The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh by Winston Groom Read Free Book Online Page B

engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    In 1928, already world famous as a test pilot and aerial racer, Doolittle was lent by the army to head up a group of fliers and scientists financed by Guggenheim money at Mitchel Field † near Hempstead, Long Island, to investigate and provide solutions for “blind flying conditions” and “aircraft spin control.”
    The day after Doolittle made his flight, the story’s headline in the New York Times read, “Blind Plane Flies 15 Miles and Lands: Fog Peril Overcome.” That was a bit of a stretch, but it would not be off the mark to say that Doolittle’s feat was a giant leap forward for the viability of commercial aviation.
    J AMES H AROLD D OOLITTLE WAS BORN in Alameda, California, on December 14, 1896. 1 His father, Frank Henry Doolittle, a carpenter, was descended from protestant Huguenots who fled religious persecution in France and settled in New England in the late 1700s or early 1800s. In the mid-1890s he married Doolittle’s mother, Rosa Cerenah Shephard, a strong-willed, twenty-six-year-old beauty of “sturdy pioneer stock.” James was their only child and their means were modest.
    Frank Doolittle turned out to be one of the dreamers and wanderers who were constantly on the make for adventure and fortune. Less than six months after James Doolittle was born his father joined the frantic stampede known as the Klondike Gold Rush. Bad luck overtook him from the start when he lost all of his carpenter’s tools in a shipwreck on his way to the Yukon. He then made his way to Nome, Alaska, an Eskimo fishing village on a vast and treeless plain, bound by the bleakness of the Bering Sea.
    Flakes of gold had been discovered along oceanfront beaches and the banks of the river that washed out of the distant mountains, and—much to the amazement and dismay of the Eskimos—an immense tent city soon materialized around Nome as thousands arrived to sift the sands for gold. Frank Doolittle prospected among them and put his carpentry skills to use as well, and in due time he sent for James and his mother, who arrived by steamer, after a trip of eight days and three thousand miles, in the summer of 1900.
    Nome quickly became a typical gold-rush town, with an overabundance of gamblers and prostitutes. There was carpentry work for James’s father to perform; by the time James was five the town boasted a bank, three churches, six whorehouses, and twenty saloons. The next year a schoolhouse was added, which was where James—now known as Jimmy, learned to fight. Being the shortest boy in his class, Jimmy was subjected to teasing and provocations by his older, taller mates, and soon he gained a reputation for defending himself from insults.
    In 1908, when he was eleven, Jimmy and his mother boarded a steamer for Los Angeles, while his father remained in Nome. By then relations between father and son had become strained, and they would meet only once more. After finishing elementary school, Jimmy enrolled at the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, a trade school where among his classmates were, curiously enough, the future Metropolitan Opera star and Hollywood actor Lawrence Tibbett; Goodwin Knight, who became governor of California; and Frank Capra, who went on to direct It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , among many other popular Hollywood movies. For sports, Doolittle took up tumbling and joined the school team.
    Around this time one of Doolittle’s English teachers offered to teach him scientific boxing after witnessing him in a school yard brawl, which—contentious, like Eddie Rickenbacker—the fifteen-year-old happily accepted. Before long Jimmy was winning amateur boxing matches along the Pacific coast, first in the flyweight, then bantamweight classes. At five-foot-four he was as tall as he was going to get. That same year, 1912, he won the Pacific Coast amateur championship, held at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, and appeared to be on