TAILWIND WILLIES
originally published in a 1930s edition of The Sportsman Pilot

Above the clouds, starting from a sharply defined line, the sky was a magnificent blue, dotted here and there by faint golden stars.

Fellow aviator Philip Browning had just acquired his LeBlond-powered Arrow Sport, L. Ron Hubbard had just logged a thirty-minute motorized flight above Michigan and, on September 9, 1931, “with the wind as our only compass,” they departed for parts undetermined, and what Ron himself will provide in his “Tailwind Willies,” first published in The Sportsman Pilot.

 

Last August, my friend Phil Browning (otherwise “Flip”) and I found that we had three weeks’ excess time on our hands before we had to get back to the college grind. Our resources were one Arrow Sport biplane (companion cockpit, sixty-horse LeBlond), two toothbrushes and four itchy feet. We had accomplished the old stunt of rattling around the country in a Model T in search of adventure, and after a few hours’ cogitation, decided that we had a new idea on an old plot. We carefully wrapped our “baggage,” threw the fire extinguisher out to save half a horse-power, patched a hole in the upper wing, and started off to skim over four or five states with the wind as our only compass. We had no idea of what we would encounter, but we knew that our “Model T” plane would get us out of whatever we got into and there we rested content.  
. . .

Our time on terra firma was mostly spent in guarding our precious Sparrow from thoughtless damage, explaining why airplanes really flew and refusing invitations to “make ourselves right at home.” Hospitality was proffered in all its forms, and if anyone thinks that this modern machine age has deadened our American kindliness and good fellowship, just let them take a backyard tour of the Middle West. We spent only one night in a hotel, and that because we landed in a thunderstorm after dark. The food offered would have done credit to the Waldorf (see definition 1). At the beginning of the trip we were a little skeptical of our ship’s abilities, but when, time after time, she pulled us out of small, muddy fields, we rested assured that the orange wings and wide-spanned wheels were capable of anything. Her faculty for ground-looping at sixty miles an hour saved us from caressing many a fence. Though she climbed slowly when once in the air, she lost very little time whenever we zoomed her out of cornfields to miss trees. At Newport, Indiana, we landed to take on gas, but the second our wheels touched the grass, we sunk a foot and stopped without rolling twenty feet. We fully expected to nose over, but the Sparrow set her teeth and put her tail right down. We took on the gas—only five gallons, to save weight—and then used up half the fuel attempting to get off. Although the field was a mile long, we spanked grass the entire length without rising an inch. The prop almost completed the harvest by chopping at the tall growth and making the sound of a machine gun quartet.

At last we gave up. I crawled out to let Flip take a whirl at it alone. By using up half the field, he managed to wish the muddy Sparrow into her element, and after building some altitude, wheeled over the place where I stood and called down that there was another field a short distance away. After pacifying a sheriff, who was about to lock me up for trespassing, by shoving him into a mud puddle, I hopped onto the running board of a Purdue (see definition 2) boy’s car and burned road over to Flip’s new landing place—if you could call it that.  . . .

We left southern Indiana for more stout-souled fliers, and picked up the thread of adventure in Kentland, where a county fair was progressing nicely without our help. We tried to buy all the watermelons in Indiana by confining our menu to that fruit for dinner, breakfast and lunch. Some of the grifters showed us around, and that night after the midway darkened we were involved in a minor auto wreck.   . . .

In Ohio, we dropped a pushrod (see defintion 3) over a solid, if small, field and were lucky enough to find a machine shop close by in the town of New London. We spent the night as the guests of a gentleman farmer, the son of a famous professor, whose house was pleasantly cluttered with all manner of things Chinese. That morning had found us trying the only piece of navigation we attempted on the trip, and the results were marvelous. When we were forced down near New London, we found that we were only twenty-seven miles off a fifty-mile course.  . . .

One scene we witnessed will remain in my memory a long, long time. It was evening and the sun had almost vanished over the rim. Clouds were all around us on the horizon, their uppermost rifts so level that they made a continuous, circular black curtain which, though miles away, seemed to frown at us as they gradually came closer. We were flying at 3,000 feet, and though we traveled at ninety miles an hour, we seemed to have paused with the rest of an eerie world. Down below, the ground was streaked with long shadows made by trees and houses, small on a rolling terrain. Above the clouds, starting from a sharply defined line, the sky was a magnificent blue, dotted here and there by faint golden stars. For an hour we roared on, the LeBlond seemingly puny in all this expanse. Finally, I looked in back of us, and there above that black curtain, reared three flaming red tufts which seemed to blaze. I nudged Flip. He stared back at the clouds and began an immediate search for a landing field. Too much was too much. We had been up there in all that terrible grandeur so long that we had almost ceased to be earthly beings. We circled and circled over a huge stubble field trying to get back to earth. Finally our sense of dimension returned, and we set the Sparrow down. Anyway, with all our mishaps, we proved three or four things (something always must be proved by a flight): Light planes are practical for cross country work; a pilot doesn’t have to follow the air lanes and empty his purse into hangar fees—he can get along just as well trying this backyard stunt; and touring for pleasure in a plane is not half as dangerous as the skeptics like to believe, and twice as much fun as any other way. Sportsmen pilots do not have to limit their flying to their own backyards. The more the US is informally toured, the quicker aviation will find a place in the hearts of the chaps on the byroads. And they say romance is dead!
—L. Ron Hubbard

Definitions:

1. Waldorf: reference to the famous Waldorf=Astoria Hotel in New York City
2. Purdue: an American university in the state of Indiana
3. pushrod: a rod in an internal combustion engine; part of the linkage used to open and close valves

L. Ron Hubbard is the author of 19 New York Times bestsellers including the universally acclaimed science fiction epic, Battlefield Earth and what is generally regarded as his magnum opus, the ten-volume Mission Earth series.

THE NEW YORK LANDMARK MATCH-UP GAME!

Postcard 1	Postcard 2
If you can correctly identify each of the following New York landmarks on these postcards >>CLICK HERE TO FILL IN THE ANSWER<<. You’ll get a special prize for deciphering the clues and will get entered into our contest to win a FREE ePulp (all 80 audiobooks pre-loaded on an iPod player)! Which one is: Grand Central Station, The Empire State Building and Grant’s Tomb? 1. ____________________________________________ 2. ____________________________________________ 3. ____________________________________________	Postcard 3

WHAT ARE THE READERS SAYING?

---

The Drowned
City

by L. Ron Hubbard

When I first broached the idea to young Jim Frazer he almost jumped out of his skin. He was sitting on the edge of the bed tying his shoes, and he looked up, his jaw slack.

“Aw,” he said, “you’re trying to kid me.”

I wish now that I had been kidding him, the way things turned out. But I was so enthusiastic about how things had stacked up that I was blind to anything else.

We had just come in from a big salvage job, the two of us. We’d brought home the bacon, all right. Three big chests of it, full of currency and gold bars. And that afternoon, Bert Sullivan, our former boss, had paid us both off.

Our diving pay was considerable. He paid us sixty an hour spent underwater, and he’d given us a tenth of the net profit. All told I had in the neighborhood of fifty thousand bucks just itching to be spent. And that amount of money in the pocket of a deep-sea diver is rarely in place for long...

Continue to read the story here.

---

Discover the magic of a Golden Age—join the Stories from the Golden Age Book Club and strap yourself in for an unforgettable thrill-ride

You get the stories either in book or audiobook format for only $9.95 a month with FREE shipping and for a limited time only you get the first book FREE!