Fasten your seatbelts The UP’s aviation fascination began over 100 years ago

By Larry Chabot

What seatbelts? Save for homemade ones, there weren’t any in aviation’s infancy. Pilots just grabbed a wire or pipe and hung on. Back then, planes were only bundles of wires, wood and fabrics, with nothing to protect the pilot from the elements. And as Keith O’Brien recounted in his Fly Girls book, pilots dealt with breaking propellers, collapsing wings, engine failure and sticky levers, flying bugs and birds. There were no cockpits or fuselages.

The first planes seen in Upper Peninsula skies were skeleton-like and chancy at best. One of the very first was in Escanaba in 1911. “Escanaba’s

First Airplane Ended in Disaster” was the headline of a 1963 story about Delta County aviation by Arne Arntzen, a member of Escanaba’s “first family” of flying.

He wrote of the city’s inaugural aircraft, in a visit sponsored by a local businessmen’s club. The device arrived in pieces by boat from Chicago on July 1, 1911, and was towed behind a brass band to the local opera house, followed by curious townspeople who watched the contraption being assembled by pilot Harry Cowling and his mechanics.

A larger crowd mobbed the fairgrounds for that first flight. When the weather cleared, the bundle of parts wobbled along a field, took to the air, barely cleared a fence and settled in a big pine tree, from which the uninjured Cowling rappelled to the ground. Another batch of parts was dispatched from Chicago but the weather never cleared, so Cowling blew town. The future of flying in Escanaba looked bleak.

Not long after that incident, two Marquette men crashed their homemade aircraft while attempting a takeoff from the hard-packed Portage Canal stamp sands near Houghton. The plane fell through thin ice, was dried out and towed toward Marquette, but a key part broke off in L’Anse. After an overnight stay in town, they returned to catch a stranger trying to steal their wounded bird. The plane-napper was hauled off to jail.

In 1914, Escanaba hosted a legitimate contender when Baxter Adams flew in with a plane that he likened to “flying a broomstick,” yet he made over $30,000 through his appearances that year.

Adams was back in the U.P. in 1919 to show his stuff for the City of Hancock’s 50th anniversary. He flew all over the town and raced on Portage Lake against a sailboat, winning one race and losing one.

Elsewhere, on Jan. 1, 1914, the first of thousands of commercial American airlines lifted off in Florida on a

23-minute Tampa-to-St. Petersburg flight across Tampa Bay, far faster than the six-hour train ride or an allday journey for an automobile. (There were no bridges there at the time). A crowd of 3,000 cheered as the first passenger boarded: former St. Petersburg mayor Abram Pheil, whose winning bid in a contest cost him $400. After offering 12 flights a week with sparse patronage, the line folded four months later.

Back in the U.P., 1919 was a busy year for barnstormer and ex-military flier Wally Rowell, who bought one of Marquette County’s earliest airplanes, a two-seat Curtiss Jenny. He flew out of a landing strip off Cherry Creek Road in Harvey after announcing, “If she flies as good as she looks, I’ll be more than pleased.” Rowell performed aerial tricks and took passengers on $10 rides as high as 1,500 feet. One excited passenger admitted that “I felt a light sensation in my stomach, like going up 20 stories in an elevator.”

Rowell returned to Harvey later that year for more loops and rides, then made extra cash towing company banners and dropping advertising sheets from the air. No less than five counties engaged him to perform at their fairs.

Seven cents a mile

Among the Upper Peninsula’s six historic scheduled airlines (all now defunct), the first was Foster Airways, established in 1930 with an ambitious schedule and route system that couldn’t sustain itself. Flying a four-seater Brougham aircraft, Foster ran a 500-mile loop from St. Ignace to Manistique, Newberry, Crystal Falls and Iron Mountain, all at the astounding rate of seven cents a mile. A Crystal Falls-to-Iron Mountain ticket cost only $1.60. Despite the cheap fares, Foster lured but one customer and folded after 10 days, furloughing its lonely pilots.

Ever hear of a flying congressman?

W. Frank James, a Spanish-American War veteran and former Hancock mayor who represented the western U.P. in Congress for 20 years until 1935, logged over 80,000 air miles covering his district and numerous Army bases in his tri-motor craft. His mileage was a record for members of Congress. He probably landed at some of the 33 landing fields built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.

National and U.P. attention was drawn to a bizarre aviation event that dominated the news in 1938. Pilot Doug Corrigan, who had several times been denied permission from

NATIONAL AND U.P. ATTENTION WAS DRAWN TO A BIZARRE AVIATION EVENT THAT DOMINATED THE NEWS IN 1938.

navigation officials to fly from New York to Ireland, filed an acceptable flight plan to Southern California from New York. Corrigan then lifted off and disappeared into cloudy skies. Glory be, to the surprise of everyone — especially the Irish — he landed in Ireland after all.

Blaming continuous cloud cover, a faulty compass and lack of a radio, he returned with his plane to the United States by boat, where he was greeted with ridicule by some but joyously by others. Boisterous ticker-tape parades held in New York and Chicago were followed by a visit to the White House and a Hollywood movie, and status as an American hero. On his list of previous jobs was helping to assemble the plane Charles Lindbergh flew on his historic Atlantic crossing in 1927. Lindbergh acknowledged Corrigan’s feat with a congratulatory letter to the man known evermore as “Wrong Way Corrigan.”

Wartime took a heavy toll on the U.P. service members in military aviation. Among the U.P. fatalities in World War II were 302 pilots and crew from the Army, Navy, Marines and even the Royal Canadian Air Corps. An untold number were prisoners of war during that conflict.

Late in the war, the Four Wheel Drive Company of Clintonville, Wis- consin, turned its transport department into a small scheduled airline named Wisconsin Central, flying fiveseat Cessna Bobcats. From this modest beginning, the little airline grew into North Central Airlines, which served the U.P. and other upper Midwest airports. North Central merged with Southern Airways to form Republic Airways, which was absorbed by Northwest Orient, which was then absorbed by Delta Air Lines.

In 1948, the U.P. welcomed Nationwide Airlines into Marquette County’s Negaunee Township field, but its single 21-seat DC-3 was unavailable at the time so the line rented a four-seat plane and hired World War II Navy pilot Joe Pietro to fly its two ticketed riders. Pietro went on to a long career as a flight instructor and senior pilot for North Central and Republic. MM

Note: The largest plane to visit Sawyer in Marquette County was a Boeing 747-8, which can seat 467 passengers and is twice as long as the Wright brothers’ first powered flight in 1903. The world’s largest passenger aircraft, an Airbus, boasts 853 seats in its two-deck colossus. And the longest scheduled flight is the Singapore-to-New York run of 18 hours and 50 minutes. That flight needs two full crews, who get three days off after the round trip.

Larry Chabot, an Ontonagon native, worked his way through Georgetown University and was then employed at White Pine Copper Company for 32 years, before moving to Marquette with his wife, Betty. He is a freelance writer who has written for several publications, including more than 180 articles for Marquette Monthly.