Chapter 6: ►

_An Isolated Environment_

I believe the fact that I was told I would never be physically able to fly was the single greatest spur in my life. I was a healthy baby, but all this changed rather abruptly one day.

In Wilmington we lived in a big pink stucco house on the corner of Lakme and L streets. There was a huge eucalyptus tree in the parkway, so large that its roots had tunneled beneath our house and disturbed the foundations. We were fond of that tree, but my father decided after painful consideration that it would have to go. Its removal was an enormous task, requiring many men, bulldozers, and other pieces of earth-moving machinery. The job took a whole day. I was five years old. There were no boys my age living on the block, so I usually played alone, or with my older sister, Elena Ruth, then eight. My younger sister, Mary Ann, was a toddler, going on three. The day the men removed the tree was a big one for all three of us. The weather was cold and damp, but we stayed outside from dawn to dusk watching as the bulldozer gouged the earth from the yard.

This prolonged exposure left Elena and me with bad cases of pneumonia. She recovered quickly, but I was seriously ill. My lungs were severely damaged and my heart was affected. For a while my parents thought I was going to die. They sent for our priest, Father Skiperelli. I can still remember the moment he entered my room. The walls were covered with pictures of airplanes. Father “Skip” joshed: “But what about the Lord?” My mother led him to a picture of the Sacred Heart, almost obscured by the montage of airplanes. He administered the last rites.

It was touch-and-go for days on end. My mother smothered me in mustard plasters. I was in a coma for some time. Our family physician, Dr. E. J. Rowan, knew a man at the University of California who was trying to develop a new serum for pneumonia. He injected some of this serum into my blood. Finally I began to recover, but the illness had left its mark. For years I was sickly and small--and would always be the smallest boy in my class.

A year or so later, perhaps as an aftermath of the pneumonia, I came down with rheumatic fever. I was not strong and the fever struck me harder than it does most people. I was in bed, flat on my back, for at least four months, possibly longer. Then for the four years following--until I was about ten years old--every so often for weeks at a time I was made to lie down and rest until dinnertime. My mother and father thought I might be crippled for life. They didn’t tell me this. My father’s strategy was to feign complete indifference lest I feel sorry for myself. Not once did anyone ever say to me that I might be a cripple. On the contrary, my parents used to joke about my having developed “rheumatism” at so young an age. But I sensed that from a physical standpoint I was lacking.

I grew to adolescence in an unusual, isolated environment, finding things to pass the long hours at rest that few other boys do. Although it now pains me to recall it, my mother taught me how to sew and knit, and I became quite adept at embroidering. I also became skilled at drawing. I had once withdrawn from school for a while, but my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Paymiller, came to my house to award me the class prize for art. My main interest, however, was aviation, and most of these long, lonely hours were devoted to it.

This interest was stimulated originally, I am certain, by a close friend and neighbor of my father’s named Charles (“Carl”) Lienesch, a pilot for the Union Oil Company. The company maintained one airplane, a wire and fabric Eagle Rock (or “Eagle Brick,” as Lienesch used to call it). This was probably one of the very first “executive” airplanes. Lienesch, who was also a chemist, visited at our home frequently. He was a colorful character, quite a story-teller. I believe his rambling air stories bored my father and mother. But in me he had an eager one-boy audience. Lienesch brought fascinating word pictures into my restricted life, and I always looked forward to his visits.

He gave me my first airplane ride. It took place in 1927, when I was about six years old. Oddly, I can remember but a few details of the flight, although it was undoubtedly the high point of my childhood. Lienesch remembers that after flying 45 minutes or so in the front cockpit of the biplane, I fell sound asleep. This, too, strikes me as odd--if not inconceivable, though my own youngsters today do this. It may be the lulling effect of the engine.

In those times, everyone involved in aviation was a walking public relations man for the trade. I don’t know why Lienesch singled me out for a special pitch. It couldn’t have been simply the fact that I was an eager listener. In any case, my earliest recollection is that this generous friend was determined that some day I should be an aviator. Although he knew I was not too strong physically, he urged me on and continued to do so for many years. I really didn’t need much urging. Lienesch had captured me from the outset. When I was old enough to realize that my health was shaky, and told by some doctor that I could probably never pass a flight physical, I was more determined than ever to be a pilot.

I leaned heavily on my imagination in those days. When I was about nine, during the time I had to rest each day after school, my mother set aside a special wicker chair for me in our small lattice-work “summer house” in the back yard. The chair had deep, downy pillows and broad arm-rests to hold my books and drawing board. To this chair I rigged some special devices of my own: an airplane control stick and rudder pedals. With the books lying open on the arm of the chair, I “flew” hour after hour, carefully following the instructions. In that chair I learned the correct stick and rudder motions for every conceivable airplane maneuver. My imagination took me across oceans, into deep valleys, and above the mountains. I dreamed of flying from California to New York non-stop and setting a new record!

Meanwhile, I had become a model airplane addict. I built models of many airplanes then in the air. The models were not hastily or sloppily made. They were near-professional, I hoped. As I grew older, I sought absolute perfection. This work led, in turn, to considerable research into the theory of flight and aircraft construction. I read everything available on the subject and wrote away, for example, to NACA, for reports on various wing airfoils and aircraft structures. I kept meticulous files. Soon I was designing my own model airplanes. Later I helped some boys build Southern California’s first model airplane powered by a (handbuilt) gasoline engine.

Flying was then a sports rage in Southern California. I think there were at least a hundred small airports in and around Los Angeles. When I could manage it, I used to hang around these places. I was impressed by any pilot. But I was especially fascinated when I heard about pilots who flew air races, which in those days were frequent and dangerous events. A boyhood hero of mine--heroine, rather--was Pancho Barnes, the aviatrix who later built the ranch near Edwards. In those days she was idolized locally, something like the way Amelia Earhart was nationally. Pancho had a new airplane known as the Travelair _Mystery Ship_. She swaggered around in boots and flying jacket and won nearly every race she entered.

For several years Los Angeles, or more specifically Burbank Airport, was the starting point for the 1500-mile Transcontinental Bendix race to Cleveland. Carl Lienesch took me out to Burbank to watch the start. I can still remember the frenzied last-minute preparations by the ground crews, and the high-pitched whine as the ridiculously tiny, stubby-winged, man-killing planes took off into the darkness with no radio and no instruments. I saw and worshiped all the great pilots: Roscoe Turner in his Weddell-Williams Special, Jimmy Weddell in another Weddell-Williams, and Benny Howard in _Ike_, _Mike_, and _Pete_, and _Mr. Mulligan_, the plane that nearly killed him. I built models of all these planes, and followed air racing around the country, from long distances, as some people follow baseball games and players. I was aware of the most obscure racing pilots, and every new racing design that emerged from their garages and workshops.

From one side of the family or the other, I must have inherited a broad stubborn streak. I did no special exercises or took no special medicines; but somehow, by sheer will power and the help of God, I began to regain my strength. I firmly believe that if the spirit is willing, the flesh will keep pace. I think my father’s example--his refusal to display physical or emotional weakness--influenced me tremendously in this regard. You can’t be around a man like that very long and feel sorry for yourself. I think, too, the fact that Carl Lienesch treated me like a normal, healthy boy who would obviously some day be a pilot, had a strong psychological impact on me. By the time I was twelve years old I was well on the road to recovery, and as a result of my long years of confinement a dedicated airplane fanatic.

About that time I took over a newspaper route for the Long Beach _Press-Telegram_ from a boy named Norman Laird. By coincidence, or maybe it wasn’t coincidence, one delivery point on the route was the Wilmington Airport, a small grass field in a slough, operated by a great colorful aviator named Vaughn McNulty. McNulty had an Inland Sportster, a high-wing monoplane, which he used to teach people to fly and to take up passengers. There were a few other planes on the field--an old C-3 Cub, an Eagle Rock, and a Travelair.

Those were tough days for small airport operators. The depression had hit Southern California and few people had dollars to shell out for airplane rides; fewer still had money for flight instruction. McNulty was ripe for the deal I proposed to him.

The newspaper delivered at the airport cost him sixty-five cents a month. I offered to supply the paper free (I always had a couple of extras) in return for one half hour of flight instruction a month. McNulty agreed, I think, not because it was an equitable business, but because he was moved to help a starry-eyed kid get a start in aviation. I was tremendously grateful and performed odd jobs around the airport for McNulty: sweeping out the hangars, cleaning mud from the airplanes, and so on. My association with McNulty and the Wilmington airport was a very personal secret. My parents did not know I was taking flying lessons.

By my thirteenth birthday I had logged several hours in McNulty’s Inland Sportster. I wasn’t yet ready to solo, but McNulty had taught me some of the basic rudiments of flying, how to handle an airplane in flight. For me each practice minute in the air was a fantastic, wonderful experience, and a tonic as well. Each minute removed me that much further from the possibility of backsliding into illness, and took me closer to my dream. I continued these flights, off and on, until my father became involved in the milk-price war and I was recruited to help wash those 7,500 bottles every day.

In sum, the seed of my life’s ambition had sprung from a twinge of adversity and it grew boldly and intensely in the face of denial. By the time I was thirteen it was clear to me that nothing could stand in the way. Moreover, what had begun as ambition had, perhaps because of the stern compression of circumstances, subtly been transformed into an urgent drive toward perfection. I would be not only a pilot but the best damned pilot in the world.

My father’s ill-timed move into the milk-processing business had certainly proved to be one of the “stern compressions of circumstances.” He was left at the depth of the depression jobless, virtually penniless and wounded in spirit, I think, although typically he showed no outward flicker of unhappiness or distress. I know the experience moved him profoundly. He broke all ties with the past. He gave up his chosen field of chemistry, at which he had excelled for eighteen years or more, and moved all of us to a new and totally different environment. It is idle, perhaps, to probe too deeply for motivation in matters of this kind for, as we know, nothing is so clear-cut as it may appear. My own belief is that in starting life anew he responded to what I believe is a basic and fundamental urge in all of us to return to the soil whence we come and where we shall return in death. He sold our house in Wilmington and bought a heavily-mortgaged, run-down 120-acre farm in the rich but remote Boistfort Valley near Chehalis, Washington, about midway between Seattle and Portland, Oregon. He got it for $50 an acre.

I was both pleased and stunned when I first saw the farm. The setting was beautiful. Boistfort Valley was lush green and stayed that way the year round. It was a land of rich, virgin timber--towering Douglas fir trees--lovely grape arbors, and rushing, salmon-filled streams. A river ran right next to our property. About sixty acres of our farm lay along this river. There were twenty more acres under cultivation and these lay higher, on a hill overlooking the river. It was a clean, silent country, full of wild fruits and berries.

Apart from the setting there was not much about the farm I could admire. The main house was a rambling, drafty, thirteen-room monster, with detached toilet facilities: a two-seater privy, which in the deep of winter was less than comfortable. Out back there was also a tottering barn, built in 1884, and a wobbly chicken shack, the whole enclosed by a broken-down, zig-zag wooden fence. Then in the winter there was mud, more mud than I ever dreamed existed on the face of the earth. The barnyard, the grounds, the paths, the driveway--all were a bottomless sea of mud.

My father’s approach to this new challenge was somewhat startling. From the outset he was determined to transform that bruised and battered piece of ground into a show place. He was an intelligent man and his method was intelligent. He studied farming. He sought advice from other farmers. He consulted often with the county government farm agent. He stretched every dime to the breaking point. Typical, I think, was his scientific handling of the chickens. He despised chickens. Yet he became the champion chicken farmer in the valley. He did it by keeping greatly detailed, endless records. He logged every egg that was laid. He carefully analyzed the results of different feed combinations on the chickens, noting if a new type increased or retarded the laying rate, how frequently the chicken house had to be cleaned, and so on. Everyone laughed, until in due time his painstaking research began to pay off handsomely.

He followed the same system with the cattle. His objective was to build up a dairy herd, the best in the valley. He couldn’t afford to buy good cattle: pure-breds cost four or five hundred dollars. Instead he bought grade cattle for $50 apiece or less. Then when he found a good cow, he bred her. Again he kept unending records. By trial and error, and trading cows left and right, he built up a herd of twenty-five, which produced a much greater return than the pure-bred herds.

As I think back on it, my father had soon organized everything on that farm to perfection.

The work was limitless. Every morning and night for seven days a week we milked those twenty-five cows. In the spring we did the plowing, a brutal, grueling, seemingly hopeless task. We couldn’t afford tractors or even good draught horses. We used cayuses, worn out from years of labor in the nearby logging camps. It was usually my fate to draw the walking plow. Near the river on the bottom land, the soil was a thick, black loam. We plowed two acres a day, moving at a fast clip, and worked several cayuses to death. In the fall we harvested the hay, wheat, and oats--a hundred tons, cured to a “T”--and stored them in the barn, after the appropriate and detailed data on the crop had been drawn up and filed away for study.

After a year or so the farm was still a long way from a show place. But I do remember one evening when my father closed his account books with a smile. He said: “We’re now one dollar in the black, the net result of twenty years of work.”

In the curious way that life unfolds, as the farm grew so grew Scott Crossfield. This parallel has never occurred to me until now. I arrived there weak and puny and not fully recovered from my childhood illness. But as the months passed--months of hard labor and good healthy food--I no longer pooped out easily or noticed any shortness of breath. I gradually became as strong as an ox. Consciously or unconsciously my father was transforming his own son, as well as a patch of earth. Perhaps somewhere in the unfathomable depths of his mind, my father knew what he was about. I will never know. I never came near reaching perfection, but from the moment I landed on that farm, with one exception, I never again became ill.

As my own strength grew, so did my determination to achieve my life’s ambition. In one sense, the farm was also a denial, a greater one than my illness in Wilmington. I had been transplanted from the center of aviation to a remote outpost. Here in this isolation I developed a great thirst and craving for any news of my interest. This craving, I think, inspired resourcefulness and a sense of independence, which in turn fostered a boldness that might not otherwise have sprouted. I was not trapped in the routine of my interest, nor influenced by mediocrity, nor bound by the usual conventions. My mind was free to try anything that occurred to it.

My room was on the second floor of our big house. After the day’s work, the last chores, I retired there not to dream but to work on model airplanes, or to read magazines and books on aviation, or to go through my files, which, after seven years, had grown to great proportions. I hung a blanket over the window so that my parents could not see the light reflecting on the ground below. There, alone with my thoughts, I worked until two or three in the morning.

Out of this room emerged what I thought was a new and brilliant idea for making a radio-controlled model airplane. Such models are common now, but in those days the concept was fairly _avant garde_. Proudly I revealed my new idea to the son of a friend on the adjacent farm, a young man who was a Doctor of Physics at the University of Washington. He said it would never work. He followed this comment with a general lecture on sizing up and working within one’s capabilities. This lecture served only to convince me that nothing would stand in the way of building that model.

Everything about the model was new and different. My greatest problem was to devise a lightweight structure to carry the enormous radio “payload.” For the fuselage I selected a new and radical method of construction known as “geodetic,” which had been devised and published by a British aeronautical engineer. (Later I learned that the British used this construction to build the World War II Lancaster bomber.) The finished fuselage weighed about half as much as with the usual methods.

The development of the special radio gear, and the devices which would translate a radio signal into a movement of the model’s control surfaces, took months. Knowing little of radio circuits or the theory of radio, I had to start from scratch and teach myself everything--with the help of some ham operator friends. The result, if I may brag, was ingenious. It was as good as, or better than, the units I have recently seen in current radio-controlled models, with transistors and “printed circuits.”

The final product of my labors, a graceful, gullwinged model, weighed a total of seven pounds and was capable of lifting a seven-pound payload of radio gear. In any man’s league this is very efficient aerodynamics. The model flew like a dream and the radio worked perfectly. Then one day during a flight the plane dipped behind a tree which interfered with the radio signal. The ship crashed and was destroyed.