Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in Rhinebeck, New York, houses one of the finest collections of old aircraft in America. The aerodrome’s most impressive offering is its extraordinary group of World War I fighters. Some are original, and others are scrupulous reconstructions based on the old plans and powered by engines that have been retrieved after years of neglect. They are gaunu crude machines, made of wood and canvas, and it is difficult to imagine that, in the living memory of a great many people, they were formidable instruments of destruction. It is harder still to imagine when they are trundled out for the Rhinebeck Aerodrome’s air show on summer Sundays. For Rhinebeck Aerodrome, through some odd calculation of what its spectators will find diverting, uses the planes for humorous effect.
The aerodrome is nicely set up, and spectators settle themselves on bleachers along a well-cropped grass airstrip while the wooden propellers tick over and blue clouds of exhaust and castor oil (the traditional aviationengine lubricant) blow across the field. Then a man in a funny hat takes his place in a low observation tower, switches on a loudspeaker system, and begins to talk into a microphone. He talks without interruption throughout the rest of the show. What he says is pretty much what Henry James called genial twaddle. There is some chuckling about the weather, some throwaway historical background, and the alarming announcement that the planes are going to fly in concert with a “comedy show.” Sure enough. Comical doughboys run around the field in the soup-bowl helmets of the First World War, girls in bloomers (“Holy mackerel, look at those mamzelles!”) run out of plywood buildings bearing signs like “Der Sausage Factory,” and the “Black Baron” minces around in huge jodhpurs. Keystone Kops zip out of the trees in a dilapidated Buick, and a lingerie shop disgorges underwear upon the detonation of an ersatz bomb. In all this sophomoric hilarity one becomes numb to the airplanes, which without the giggling announcer and the frantic pageant on the field wouldn’t look funny at all.
The legendary Sopwith Camel, for instance, is anything but quaint. It is a chunky, businesslike plane that jumps into the air and climbs, shuddering in the wind, at an impressive rate. Behind it a British FE-8 pusher makes a somewhat less striking takeoff but flies steadily enough. The FE-8 wasn’t much of a plane by World War i combat standards; one squadron lost all of theirs in a few weeks under the guns of the German Fokkers. The men who flew them sometimes had to go out three times a day. They usually saw one or more of their fellows go down. The ordeal was none the less painful for its participants because they flew slow, primitive airplanes.
Those planes were not easy to fly, but the pilots at Rhinebeck toss them around the sky with an easy, graceful skill that belies the essential difficulties of the craft. And all the time they are in the air, the intrusive announcer and the vaudeville on the ground work to make them just another funny thing.
It is, of course, a most human impulse to mock the immediate past, especially in so accelerated an era as ours. Our machinery is very sophisticated indeed, and our problems are immediate. Making the World Safe For Democracy now seems a jejune concept to die for, and those who did die for it must have been pretty simple and foolish after all. Of course they were no more simple or foolish than we are.
Rhinebeck Aerodrome is an excellent aviation museum, filled with planes that have been kept up by dint of a great deal of care and an enormous amount of research, and it is sad that the museum’s chief event seems to be devoted to demeaning the efforts of the men who first flew the planes, and demeaning them for no better reason than a few laughs and threedollars-a-head admission.
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
On the sweltering night of July 22, 1934. John Dillinger stepped out of the Chicago Biograph theatre, where, cooled by “iced fresh air,” he had been watching Clark Gable and William Powell in Manhattan Melodrama. Dillinger, America’s most wanted criminal and the object of one of the greatest manhunts in history, had gone to the movie with two women. One of them, Anna Sage, hoping to avoid being deported for prostitution, had told the F.B.I. that Dillinger would be at the Biograph that night. As Dillinger moved away from under the marquee a G-man stepped out from behind a lamppost. “Hello, John,” he whispered, and as Dillinger turned toward him a half dozen guns cut the gangster down.
Hundreds of people gathered in front of the Biograph to gape and dip their handkerchiefs in Dillinger’s blood. Ever since then, though, the theatre has had trouble drawing a crowd. Last July, nearly forty years to the day after Dillinger’s death, the seamy Chicago landmark closed its doors forever. William Durante, the last owner of the theatre, carried on right up to the end showing the classic films of the twenties and thirties on the Biograph’s original projector. But the people didn’t come. “The neighborhood theatre is dead, just like Dillinger,” Mr. Durante mourned. “The only thing that’s making it these days is skin and violence.” Mr. Durante lost a hundred thousand dollars trying to keep the Biograph alive. However, this serious reverse has not put him out of business; he also manages a highly successful chain of theatres featuring x-rated films.
LIVER-EATING JOHNSTON COMES HOME
At last the sod may lie lightly on the bones of Liver-Eating Johnston, thanks to the efforts of the seventhgrade students of Park View Junior High School in Lancaster, California. John Johnston went west from New Jersey during the Gold Rush, fought with the Union army during the Civil War, did a turn of duty as a sheriff, and spent most of his years as a logger and trapper. When Crow Indians murdered his pregnant Indian wife, Johnston swore revenge and declared war on the tribe. Six feet tall and weighing 260 pounds, he was a formidable opponent. Legend has it that a mutual respect grew out of the feud, and Johnston eventually became blood brother to the Crow chieftain.
Johnston got his grisly nickname after a skirmish with a group of Sioux when a friend saw him cutting out the liver of a fallen Indian. Later Johnston modestly explained: “I didn’t eat any …,” just “made that man think I did.”
Like so many of his breed, he ended up penniless; the sometime mountain man lived out his last days in Santa Monica, died in 1900 at the age of seventy-eight, and was buried in the Sawtelle Veterans Cemetery.
Johnston had told his friends that he wanted to be buried in the great Northwest, but nobody paid any attention to this last wish until the students at Park View learned of it late last year. Encouraged by their teacher, Tri Robinson, they formed the Committee for the Reburial of Liver-Eating Johnston. The committee petitioned the head of the Los Angeles Veterans Cemetery, won the support of various colleges and historical societies, and waited for a decision from Washington. The decision came in April: Johnston could be moved to Cody, Wyoming. Despite the intervention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, whose spokesman called the federal officials who approved the move grave robbers and complained that “…no veteran remains safe in his grave,” Johnston was reburied last June in a sagebrush prairie at the edge of the Shoshone River, near the prominence that the Crow Indians named Buffalo Heart Mountain.
THE WAY TO ALASKA
We have received the following scholarly letter from H. J. Dring of San Francisco:
In “The Way to Alaska,” in the February, 1974, issue, Walter Havighurst refers to two schooners, Snohomish and Skykomish. To the casual reader, and to anyone familiar with the Puget Sound area, these are both local place-names; in fact, Snohomish is a county.
My challenge has to do with a careful search in Merchant Vessels of the U.S. (Dept. of Commerce Ship Registers) from 1893 through 1920. I also checked the Lyman List, which is a compendium of West Coast-built vessels. In neither of these authoritative sources did I find the above-named vessels. As a ship buff for forty years and a professional seaman, I am convinced that Mr. Havighurst used fictitious names for the two schooners.…
We forwarded this letter to Walter Havighurst and received the following reply, which we print with our apologies to Mr. Dring and our other readers:
…In “The Way to Alaska” I used some made-up names for want of the actual ones. For example, instead of referring to “the Captain whose name I have forgotten,” I just called him Captain Olson. The same with the stowaway; though I remember his nickname I had to invent a surname.
To Mr. Dring’s point: reaching back fifty-one years I’ll say that one of the schooners was either the Tacoma or the Spokane—both familiar names from the state of Washington. Her twin was something like Camaro or Camargo or Camiro. I’m hazy about that name, though I have a firmer hold on the tug Coutli, a name I associate with the geography of British Columbia. That suggested using the twin schooner names that have a Puget Sound association.
TENNIS ENSHRINED
Last June two members of our staff attended a pleasant luncheon given in New York by James Van Alen, best known for his creation of the suddendeath scoring system of tennis and now president of the National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame. In the year of tennis’ hundredth anniversary in the United States [see “Sphairistiké, Anyone?” AMERICAN HERITAGE, June, 1971] it is most appropriate that the Hall of Fame should be housed in the handsome old Newport Casino, built by James Gordon Bennett in 1880, where the first United States Lawn Tennis Association championship tournament was held in August of 1881. Although the Hall of Fame has been there since its founding in 1954, the board of directors sees a growing need for extensive restoration and expansion of the Casino and so is offering limited membership in the nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. The luncheon, given to present the campaign to the press, was brightened by several tennis luminaries besides Mr. Van Alen, who was United States amateur court-tennis champion in 1933 and 1940.
In 1952 Mr. Van Alen helped rescue the Casino from being replaced by a shopping center. He hopes to open the Casino to visitors on a year-round basis, as opposed to the current Mayto-October season. Thirteen grass courts will be available to visiting members, and tennis clinics and lectures are planned. At present the four museum rooms include displays of antique rackets and costumes, trophies, photographs, prints and paintings of tennis stars, and a tennis library. Plans for expansion call for more exhibition rooms, a Davis Cup room, and a gift shop.
