The Fateful Flights of Edgar Rice Burroughs
by Alan Hanson
On page 554 of the Porges biography is a picture of a
dashing old man with his flying machine. When Edgar Rice Burroughs took
up flying, he was 58 years old, weighed 189 pounds, and stood five feet,
nine inches tall, all that according to his student pilot license. Burroughs
took his first lesson from instructor Jim Granger at Clover Field in Santa
Monica on January 5, 1934. That the new student himself questioned the
wisdom of such an undertaking is confirmed by the fact that he tried to
conceal the whole thing from his wife.
In his diary, Burroughs admitted that the taking up of
flying so late in life was, at least in part, an attempt to recover some
of the self-confidence he felt as a youth but lacked as an adult. However,
he must also have been motivated by a desire to participate in the great
adventure of aviation that had grown from infancy during his lifetime.
In his youth, Burroughs no doubt watched with a mixture
of anticipation and humor the early efforts of man to build a flying machine.
ERB’s humorous account of Abner Perry’s attempt to build an airplane in
Pellucidar brings to mind those early newsreels of failed attempts to achieve
flight. As it could be used to drop bombs on enemy villages, Perry anticipated
that his new invention would be quite an advancement for Pellucidar. The
honor of piloting the first test flight was given to David Innes, who described
Perry’s contraption as looking like a “parachute with a motor and cockpit
on top of it.” When the blocks were removed, the airplane moved backwards,
since Perry had unwittingly reversed the pitch of the propeller blades.
That corrected, the plane headed down the runway in the right direction
but would not rise. Instead, the fabric burst into flames, and David was
barely able to escape the cockpit before the gas tank burst, completely
destroying Perry’s invention. After the failure of his airplane, Perry
decided to turn his attention to the construction of a hot air balloon
instead.
Burroughs was 28 years old when the Wright Brothers finally
achieved power-driven flight in December 1903. As he aged, ERB must have
been amazed and thrilled at the rapid advancements in aviation. The Atlantic
was first crossed by way of the Azores in 1919. In 1921 General “Billy”
Mitchell demonstrated the military value of airplanes when his bombers
sank a captured World War I German battleship. Then it was Charles Lindbergh’s
solo flight from Long Island to Paris in May 1927 that completely captured
the fancy of the nation. Four years later, Willey Post completed a flight
around the world. Man’s age-old earth-bound limitations were being shattered
all over the world when Burroughs climbed into the cockpit in 1934.
A passage in “Tarzan’s Quest,” written in April
1934, just two months after Burroughs earned his wings, shows the pride
he felt in the achievements of pioneering American aviators. As pilot Neal
Brown was flying blind through a storm, he overheard passenger Prince Sborov
remark to his wife, “Kitty, you should have hired a good French pilot.
These Americans don’t know anything about flying.” Brown, turning to Lady
Greystoke in the seat next to him, responded, “I guess that guy never heard
of the Wright Brothers or Lindbergh.”
Short on self-confidence at the time, it is not surprising
that ERB had difficulty learning to fly. Of his first lesson, his diary
reports that the altitude was four thousand feet, the air bumpy, and the
student “scared stiff.” Subsequent diary entries commenting on further
lessons include the laments of a nervous student pilot. “Can’t make my
feet behave.” “Why flying I envy the cow.” “Forgot to put down my goggles
again.” “I think I’ll never learn to fly.”
Slowly, however, nervousness diminished with experience,
and Burroughs finally felt confident enough to purchase his own aircraft.
It was a Security Airster plane, which Burroughs named “Doodad” after the
trademark symbol that appeared on the spine of his books. It was delivered
to him on February 12, 1934, and just two days later he wrote in his diary,
“Soloed perfect. Got my wings. Great thrill.”
Burroughs’ son-in-law James Pierce had already started
flying lessons, and ERB’s success got the rest of the family involved.
Sons Hulbert and Jack started lessons, and wife Emma did also, taking her
first one on March 10. In the early months of 1934, Edgar Rice Burroughs
was the patriarch of a family of budding aviators.
Flight in ERB’s Fiction
Aviation was in its infancy in 1911, when Edgar Rice Burroughs
took up writing as a profession. From the beginning, a fascination with
flight found its way through his imagination into his stories. His first
fictional image of aviation came in his first story when John Carter, looking
across a Martian valley to the hills beyond, watched as a “huge craft,
long, low, and gray painted, swung slowly over the crest of the nearest
hill.” Barsoomian battleships and fliers with their directional compasses
and 8th Ray propulsion were all creations of ERB’s imagination, with no
relation to the science of earthly aviation, as would be the Anotar that
Carson Napier used to explore his adopted world in Burroughs’ Venus stories.
Napier was a pilot on Earth before the star-crossed expedition that took
him to Venus. He flew all over the Earth before he did the same on Venus.
It was not until his twenty-fifth story, “The Land
That Time Forgot,” that Burroughs wrote a scene of fixed-wing flight
in the skies of Earth. It was late in 1917. ERB had Tom Billings assemble
a “hydro-aeroplane” from crated parts on a beach and fly it over the cliffs
into Caspak. The outcome of this first fateful flight of Edgar Rice Burroughs
set a pattern that would be repeated in several later stories. The pattern
was: (1) hero takes off and flies away gloriously, (2) hero makes a foolish
mistake and crashes, (3) hero survives crash and defies all odds to return
home on foot.
It happened to Billings, to Tarzan in “Tarzan and the
Ant Men,” to Jason Gridley in “Tarzan At the Earth’s Core,”
and to Lady Barbara Collis in “Tarzan Triumphant.”
Lady Barbara Collis and
Ruth Elder
Speaking of Lady Barbara, it’s noteworthy that among
the more than 20 earthly characters Burroughs gave the skill to pilot an
airplane, she was the only female to be so honored. ERB portrayed Lady
Barbara as an “aviatrix,” a term used to refer to a handful of women who
were vying to become the first of their sex to fly certain long distance
routes in the 1920s and 1930s. In “Tarzan Triumphant,” Lady Barbara
was attempting a solo flight from Cairo to Cape Town, when she ran out
of gas and had to bail out over central Africa. Attractive, courageous,
and independent, she fit the profile of a real-life aviatrix. These female
pilots were the rock stars of their era, setting trends in style and fashion,
as well as serving as role models for a generation of young women only
recently given the right to vote.
Burroughs wrote “Tarzan Triumphant” in 1931. Some
three years later, while taking his flying lessons at Clover Field in Santa
Monica, he had a chance encounter with a real life aviatrix. His diary
records that one day he a met a Mrs. Gillespie and asked her if she flew.
It turned out that Mrs. Gillespie was actually Ruth Elder, the aviatrix.
Overshadowed by the legend of Amelia Earhart today, Ruth Elder was a well-known
personality in her own day. She burst on the scene in 1927, shortly after
Lindbergh’s flight, when she and co-pilot George Haldeman attempted to
fly the Atlantic from New York to Paris. They didn’t make it. After 41
hours in the air, they went down and were rescued from the sea near the
Azores. Still, Ruth was honored in New York with a ticker-tape parade and
the key to the city. The hazel-eyed, shapely Ruth was then spirited off
to Hollywood to star in motion pictures. She was back in the cockpit, however,
in 1929 as one of 19 pilots who participated in the Women’s Air Derby,
a race from Santa Monica to Cleveland.
Ruth Elder and Her Airplane 'American Girl' a
Stinson Detroiter
Ruth Elder’s image of a highly independent modern woman
obviously impressed ERB, for he used both her name and image in one of
his works of fiction. Although Burroughs’ only series play, “You Lucky
Girl!” was not published until 1999, it was written in 1927, the same
year of Ruth Elder’s abortive but celebrated attempt to fly the Atlantic.
At one point in “You Lucky Girl!” Corrie and Anne, two young women
who aspire to stage careers, argue with their fiancés, both of whom
want their wives to stay at home and raise children. Tracy, one of the
men remarks, “The trouble with you girls is that you want to pattern yourselves
after such home loving wives as Ruth Elder.” The use of her name in the
passage reveals that Burroughs considered Ruth a classic contemporary example
of a nonconformist wife. Considering the impression her exploits had made
upon him in 1927, Burroughs must have been a bit awed at their chance meeting
seven years later.
It cannot be said with certainty that Ruth Elder was the
inspiration for Lady Barbara Collis, since Burroughs wrote “Tarzan Triumphant”
three years before he met Ruth. However, ERB’s depiction of the cool and
courageous Lady Barbara revealed his admiration for those adventurous early
women aviators, Ruth Elder being one of the most well known at the time
Burroughs wrote that particular Tarzan novel.
Burroughs’ Ill-fated Flights
'
Aviatrix Amelia Earhart's crashed Airster
Nearly all of the earthly flights Burroughs put into his
fiction came to ill-fated ends, and, ironically, nearly the same pattern
Burroughs used in his novels would later be played out for real in the
Burroughs family. On February 16, 1934, just six days after ERB’s new Security
Airster plan was delivered to him and just four days after Burroughs soloed
for the first time in it, Hulbert, then 25, attempted a landing at Clover
Field. When a gust of wind tilted the plane, Hulbert made the mistake of
hitting the gas and trying to take off again. The ship rose only about
15 feet before crashing on the adjacent golf course. Hulbert suffered only
minor injuries, but the plane was nearly a total loss. In his diary, ERB
lamented, “I had the pleasure of flying it for five minutes.”
Hulbert’s crash was not the only near disaster experienced
by the flying Burroughses. In 1943, Jim Pierce, who was operating a flying
school at the time, crash-landed a plane on a lake shore near Prescott,
Arizona. He had just enough time to drag his passenger away from the wreck
before it exploded and burned. ERB himself was never involved in a crash,
but he did flirt with disaster on one occasion when he took off on a flight
to Pomona College to visit his son Jack. Burroughs later admitted to a
friend that he became lost and circled over El Monte until almost out of
gas. Fortunately, he turned back home in time, unlike several of his characters
whose curiosity and lust for adventure caused them to linger in the air
a bit too long.
In 1937, three years after ERB’s flight to Pomona, ERB
wrote “Carson of Venus.” The following passage from that novel could
easily reflect what he felt in the cockpit during that aborted flight to
visit his son.
“Everyone who has ever flown will recall the thrill of
his first flight over familiar terrain, viewing old scenes from a new angle
that imparted a strangeness and a mystery to them as of a new world; but
always there was the comforting knowledge that the airport was not too
far away and that even in the event of a forced landing one would know
plenty well where he was and how to get home.”
A real tragedy did touch the Burroughs family in October
1934, however, when Jim Granger, the flight instructor the whole family
had come to admire, died in a plane crash. First Hulbert’s accident, and
then this tragedy caused ERB to lose interest in flying. The great adventure
in flight, begun with such enthusiasm in the new year, was abandoned in
a matter of months.
With all the troubles that came with the family’s brief
foray into aviation, perhaps Burroughs felt then as did the wife of Harkas
Yen, a character in “Beyond the Farthest Star,” “Planes! The curse
of all time. I hate them,” she cried. Of course, having lost 13 sons in
the war planes of Poloda, she probably had stronger feelings on the subject
than Burroughs did in real life.
Airplanes Moved ERB's
Plots Along
Although Burroughs was out of the cockpit, he continued
to put his fictional characters in it. In 1936 he had Pat Morgan fly into
Northern Siberia and bring out Jimber-Jaw, a visitor from the Pleistocene.
The next year, Tarzan again was involved in a fateful flight, this time
as a passenger in “Tarzan and the Forbidden City.” In 1940, aviation
played a role in three Burroughs stories — “Tarzan and the Madman,”
“Savage Pellucidar,” and “Beyond the Farthest Star.”
For plot purposes, Burroughs almost always used airplanes
to insert characters in a desired location so that further action could
take place. Billings was airmailed into Caspak so he could meet Laja and
fight his way north on the island. Tarzan was dropped inside the thorn
forest to encounter the Ant Men. In “Tarzan’s Quest,” Jane
and her friends were delivered into the heart of Africa to begin their
fateful adventures in that story. The same was true in “Tarzan and ‘The
Foreign Legion’” when the crash of “The Lovely Lady” left Tarzan and
the American aviators to fight their way out of Sumatra.
That story, one of the last Burroughs would ever write,
was born out of one last true life adventure that fate allowed Edgar Rice
Burroughs to experience. In 1942 Burroughs sought and received credentials
as a war correspondent in Hawaii. He went into three
expeditions deep into the South Pacific, flying thousands of miles
each time. These flights took him to New Caledonia, Australia, the Gilbert
Islands, the Marshall Islands, and the Caroline Islands. He flew on transport
and hospital planes, as well as bombers on daylight missions against Japanese
installations. In an article in the “Honolulu Star Bulletin” of February
27, 1942, ERB wrote reverently of a recent flight in a B-17 “Flying Fortress.”
Wartime
Journals of Correspondent Edgar Rice Burroughs :: December 1942-April 1943
“It is difficult to conceive, viewing them from the
ground, the stately majesty of these great ships moving steadily and serenely
through the air against a backdrop of blue flecked with little bomb bursts
of soft, white cloud — moving in faultless formation, guided by a single
mind as though by a single hand, bound together by the thousands of hours
of intensive training behind the six young pilots who flew them.
“I don’t know at what altitude we flew; but as I stood
between two open gun ports, holding to both because of the roughness of
the air, the sea, far below, appeared a solid mass of dark blue ice, flecked
with snow — the whitecaps that did not appear to move, from my Olympian
vantage point.”
At that moment, having observed in his lifetime both the
development of flight and two world wars, perhaps Edgar Rice Burroughs
pondered both the good and the evil of which mankind was capable. Certainly,
in his fiction can be found many expressions of both pride for one and
disgust for the other.
Being a war correspondent was an adventure Burroughs passionately
sought, but it was one that also took a great toll on his health. A preexisting
heart condition was much worsened by those strenuous trips. When the war
ended, Burroughs resolved to return home and spend his remaining years
with his family. On October 28, 1945, Edgar Rice Burroughs left Hawaii
and flew to Hamilton Field in California. It was probably the last flight
of his life. He was 70 years old.
— The End —
