Predator by Richard Whittle Read Free Book Online Page B

and then enthusiastic about their summer plans.”
    The trip to Latin America would be more expensive than the Yale Daily News expedition, and Neal decided they should finance this one by putting together a “syndicate” of newspapers to buy articles and photos. To establish the syndicate, they spent their 1956 spring vacation flying across the United States, pitching their proposal to city editors at major papers. Before each stop, they would send the next newspaper on their list a “night letter” (a reduced-rate telegram transmitted after office hours for delivery the next morning) requesting an appointment. Then, without awaiting a reply, they would fly in and show up in person to describe their plan. For a package fee of $1,500, they offered fifteen hundred words of copy and four glossy photos a week.
    Their syndication plan succeeded splendidly. They signed up major papers coast to coast, including the Boston Globe , New York Herald Tribune , New Orleans Times-Picayune , Houston Post , San Diego Union , and their hometown Denver Post . The papers paid the brothers a combined $3,000 in advance, more than covering the $1,350 they had paid for the used 1946 Piper Super Cruiser they had purchased to fly across the country while putting the syndicate together. Buoyed by that success, and realizing they needed an aircraft with more power, speed, and range for the expedition to Latin America, the Blues now elevated their aim. On a trip to New York, they visited Life magazine and negotiated another good deal. Life would provide them all the film they needed for the trip and consider buying their story when they got back. Armed with that commitment, the Blues next contacted the New York public relations agency for Piper Aircraft, whose director liked the idea of the free publicity the young men were promising if the company loaned them a better plane than their Super Cruiser. An agreement was quickly struck there, too, and the Blues delivered as promised.
    Their trip in the Blue Bird —as they dubbed the brand-new, four-seat, fabric-covered Tri-Pacer plane Piper loaned them—included a number of adventures. In Ecuador, they visited with headhunters who showed them “the apple-sized and goateed head of a German prospector the Indians had captured 25 years ago.” In Chile, they skied the Andes in springtime and had to make ad hoc repairs to their landing gear after a wheel rolled into a deep rut during a takeoff from frozen Lago de los Incas. In Brazil they got lost over some flatlands, ran low on fuel, and had to make a forced landing on a country road, bashing their plane’s wings into fence posts as they bounced to a stop. While Neal flew home to arrange repairs for the Blue Bird , Linden spent two weeks in Brazil, putting his time to good use by interviewing the country’s president, Juscelino Kubitschek, for their newspaper syndicate and sunbathing on a Rio de Janeiro beach with a pretty girl he met there.
    Ultimately their aerial expedition included forty-four stops in one hundred and ten days and nine crossings of the Andes. Life bought their story and photos for eight thousand dollars, a princely sum in the 1950s, and then featured Neal and Linden on the cover of its April 8, 1957, issue, under the headline “The Flying Blue Brothers.” Shown in the cockpit of the Blue Bird wearing gleeful grins, the two dashing young men looked for all the world as if they were capable of anything.
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    Neal and Linden Blue found the investment opportunity they were looking for during one of the first stops on their tour. In Managua, Nicaragua, a letter of introduction from some friends of their mother’s got them an interview with the president, Anastasio Somoza García, who had been the country’s dictator and a reliable U.S. ally for two decades. Their talk with “Tacho” Somoza in July 1956 was not intended as grist for their articles for Life