into the spinning propellers behind them. They must have felt like Canada geese, rumbling, and jostling among the roar of the engine and the flapping of their heavy canvas planes high above the regenerating growth of southern New Jersey pine forest after years of cutting and burning, fires caused mainly by sparks from the relatively slower train locomotives.
Descending over Ventnor Boat Works on Lakes Bay while approaching Atlantic City and the Thorofare waterway, Grover and Kraus were buffeted by ocean winds they had not previously experienced in the airplane. However, Grover’s steady hand on the levers finally brought the duo down to the ground safely at Chelsea Heights in an area known as the Meadows. The landing, said the Inquirer, was “two squares north of the Albany Avenue bridge.”2 It was the first airplane flight from Philadelphia to Atlantic City. It took one hour and 23 minutes to fly the 60-mile route.
The newspaper chronicled the daring journey with a photograph of the plane taking off from Eagle Field and an inset photo of Grover and Kraus in their Wright B seats, straddling the tall control levers and steel guide wires, dressed in suits, white shirts, and ties, and with their matching caps. Kraus appears comfortable and relaxed, beaming with a smile. As he often did, Grover sat erect but expressionless with one shoulder cocked toward the camera.
He knew how to take a photograph.
Grover’s brother-in-law, Albert Hall, greeted them, arriving from one of the Bergdoll beach properties as arranged by telephone. He drove the boys to his cottage for breakfast with Grover’s sister, Elizabeth. If it was a celebration, they made nothing of it.
Grover’s airplane attracted much attention as he flew over Pleasantville, toward Atlantic City and its new Million Dollar Pier jutting into the ocean. It wasn’t the first time people in the summer beach resort had seen airplanes, but it still drew a crowd of thousands.
Aviator Glenn Curtiss had spearheaded passenger service from the same airfield a year before Grover’s landing. Its proximity to water made it ideal for a seaplane base for flights to and from New York City. However, this was still a significant event. Traveling from Philadelphia to Atlantic City took hours by car, ferry, or train with multiple stops.
It proved that a pilot with an airplane could carry a passenger for great distances and over water to reach a far-flung destination in a fraction of the time.
Attempting to return to Eagle Field the next day was challenging for Grover and the Wright B. He was 19, and with only a few months of experience on the Wright airplane, the unique wind patterns around the Atlantic City and Ventnor shoreline and back bays were so troublesome that he was forced to wait until the cooler air of early evening on August 17 caused the wind to subside. It also required him to leave Kraus’ extra weight behind and attempt the flight himself.
The Inquirer said the air currents nearly caused the Wright B to overturn and that when Grover finally departed the Chelsea Heights airfield for Philadelphia, it was 6:05 pm. Slowed by a west wind, Grover made it nearly to Berlin, the high point of his previous flight, and was forced by darkness to land in a field of hot-colored blooms on the sprawling Peacock Dahlia Farms. He narrowly missed a telegraph pole when landing.
Hiring men to watch over the airplane, Grover called his brother, Louis, who arrived to pick him up in an automobile. Grover later returned and flew to Eagle Field in the airplane in daylight, said the Inquirer’s special report.3
Kraus hitched a ride home with Albert Hall. While Grover was already a celebrity in Philadelphia, the incredible flight elevated Kraus to similar status.
During their teenage years, Grover and Charles Kraus were best friends. People described them as being joined at the hip, closer than brothers, running the streets of Philadelphia and the Main Line in Grover’s fast cars, on the race track, and in the air with Grover’s Wright B.
Charles John Kraus, Jr. was born in Philadelphia on July 29, 1894, to German parents Charles and Caroline Wagner Kraus and baptized at the Bergdoll’s Zion German Presbyterian Church as Karl Johann Kraus.
Living in 1910 in a small two-story Flora Street brick rowhouse with his parents and sister, Minnie, just three blocks from the Bergdolls’ North 29th Street mansion, Kraus grew up with Grover on the streets of Brewerytown. His father was a cake maker at a local bakery, and from age 15, Kraus worked as a bookkeeper for an electric company and, later, Albert Hall’s concrete and plaster company in Grassland, near Eagle Field.
As with his other companions, Grover paid for most of Kraus’ travels, including his fare to Dayton, to help collect the Wright B and ship it home to Philadelphia.4
Unlike Grover, however, Kraus went on to serve in the Army. He mustered at Camp Meade, Maryland, on February 24, 1918, and deployed to the Allied Expeditionary Forces in the 45th Engineers Unit (later, Transportation Corps), arriving in France on July 23, 1918. He saw no battle engagements but worked at railway maintenance operating a team of horses hauling railroad materials on a wagon. He served through promotions from private first class, to wagoner, to sergeant until he was honorably discharged on July 16, 1919.5
Throughout Kraus’ military service, Grover was hiding from federal agents in the mountains of western Maryland. In 1934, when Grover was hiding in Germany, Kraus applied for veteran’s benefits. The final question on his application asked, “Did you ever refuse on conscientious, political, or other grounds to perform [the] full military duty or to render unqualified service?”
Responding, “No,” Kraus couldn’t help but think of his childhood friend, Grover.6
For much of the 1913 flying season, Grover seldom got his airplane into the air, partly because he spent so much time in and out of courtrooms for speeding and assault infractions and then spent two months in the Montgomery County Jail.
Boredom crept upon him in jail, and he dreamed of a new airplane. From his solitary confinement cell, only a year after completing his flight school in Dayton, he wrote a letter to Orville Wright inquiring about the Wright Model R, a smaller and faster airplane nicknamed “Baby Wright” and developed from the Model B.
“I am stuck on the ‘Baby’ type which you refused to sell,” Grover declared to Orville. “Now, if you will decide to part with those two ‘babies’ which are in the building opposite the (Wright Brothers) shop, can’t you make me a price?” Grover wished to buy both the Wrights’ Model R airplanes. Not content with the slowness of his Wright B and reading daily in jail newspapers about other aviators moving up to faster aircraft and setting new records, Grover grew determined to achieve more fame. He told Orville he had safely made more than two hundred flights in his Wright B and felt the “Baby type was much easier to handle.”
He signed off by suggesting that even though he was in jail, he would “rather [be here] than where poor [Al] Welsh is.” His Wright Brothers flight instructor, Welsh, had recently been killed in a crash.
Orville responded by letter on May 19, 1913, saying he would not advise Grover to go for the “Baby” machines. Instead, he recommended the company’s new Wright D with a six-cylinder, 60-horsepower engine that could propel the plane up to 67 miles per hour and more than double the climbing speed of the Wright B. He also suggested Grover might be interested in their new hydroplanes (seaplanes). Orville said, “when you are free, we would be glad to have you come to Dayton to see them and the new models.” Grover never responded to the offer.
Upon release from jail at midnight July 6–7, Grover was determined to put on another show. Returning to his hangar at Eagle Field within days, he performed a tune-up on the Wright B, reviewing the motor, props, canvas planes, and flight control levers. However, he didn’t check the steel guide wires carefully enough, and only because of poor weather conditions did he not take the plane up immediately.
