In 1924, Chicago was a victory leg stop for the first aviators to circle the globe (2024)

Ron GrossmanChicago Tribune

A century ago on Sept. 15, Chicagoans’ necks craned skyward looking for a single-engine Douglas World Cruiser bearing their city’s name.

It was on the home stretch of its journey as America’s entry in a 1924 international competition to make the first flight around the world. The United States began the journey with four aircraft named for American cities: Seattle, Chicago, Boston and New Orleans. Flyers from Britain, Portugal, France, Argentina and Italy also participated in the competition, taking off at various times through the year.

America’s flyers took off from Seattle on April 6, taking a westerly route, and were scheduled to arrive in Chicago on Sept. 13 amid a triumphant home leg of their journey. But that was set back by two days of bad weather in Ohio, their previous stopover.

The delay heightened the anticipation for Chicagoans who had followed the flyers’ journey via reports from Tribune foreign correspondents. The pilots were already familiar names as newspapers spewed out a steady stream of stories.

“Radiogram Says Heroes of the Air Are Coming,” a Tribune headline announced on July 27.

But it turned out the aviators couldn’t land their plane in their city. As the Tribune noted in an editorial on Sept. 16: “When the world flyers came out of the South and roared over the city yesterday, Chicago could offer them no airplane landing place.”

Illinois Gov. Len Small had suggested the planes land “at the foot of Grace Street in Lincoln Park,” the Tribune reported. The executive committee of the Army and Navy Club denounced that plan as “a political movement to make votes for Small.”

Small, a Republican, had been indicted shortly after becoming governor for embezzling millions of dollars while the state’s treasurer. Eight of the jurors who acquitted him got state jobs. Was that the face the city wanted to show the world while an airplane named Chicago was flying across the globe?

So the flyers had to touch down on a small airstrip just outside of west suburban Maywood, from there going into the city to be feted at the Drake Hotel.

But on the whole, the flyers’ visit went well.

Chicago’s guests were hailed as modern-day Magellans in honor of Ferdinand Magellan, a highly skilled 16th century seafarer who led an expedition that circumnavigated the world by sea, although he was killed along the way.

Magellan made his mark with a practical deduction from a geometric axiom. The Earth is a very big ball. Therefore if you travel in a straight line you wind up right where you started.

As Europe’s leading seafaring nations, Spain and Portugal had agreed to divide the international trade, giving each exclusive rights to separate areas of the world. By that treaty, Portugal controlled the logical route to the spices of the Indies: sailing east from Europe and around Africa. So the king of Spain was delighted with Magellan’s creative proposal to sail west and around South America in search of riches from the Indian subcontinent. Five centuries later, that course setting aligned America’s World Fliers, as they were known, with the same winds that filled their hero’s sails hundreds of years earlier.

The flying Magellans also realized that ships are vulnerable and humans are fallible, and prepared accordingly. Other nations entered one or two airplanes in the race. Maj. Gen. Mason Patrick realized that the more Army Air Service aircraft and well-trained crews competed, the better the chance of winning.

The pilots had served in World War I, when aviation came of age. They had additional preflight training, including survival skills, should they crash in uninhabited and unmapped terrain.

To help them navigate, the Navy stationed warships along the race course. They let smoke bellow out of their funnels just before the expected arrival of the airplanes. To pass on weather reports to the flyers above, the sailors put white panels with black letters on their ship’s deck: T meant good weather, L for unfavorable conditions, H for dangerous.

Radios were then only marginally effective.

The destroyers and cutters carried food supplies, spare parts, replacement engines, wheels and pontoons. The airplanes’ landing gear was designed so the pilots could touch down on water or land.

The mechanics swapped out engines and other parts during the competition. The Chicago pilot Lowell Smith took 10 hours to complete one transplant during a tropical downpour in what was then French Indo-China. “It is significant of the completeness of the plans for this expedition that each time a new engine has been needed it has been available within a few hundred miles,” a Tribune story noted.

It also proved wise to start the voyage with four planes. The Seattle encountered dense fog off the coast of Alaska. Frederick Martin steered inland, looking for a body of water to set the plane’s pontoons on. Suddenly a mountain popped out of the fog. The impact destroyed the airplane. Martin and Alva Harvey, the mechanic, survived but had a limited food supply: four sandwiches, a dozen malted milk tablets, and two thermoses of concentrated nutrient.

“To expect outside rescue was folly,” Harvey recalled. “Saying ‘Fairwell Seattle, we regret leaving you here wrecked and battered’ we walked away.”

The crew made its way over snow-covered mountains, and at one point came upon a milk carton labeled “Port Moller Cannery,” an encouraging sign. They tramped 25 miles before being seen by the crew of a small boat, which picked them up and took them to the cannery.

That made headlines back home. So did other exploits. On Aug. 24, the USS Richmond spotted the faint light of a downed Italian competitor. The American sped to it and rescued its crew even as their airplane was sinking.

The planes from the other countries also crashed during the circumnavigation attempt. The Americans landed in Boston on Sept. 6, and while they still had to continue to Seattle, the U.S. team won. The aviators were incredibly famous.

“Those who trod the wilderness and cross the seas filled with dangers are never forgotten by posterity,” New York Sen. James W. Wadsworth said at their reception in New York City.

The residents of every whistle stop, small town and big city en route to Seattle were determined to get at least a glimpse of the flyers.

In Washington, they were given a grand parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and dropped flowers on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In Chicago, they were given engraved cigarette boxes filled with gold coins.

Omaha picked a queen and five ladies-in-waiting to escort them. In Muskogee, Oklahoma, they got gold medallions. Throngs of people packed celebrations in San Diego and Santa Monica, where the crowds knocked down a fence, the police and the flyers. A woman grabbed Smith’s ear. Another cut off a piece of his collar with a pen knife.

“Somebody else took a souvenir of the seat of my trousers,” Smith said.