American Heritage MagazineDecember 1980    Volume 32, Issue 1
POSTSCRIPTS
 

THE SPRUCE GOOSE FINDS A NEST


On July 19,1942, Henry J. Kaiser- whose construction company had helped to build Boulder Dam and was now grinding out Liberty Ships by the dozen—attended the launching of the Harvey W. Scott in his yards and presented the assembled crowd with a vision he believed would win the war for America: “We will be able to put down a vast army, anywhere in the world, within a single week. We will be free once and for all of the fear of having our Armies cut off in some place distant from our shores. . . . The whole world will be our front yard. And our enemies will be beaten to their knees.”

What Kaiser had in mind was a fleet of monstrous flying boats capable of carrying cargo and soldiers high above the Atlantic. Kaiser had never built an airplane, but he thought he knew of someone who could: Howard R. Hughes, Texas tool-company millionaire, Hollywood movie producer, holder of transcontinental and aroundthe-world flight records, and president and owner of the Hughes Aircraft Company at Culver City in Southern California. Hughes, never a man to shun the grandiose, agreed. By the fall of 1942, his engineers had developed preliminary designs for the plane, and in November the government granted a contract—not for a fleet, but for three prototypes. Each was to be constructed of plywood, to conserve the nation’s metal supply, and each was to be large enough to ferry seven hundred men or a load of sixty tons across the sea.

The contract authorized the expenditure of as much as $18,000,000, a sum more than adequate to do the job in those times. But even in 1942, as Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele have disclosed in Empire (1979), the thirtysix-year-old Hughes was showing signs of the dementia that would befuddle the last twenty years of his life, cost his various companies millions of dollars, and cloud with mystery his death in 1976. For all his wealth and genius, he was a dreadful administrator, meddlesome, indecisive, vague, and apparently incapable of delegating authority. By the spring of 1944 so little had been accomplished on the project that the government cut its order down to just one prototype—and that was not completed until November of 1947.

The flying boat was called the HK1—more commonly the Hercules and even more commonly the “Spruce Goose” after the wood from which it was made—and it was, and remains, the largest airplane ever built. Its tail assembly was as tall as an eight-story building; its wingspan was longer than a football field; the propellers for each of its eight engines were seventeen feet in length; the hull stood thirty feet high; each wing was so thick a man could stand up inside it; and it weighed 400,000 pounds, more than today’s Boeing 747. And it worked. On November 2, 1947, with Hughes himself at the controls, the Hercules roared across the water of Long Beach harbor, lifted into the air, and flew for a little over a mile before Hughes put it down.

It was the last time the plane ever flew. The war over, the government lost interest. But Hughes continued to revere his creation. He had it placed in a specially designed hangar with orders that it be kept in such a condition that it could be made ready for flight with ninety days notice. After his death, however, the Las Vegas-based Summa Corporation, the conglomerate which had taken most of the Hughes companies under its wing in 1972, began to look askance at the $1,000,000 a year it was costing to keep the plane in shape. Still, as if the ghost of Hughes yet hovered on the premises, the company could not quite bring itself to dismantle the plane and simply sell off its 3,000,000 square feet of plywood. In July of 1980 it announced that it was turning it over to the Wrather Corporation, operators of the Disneyland Hotel, who would set it up as a public museum in Long Beach not far from where the Queen Mary (also now a museum) is currently berthed.

 

OF A FLAG AND A FACE


The green flag’s career in America is a great human drama,” Thomas Fleming wrote in “The Green Flag in America” (June/July, 1979), “the story of a defeated people who found new strength and pride in a free society and gave generously of themselves to restore some measure of that strength and pride to the land of their fathers.” The flag of which he spoke was that of Ireland, and the giving that of Irish-Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who supported the home country in its struggle against British dominion.

Now, Mary Z. Gray of Silver Spring, Maryland, brings to light a littleknown participant in that great human drama:

“From 1928 to 1977 a pensive female face appeared on all denominations of Irish paper money. Even today, her shade still haunts Irish currency in its watermark. Who was she? Ask any man or woman under fifty in Ireland and the answers come back shrouded in Irish mist: ‘That’s Kathleen ni Hoolihan, mother of all Ireland, and most famous Irish beauty.’ Or: ‘She’s Katharine O’Shea, uncrowned Queen of Ireland.’ Better still: ‘St. Brigid it is. And that’s a true fact.’ She may even be identified as the Rose of Tralee or Mother McCree. She was in truth Hazel Jenner Martyn Trudeau, Lady Lavery. She was an American, but her picture graced Irish currency during those fifty years for good and sufficient reasons.

“She was born in Chicago in 1881 of Galway stock. After her first husband’s death, she married Belfast-born artist John Lavery, whose success soon made him Sir John Lavery and gave the couple homes in both London and Morocco. Their London home was the meetingplace for such notables as George Bernard Shaw, Lord Birkenhead, and Winston Churchill.

“When the troubles in Ireland once again flared into open violence, Hazel turned her considerable charms to politics—the politics of reconciliation. She gave dinner parties and invited the leaders of the Black and Tans to sit down and eat with British government officials; she arranged to have Sir John do portraits of the top men in the opposing Irish parties, whose sittings were set up at the same hour so that they could meet; she once sat by a window in front of Michael Collins, commander of the Irish Republican Army, to protect him from a gun trained on his head from the street, and personally drove him to the negotiations that led to the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922.

“So effective was her role as a mediator, loved by both sides in the struggle, that she was seriously recommended as the first governor-general of the Irish Free State. That did not come to pass, but Sir John’s portrait of her was placed on the country’s currency—a charming tribute to the Irish-American who, if not the mother, was at least an important midwife in the birth of a free Ireland.”

 

HOLIDAY FARE


We are pleased to announce that American Heritage Publishing Company is offering two companion volumes for this holiday season—The American Heritage Cookbooks. One is an old favorite, long out of print and greatly in demand, The American Heritage Cookbook—500 traditional recipes and 30 historic menus from every era of our history. Boxed with it in a special slipcase is a totally new volume, The American Heritage Book of Fish Cookery. Written by Alice Watson Houston, it includes recipes and clear instructions on how to prepare more than 100 varieties of native fish. Both books are richly illustrated. The boxed set—a 496-page feast—costs $26.00. If you’d like to send it as a Christmas gift, please call the following toll-free number: 800-228-5656 (in Nebraska, call 800-642-8777) but be sure to do so by December 12. For later deliveries, you may, of course, call anytime.

 

THE ELKS UNCORKED


In “The Bohemian Club” (June/July, 1980), Richard Reinhardt’s sprightly treatment of one of our most exclusive fraternal organizations, the author noted that the club rented its first San Francisco headquarters in 1872 “from a local fraternity called the Jolly Corks, which long since has joined the dust of the Tontine, the Pickwick Club, and the Rinky Dinks.”

But the Jolly Corks of San Francisco, it appears, were not alone, as reader Ed Waltenspiel of Moraga, California, has written to remind us. The Jolly Corks, he points out, first popped up in this country in 1867 with the arrival of a British actor named Charles Algernon Sidney Vivian. A convivial sort, Vivian soon was accepted into New York City’s somewhat raucous theatrical world, to which he introduced the cork game, a popular diversion among British actors. In the game, a newcomer would be asked if he would like to join the “Jolly Corks,” a barroom coterie whose members sat around a table. If the newcomer agreed, he was asked to pay an initiation fee of fifty cents, his name was entered in a little black book, he was invited to sit down and was given a cork. The other members would then take out a cork and place it on the table. The “Imperial Cork” (Vivian himself) then explained that at the count of three, the last man to raise his cork would have to buy the rest a drink. Invariably, the newcomer would find himself left holding his cork on high, while the rest of the members simply covered theirs with their palms. To disabuse the newcomer of any notion that he had thus won the game, it was explained that while he may have been the first to raise his cork, he was also the last—for no one else was ever going to raise his.

This harmless foolery somehow caught on among New York theatrical men, and the Jolly Corks became a large drinking society with headquarters over a saloon on Delancey Street. But many members thought the organization should devote itself to higher things than drinking and playing games, and at a meeting in February, 1868, it was resolved that the Jolly Corks be reformed into a benevolent order, and that a committee be appointed to draft rules and a ritual and to select a new name. Imperial Cork Vivian, who was also a member of the British Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, leaned toward naming the new order after that animal, but he was overruled, and on February 16, 1868, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks—the B.P.O.E.—came into being.

“The B.P.O.E.,” Mr. Waltenspiel concludes, “is an organization of which I am proud to be a member. Our current national (Grand Lodge) budget includes approximately $1,000,000 for scholarships. Our California-Hawaii Elks alone raise $1,500,000 annually for cerebral palsy therapy programs. So, the ‘Benevolent’ still functions—and there are those who maintain that the B.P.O.E. stands for the Best People On Earth!”