Chapter 7: ►

“_Take Her Up and Try a Spin_”

I went to Boistfort High School, a consolidated country school about nine miles from our farm. There were fifty-six pupils in the whole school, quite a contrast to the big 3000-student schools in Southern California. The superintendent of Boistfort School, Carl Aase, was a most unusual man and to me, at least, a very generous one. For some strange reason my teachers have always made a lasting impression on me. I can recall everything about them, including their names: in kindergarten, Mrs. Wallin; first grade, Mrs. Clark; second grade, Mrs. Meade; third grade, Mrs. Thomas; fourth grade, Mrs. Humphries; fifth grade, Mrs. Paymiller; sixth grade, Mrs. Blossom. And so on.

Carl Aase, an intelligent and resourceful man, became a good friend of my father’s. He visited our farm frequently, but he didn’t let this friendship stand in the way of doing his job, or of administering discipline to incorrigible boys. In this respect, he was quite like my father. Mr. Aase never displayed anger or emotion. Like the other farm boys, when I reached the age of fifteen I was a tough, scrappy youngster. We boys used to fight often, and occasionally Carl Aase would suspend me from school. He was very calm and matter-of-fact about it. “Scott,” he would say, “don’t wait for the school bus today. Just walk on home right now.”

At first I was not an exceptional student. My grades averaged about “B.” They improved later when I was seriously preparing for college. But at sixteen my interests were many and my time too limited for concentrated study on anything but aviation, for which I was not given credit in school. I joined in 4-H Club work and raised several prize dairy animals. I was also intrigued by photography. I converted one of the unused rooms on the second floor of our home to a dark room. I took all the photographs and made the woodcuts for the school yearbook. I had no time for sports such as football, tennis, or swimming, and I haven’t found time for them yet.

The farm and the school absorbed most of my hours. I got up early to do my chores, spent most of my day at Boistfort, in the evening returned to my chores, and then to my private room on the second floor. But there was one other spot to which I was drawn like a metal filing to a magnet: the Chehalis municipal airport. I didn’t get there as frequently as I wanted to. When I went, it was in secret. I didn’t want to trouble my parents with my ambitions to be a pilot. Although he never mentioned it directly, I believe my father hoped I would study law or medicine. A professional education, he thought, was a necessary part of a gentleman’s preparation for life.

The Chehalis municipal airport was a cow pasture adorned with two skeletal airplane hangars, a tiny CAA weather shack, and a tattered wind-sock. It was home for about a dozen old wire-and-fabric airplanes, several of them derelicts and veterans of the first World War, which had then been over for eighteen years. The field was operated by a man named Donahoe, who somehow managed to stay one step ahead of the sheriff. The people who hung about that airport were, I think, typical of the depression era, young and old who almost on faith alone stuck with aviation, consciously and unconsciously knowing its future. Some, like me, were called “airport bums.” Chehalis Airport was a Garden of Eden to me. The pilots to a man were my special heroes.

Whenever I had the money, which was seldom, although the amount required was ridiculously small, I took flight instruction from anybody and everybody. I was lucky to squeeze in one hour a month; many months went by during which I received no instruction at all. It was slow going and I’m not certain that the instruction was top quality. But I was learning, inching toward my first solo flight. It finally came quite unexpectedly, and it turned out to be rather exciting.

“Why don’t you try it by yourself?” one of the pilots said to me one day at the airport. At this time I probably had accumulated about seven or eight hours of flight instruction. A solo flight was technically illegal: I had no student permit. But at Chehalis there was a sort of devil-may-care attitude about rules and regulations. A small knot of airport hangers-on gathered around us. “Yeah, Scotty, take her up and try a spin.” The crowd broke up with laughter.

I crawled into the cockpit of the Curtiss Robin. It was a high-wing monoplane powered by a cranky OX-5, the engine that was used in World War I. Someone spun the prop and soon I was bumping over the cow pasture toward the end of the strip. Without fear or hesitation--indeed, very happily--I gunned the engine and horsed the Robin gracefully into the air. The deep green Chehalis Valley spread out below me. The engine, laboring heavily, took me to 4,000 feet, which was about the ceiling of that airplane.

I flew about over the valley for ten or fifteen minutes, turning, twisting, and tracing lazy eights in the sky. This, I thought, was it, the absolute ultimate! Here man had a new view of his life and the world. He was detached, removed from the detail of it--the mud, the privy, the school fights, the chicken house, the slights and denials. Here, high in the sky, man’s vision was unobscured. He could see far and wide, the whole picture of God’s world, a model of grace and perfection. At the same time there was challenge: a man, a brain, some muscle, and a machine pitted against the air, a basic and important element of that earthly perfection.

I was an ace now, zipping low over the battlefield returning to my aerodrome in France. Then I was Lindbergh, passing over wild Nova Scotia, eight hours out of New York, ready to bank over the cold gray Atlantic. Then I was Benny Howard, poised on the end of the runway at Burbank Airport in tiny _Mr. Mulligan_, ready for an incredible 1500-mile non-stop flight to Cleveland. Then I was Scott Crossfield, setting off in a new plane of his own design to break the Los Angeles-to-New York record.

The long years of denial made these moments far more endearing and meaningful than I can possibly describe. I wondered: did more denial lie ahead? Maybe I had better squeeze every drop out of this flight. Maybe I had better see how far I could go: find out where nerve left off and fear began. Find out, in one fell swoop, if I had it.

“Try a spin,” the crowd had said. Well, while I’m about it, why not? The crazy thought absorbed my attention. I climbed higher. I deliberately pulled the nose up steep and stalled out. The Robin’s right wing dipped. Earth and sky alternated in the windshield. I was spinning.

Suddenly I was aware of a strange and startling noise, a kind of banging, foreign to the ordinary noise of the plane. What was it? Quickly I pushed the stick forward and the rudder pedal hard left and brought the Robin to normal, level flight. The noise disappeared. Was I imagining something? What happened?

I climbed back to altitude and dropped the Robin into a second spin. Once again the fearful racket began. Again I brought the Robin to normal flight. No, I definitely was not imagining the noise. It was not my nerves. It happened when I put the ship into a spin. Curiosity overwhelmed me. What was it?

For the third time I climbed and spun the Robin. This time when the clattering began, I strained and looked behind me, searching for the answer. Then I found it: the rear door of the plane was loose. In ordinary flight the slipstream kept it firmly in place. But in the spin gyrations it was banging open and shut. I laughed aloud at my concern.

Time was running out. I had to land. I banked in a large circle and lined up on the cow pasture. The Robin ghosted down. Her wheels struck the soft grass and she clung. I taxied toward the knot of people near one of the hangars, shut off the engine and climbed out, showing not a trace of excitement or elation. I was as dead-pan as an undertaker.

“How’d it go?” someone asked.

“Good,” I said. I knew they had watched the three spins. There was no need to brag about it.

“No trouble?” Then with a start I realized I was the subject of a practical joke. The crowd _knew_ what happened to the Robin’s door in a spin. I was being hazed, like a college freshman. But I was determined to give them no satisfaction.

“None at all,” I replied. I read disappointment on all their faces.

I returned to the farm and my chores. At the dinner table that night I felt very proud. But I dared not say why.

* * * * *

Carl Lienesch visited us from time to time on the farm. He no longer worked for the Union Oil Company. He had moved to Seattle, where he took a job as a Civil Aeronautics Board inspector. One day he proposed that I go up to Seattle with him to watch the first flight tests of Boeing’s new Clipper.

Compared to anything I had seen, the flying boat looked huge, squatting on Lake Washington, on the eastern edge of Seattle. It had four powerful engines mounted high on the metal wing, and a towering single tail. The test pilot was Eddie Allen.

Eddie Allen would have been quite surprised, I’m certain, to know how much the young man standing on the Lake Washington dock knew about him. By then my files on test pilots matched or surpassed my files on racing pilots and other famous characters in aviation. Jimmy Doolittle was far and away the most famous U. S. test pilot. On the East coast the top dog was James Taylor, who flew mostly for Grumman. On the West coast the top dog was Eddie Allen, who was also Boeing’s Chief Engineer. As I have said, he began his career with the old NACA shortly after World War I. At Boeing his word was considered law. He participated in the design of the airplane he would fly. If he didn’t think a piece of equipment ought to be on an airplane, it wasn’t put on the airplane. There was no great gap between Allen and the airplane designers. He _was_ an airplane designer.

I watched as Allen taxied the mammoth plane through the water. The engines roared to life and the plane plowed through the water gaining speed. Allen lifted it a few feet into the air and splashed it back down again. A short while later he returned to the dock. The Clipper lacked fin area. Allen directed that two additional fins be added to the airplane.

As we were driving back to Chehalis, Lienesch, visibly impressed by the flight, was garrulous. His expensive Auburn was making nearly a hundred miles an hour.

“Now, Scotty,” he said, “if you’re going to get into the aviation business, Allen’s job is the one you want to shoot for. That’s the top of the ladder. You don’t want to be a barnstormer, or a racing pilot, or a military pilot. Get a degree. Be an engineer. Help build the airplanes. Then fly them and find out what you did wrong. Then fix it. That’s a real profession. It has dignity as well as excitement and challenge. You can combine all your energies and focus them toward one single objective: to improve the airplane. Who knows, maybe you might contribute something in this never-ending, restless urge of man to do better.”

I was profoundly impressed.

* * * * *

My father’s limitless energy and meticulous research--his drive for perfection--had a telling effect on the farm as the months rolled by. It was still far from a show place, but it was no longer bruised and battered. The herds were growing and producing. The chickens were profitable and were pointed to as examples by the County Agents. The barn had a new addition. We had stemmed the sea of mud somewhat with gravel walkways. The main house was equipped with an indoor toilet. The farm produced enough money to support us and to send my older sister, Elena Ruth, to the University of California in Berkeley.

Although it appealed to me not at all, I was caught up in the rural way of life and naturally influenced by the people. As the son of an increasingly successful farmer, and naturally competitive, I took some pride in contending with the sons of other farmers. I became a leader in our 4-H Club. My pure-bred Guernsey bull, which I had nursed to a beautiful showpiece, won many prizes at county livestock fairs and brought me an invitation (which I accepted) to represent the State of Washington in the International Livestock Show in Chicago. I was also assured of a scholarship to Washington State College provided I majored in agriculture.

None of this gave me any real satisfaction. My basic interest lay elsewhere and was deeply rooted. I liked to pal around with the farmers’ sons, but they were not my closest friends. Indeed, my really close friends seem a strange lot to me now. I probably fitted in perfectly.

One of my friends was a ham radio operator, Art Beal, who was about forty years old. I first met him when he came to the farm to investigate my weird radio-transmitter signals which were disturbing the airways. He taught me a great deal about radio and helped me build the radio-control model. Through him I met Elden Reed, about twenty-five years old, and Bill Young, about twenty-eight, and blind from birth. All three were avid hams; they never seemed to sleep. All of us, together with a tomboy about four years older than I, Louise Wilrich, became fast friends. Art, Elden, and Louise all learned to fly at Chehalis.

Bill Young was an extraordinary person. He lived on a small pension, alone except for his seeing-eye dog, and picked up extra money tuning pianos. In Nature’s strange way, having denied Bill sight, she developed his ears to perfection. Bill was often the only operator who could pick up signals from North Africa. During the war the Air Force used his cheap home-made gear and sensitive ears to communicate with North Africa when military radio could not get through. I remember the time when a thief broke into Bill’s house, robbed him, and killed his seeing-eye dog. I think that if the rest of us had caught the thief we would have killed _him_.

When we went to the Chehalis airport to fly, or just to shoot the breeze with Donahoe and the other pilots, Bill always came along. However, the airplane was something of a mystery to him. He walked about, feeling the wings, the fuselage, and the propellers. But it was too big and complex and he couldn’t “see,” as he said, the whole concept of the plane. I think this distressed him considerably because in that crowd we talked of little else besides radio and airplanes. Bill’s inability in this regard touched me, because to me Bill was a kindred spirit, a piece of nature’s bruised fruit. I helped him to understand the airplane by bringing along my models. With these miniature versions he could “see” the airplane as a whole.

It was about this time that I began building my own life-size airplane. The idea came to me one day when I read in one of the many aviation publications I subscribed to that a French company, LeBlonde, had produced a very lightweight, efficient gasoline engine of 15 horsepower. One of these engines successfully powered a small plane. There on the farm, over six thousand miles from France and the nearest LeBlonde engine, the seed took root and sprouted. An engine that small ought to be pretty inexpensive, I thought. If I built the airplane, I would find a way to buy the engine.

As my father lacked enthusiasm for my flying, so he viewed with less enthusiasm my plan to build an airplane. I suppose any rational father would try to talk his son out of a scheme like that. But in spite of my father’s advice to the contrary, I was determined to carry the idea through. I worked late at night, drawing up the plans and designing my vehicle, the sum product of a 17½-year-old’s aeronautical know-how and skill with a pencil.

I had long talks with my school principal, Carl Aase, about the material for the airplane. One problem was that the spruce I intended to use in the wing, tail, and fuselage was very expensive. Aase suggested that I substitute Port Orford cedar, which in the old days the Indians used to build canoes. It was strong and flexible, a good inexpensive local substitute. I saved my money and sent away for the cedar. Since I had little money, I spaced the orders far apart.

I enjoyed building anything. This full-scale airplane that could take me into the boundless sky turned into an intense work of love. I doubt that ever in history an airplane was built with such painstaking care for detail. Each piece of cedar--one-inch square strips--was handled like a piece of gold. After steaming it into shape, I sanded it carefully and then laid it in place. Then I tacked it down with glue-coated nails (which I ordered as required, with no allowance for surplus) and mortised each individual joint. As with my models, I strove for perfection. It was slow going. It took months and months to complete the fuselage. Then I saved for more cedar, built some jigs and laid out the wing spars.

Though I worked on the airplane only after my chores were finished, I always felt guilty about the time it took. In a way it was like waving a red flag in my fathers face. He was becoming very attached to his piece of the earth and its mounting production. I believe he hoped I would share his enthusiasm and in time take over. Perhaps because it was a symbol of my conflicting ambition, annoying to my father, I never finished the airplane. It became a kind of unfinished Hangar Queen--in this case Barn Queen. I would meet other Hangar Queens later.

Carl Lienesch convinced me that my approach to my chosen profession should begin with a solid college foundation in engineering. Upon graduation from high school in June, 1939, my plan was to go straight to basic freshman engineering at the University of Washington. But this well-laid plan went astray. I was delayed a whole year by a variety of factors.

In January of 1939, several months before I was to graduate, my younger sister Mary Anne, fourteen years old, was stricken by polio, and after a brief but severe illness she died in an iron lung. She was a pretty girl, already determinedly planning a career on the stage. Her sudden death was a stunning blow to my parents and me. It brought us closer together than ever before. To leave for college then, to leave my mother and father alone on the farm, seemed to me like deserting them. (My older sister was still enrolled at the University of California.)

The farm was simply too big for my father to operate alone. For several years he employed a boy named Harold Jones, who lived nearby, to help with the heavy work. Over the years Harold became another son in the Crossfield home. But in 1939 Harold went away to college to study agriculture, and my father could not afford to hire a full-time employee to replace him. A year later it would be a different story. But now my father obviously needed my help.

After turning these facts over in my mind, I decided to stay home on the farm for one year. At the time it seemed a dreadful decision, an agonizing delay, a frustrating denial. Yet I probably gained by it. In 1940, through the combined efforts of my father and myself, the farm was a going concern. We were able to afford automatic milking equipment and--believe it or not--a tractor. I traded my old Oakland jalopy (bought in high school for $26) for a 1935 Chevrolet and tuned the engine to near-perfection. I filled in some lacking school credits by taking correspondence courses in math, physics, and chemistry from the University of Nebraska. I logged an increasing number of flying hours at Chehalis airport with my constant companions, Art Beal, Elden Reed, Louise Wilrich, and Bill Young.