Glacier Pilot

292 Pages·1976·9.752 MB·English

by  Beth Day

COM STOCK
THE STORY OF BOB REEVE
AND THE FLYERS WHO PIONEERED ALASKA'S
SKIES IN SINGLE­ENGINE PLANES
BETH DAY
In 1932, when Bob Reeve climbed off a freighter at Val­
dez, Alaska, he was broke, sick, and without a plane to fly.
From those grim beginnings, he built up a successful com­
mercial airline operating in "the worst weather in the
world"—along the fog­shrouded chain of Aleutian Islands
—and became known throughout the territory by many
names: "Half-Bird," the greatest rough terrain pilot of
our continent and "MR. ALASKA."
Comstock Editions
ISBN 0­89174­009­0
GLACIER
PILOT
The Story of Bob Reeve
and the Flyers Who
Pushed Back Alaska's Air Frontiers
Beth Day
A COMSTOCK EDITION
Copyright © 1957 by Beth Day
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57­6761
ISBN: 0­89174­009­0
This edition published by arrangement with
Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Third Printing: May 1981
Fourth Printing: October 1986
Printed in the United States of America
Additional copies of this book may be obtained by send­
ing a check or money order for the price of the book
plus a dollar for the first copy and 75$ for each addi­
tional copy ordered. A free catalog of books published
by Comstock is also available.
COMSTOCK EDITIONS, INC.
3030 Bridgeway, Sausalito, CA 94965
To Tillie Reeve and Donald Day,
who stood by with Jovian patience,
high good humor, and lively encouragement
while this book was being put together
Contents
Preface ix
1. He looked like a tramp 1
2. It didn't hurt to be a little crazy 12
3. Getting a stake 37
4. Making the headlines 57
5. First glacier landing 67
6. Airdrops, mud flats, and romance 76
7. "I was pushing my luck" 94
8. "Anywhere youH fly, I'll ride" 116
9. "I ran out of planes—and luck" 129
10. "He who holds Alaska will hold the
world" 144
11. The Northern air route 159
12. Remember Dutch Harbor! 171
13. Ice, scud, and williwaw 185
14. I lay in bed and marveled Iw as still
alive 204
15. Wanta ticket to Alaska? 223
16. Air line headaches 231
17. Fight for the chain 242
18. Big Brownie 254
19. The air route nobody wanted 261
Preface
If you look down upon a world globe, you will see that
Alaska and the Arctic compose the most centrally located
area on earth. From the North Pole it is only 2950 miles to
New York; 2300 to London; 2050 to Moscow. "If World
War II should come," predicted General H. H. "Hap" Arnold,
"the strategic center will be the North Pole."
A natural air theater, its cities divided by virtually insur­
mountable terrain, Alaska was using airpower as its means of
transportation, its supply line, and its source of emergency
aid, long before the rest of America was even taking aviation
seriously. Today, Alaskans fly thirty times more per capita
than other U.S. citizens. The growth of Alaskan aviation is
without parallel; its development is the story of the courage
and initiative of its individual citizens and pilots.
When you first board one of the big, comfortable North­
west Airlines Stratocruisers, out at Idlewild Airport in New
York, you get your initial taste of frontier Alaska in the
friendly informality of the plane's personnel. At the bustling
Seattle airport, as you listen to schedules being announced
in Japanese and Hawaiian, you begin to realize just how far
west—as well as north—the Territory really is, but a hand­
spring from the Orient. Flying Northwest's northbound
flight to Alaska, over a wilderness of open water and forest
slashed by fir­lined fjords that cut inland from the open sea,
you are aware of how awesomely impenetrable much of our
Far North is. But the man beside you points to those unin­
habited landmarks as old friends. He is Alaskan, with the
frontiersman's identity with space. As you circle over Cook
Inlet approaching the city of Anchorage, he tells you proudly
n,
that Anchorage was, during World War the fastest­grow­
ing city in the world, its population leaping from 12,000 to
ix
X Preface
60,000 within a few hectic years; that it is the purest trans­
portation town in America, with 98 per cent of its business in
transportation, and that predominantly by air.
There is little doubt that Alaska, at long last, is on the
march—its isolated, mountainous terrain connected by a net­
work of modern airways, its skies filled with planes. It is our
jumping­off point to the Orient by way of the Aleutian
Islands, and to Europe by way of the North Pole.
But, until a few short years ago, Alaska was ignored both
strategically and in the development of commercial aviation.
Without federal aid or modern navigational equipment, Alas­
kan bush flyers pioneered the skies of the Far North and
prepared the way for both the commercial and military fly­
ing of the future.
This is the story of one of those aerial pioneers, glacier
pilot Bob Reeve. It is also the story of Alaska's coming of age,
and of the other daring flyers who, along with Reeve, con­
verted its vast wastelands into the busy air center of today.
If at times it seems to be a record of forced landings, near­
disasters, and crack­ups, it is because the thousands of suc­
cessful, uneventful flights made by Reeve and the other
pilots do not reveal the drama of their story. Those were the
"routine" that they were striving to establish against tre­
mendous physical odds. Many of those early flyers have
crashed to their deaths. Fortunately, a number are left who
are able to tell not only their own stories but those of the
men who are gone.
I wish to thank those men who cooperated so unstintingly
in the creation of this book: flyers Ray Petersen, Merle Smith,
Noel and Sig Wien, and Jack Jefford; mechanic Tom Apple­
ton; Reeve Airways Captains Borland, Kelly, and Forsythe;
Wien Airline Captains Hulshizer and Friericks; and Wien's
Point Barrow station manager, Forrest Solomon.
Special thanks are due to the personnel of Northwest Air­
lines, both at Saint Paul, Minnesota, and at Anchorage, who
contributed so generously to this book: Chairman of the
Board Croil Hunter; President Donald Nyrop; Vice Presi­
dent Frank Judd; Anchorage Manager A. B. "Cot" Hayes;
George Masters and Jerry Anderson of the Public Relations
office; and Northwest Captains Fairbrother and O'Neill.
I wish also to express my appreciation to the Civil Aero­
Preface xi
nautics Administration's Chief of Public Information, Mr.
Charles Planck, and the other CAA and CAB personnel in
Washington who took the time and had the patience to ex­
plain the various facets of aviation legislation.
Thanks, too, for their fine Alaskan hospitality, to Mr. and
Mrs. Thornton Wheaton, Artists Sara and Fred Machetanz,
Ellen and Harvey Goodale, Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Rasmuson,
Mr. and Mrs. Noel Wien, Mrs. Helen Buckingham, and Mr.
and Mrs. Clifford Cernick of the Anchorage News. I am also
grateful to Alaskans Admiral C. E. "Squeaky" Anderson, Mr.
Henry W. Clark, Bill Egan, and Owen Meals, who all pro­
vided invaluable sources of information.
Mr. Bradford Washburn, director of the Boston Museum
of Science, was kind enough to give of his time, as well as the
permission to use material from his private journals of the
Lucania expedition. Mr. D. W. H. MacKinnon, Vice Presi­
dent of Northeast Airlines, was helpful in filling in back­
ground on Reeve's early life.
Finally, thanks go to the Reeve family—Richard, Ro­
berta, Janice, David, and Whitham Reeve, and "Grandma"
Morisette—as well as the Reeve Airways office personnel,
who all put up so graciously with the confusion while this
book was being assembled; to Clara Kent Pearce, without
whose expert help this manuscript could not have been read;
and to Howard Cady, for enthusiastic encouragement
Beth Day
Chappaqua, New York
March 15,1957
1. He looked like a tramp
As the weekly summer freighter whistled up to the wooden
dock of Valdez, Alaska, one brisk, sunny day in 1932, a man
dipped quietly from under a covering of tarpaulin on one
side of the deck, jumped ashore, then elbowed through the
mixed throng of whites, Indians, Old Russians,* and bearded
sourdoughs who lined die pier, watching the boat unload. As
he strode down the board walkway toward the center of
town, the stranger's footsteps echoed hollowly on the planks
that crossed the tidewater flats on a trestle and led to the
main street, parallel to the sea and one block north of the
dock. Main Street, the stranger found, was an empty slash of
muddy road, lined on both sides by unpainted false­front
buildings. There were two hotels, a grocery, a Chinese restau­
rant At the northeast corner of the main intersection, the
Pinzon opened hospitable doors to any man interested in a
game of billiards, bar service, a hand of cards, or a place to
sit down. But even the Pinzon appeared momentarily desert­
ed. Valdez' four hundred­odd citizens had apparently all
gone down to the dock to watch the steamer unload. The
newcomer hesitated, then walked on to the edge of town,
where he spied a knot of workmen mending the dike that cir­
cled the back of the little village. Beyond it a mighty range
of mountains jutted from sea level up to snow­covered peaks
ten thousand feet high. Each spring, at breakup time, the ring
of glaciers back of Valdez, drain lines of the giant ice cap,
sent down torrential streams that but for the dike, would
have inundated the town. The rutted road that led north of
the village to connect with the Richardson Highway, which
bisects the Alaskan interior, crossed twenty­nine glacial
streams before it attained solid ground.
* Descendants of Russian colonists who came to Alaska in the
eighteenth century.
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