Spruce Goose to Migrate--But Where Will It Go?

The Spruce Goose, a grandiose symbol of one man’s iron will and of a once-mighty aerospace industry now withered by layoffs and plant closures, may leave its lifelong home of Southern California amid a fierce nationwide rivalry for the famed flying boat.

To aviation purists, it’s the HK-1, the world’s most Gargantuan airplane, but to just about anybody else who remembers a certain cold November day in 1947, the craft is simply known as the Spruce Goose.

On that day, the colossus made thrilling worldwide news when multimillionaire and airplane pioneer Howard Hughes delighted in surprising a crowd by turning a trial run into a short but legendary flight.

But now, the Spruce Goose can’t draw big enough crowds to its 3 1/2-acre, domed mausoleum beside the stately ocean liner Queen Mary in Long Beach. The Walt Disney Co., which runs both tourist attractions, is ending its money-losing lease on Sept. 30, putting the future of ship and plane into question.

Spruce Goose enthusiasts in Oceanside are waging a spirited competition against out-of-state suitors to keep the seaplane in California, and a decision on the plane’s new home may come on Thursday as the owners meet to ponder its future.

“We want the sucker,” said George Barrante, the blunt president of a private group, the Oceanside Tourism Foundation, that’s seeking about $6 million in donations to import the craft by ocean-going barge.

“We want it for educational (uses), not as a carnival,” said Barrante, who added, “it’s probably the biggest thing that’s going to happen in Oceanside in 10, 20 years.”

He’s not the only one who wants it--competitors for what aviation devotees consider a national treasure represent Las Vegas; Tampa, Fla.; Miami, Fla.; McMinnville, Ore.; and the Port of Tillamook Bay, Ore.

High stakes are involved in the multimillion-dollar quest for the plane, as the outcome determines whether it goes to Oceanside or must be severed into huge pieces for the logistically daring move elsewhere. Also in the balance, at least for the prospective new owners, is the craft’s questionable profit-making potential.

Like the bad joke about what do you do with an 800-pound gorilla, the same can be asked about the Spruce Goose. What do you do with a 200-ton behemoth with eight Pratt & Whitney 3,000-horsepower engines that is 79 feet high and has a wingspan 20 feet longer than a football field?

Boosters in Oceanside insist the airplane rightfully belongs in the Southland, and that their trump card is being the only place that could secure possession of the giant without plucking apart the wings or other sections to move it.

Barrante’s foundation would establish the Spruce Goose and its enormous protective bubble on donated property out toward Father Junipero Serra’s Mission San Luis Rey as a convention center and educational facility that theoretically would entice droves of tourists.

Oceanside, the politically fractious (the mayor, in a public meeting, recently called a city councilwoman “Rosemary’s Baby”) neighbor of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base, has hungered for years to become a revenue-generating tourist destination.

Then early this year, City Councilman Ron Rodee, a pilot for American Airlines, proposed going after the Spruce Goose and putting his community of 134,000 people on the map.

“It’s the most unique aircraft in the world,” Rodee enthused. “It’s brought millions of people to Long Beach and will bring millions of people to Oceanside.”

Some naysayers point out that the Walt Disney Co. couldn’t make money off the Spruce Goose and the Queen Mary, so how can Oceanside, or anyplace else for that matter?

Indeed, Disney disclosed earlier this year it lost almost $8 million on the ship and airplane in 1991 and is spending nearly that much a year on maintenance and repairs.

Attendance figures haven’t been made available, and since one ticket gets access to both attractions, it’s difficult to determine the plane’s single drawing power. Disney has no comment on attendance and refers inquiries to Aero Exhibits Inc., which owns the plane and says it has no attendance figures.

Rodee is confident Oceanside can generate enough activities at the Spruce Goose to make it pay off, saying “if we have 200,000 (visitors) a year, it pencils out” at $6 to $9 a head. He pointed out that Oceanside beaches draw millions of people a year, and that each day, 250,000 vehicles pass through his city on Interstate 5.

But the city’s mayor, Larry Bagley, trashes the whole idea.

“They can’t do it, (but) let him give it a good hard try,” said Bagley, who doesn’t exactly get chills of ardor over the airplane itself.

Scoffed the mayor: “I think the Spruce Goose was a boondoggle from the very first. It showed government how they could pay for (cost) overrides. It was obsolete when it was built. It was a rich man’s hobby when Hughes built it at government expense, and I don’t want Oceanside to pick up the tab now.”

Others would be only too happy to pay the freight, literally and figuratively, such as Will Bissett, a real estate developer in Tampa who proposes to float the Spruce Goose to Florida on a barge via the Panama Canal.

“Once you’ve secured it on a barge and encapsulate it, it makes no difference whether you go three or 3,000 miles,” said Bissett, who conceives of the Spruce Goose as a tourist attraction for Tampa’s redeveloping harbor front. The cost of moving the plane, buying a site and a protective dome is estimated at $12 million to $18 million.

To float the massive airplane, “the only thing we have to do is take the wings off, which is no big deal.”

Bob McCaffery, the leader of a $2.5-million effort to take the plane to Las Vegas, waxes effusive about the triumph of getting something as important as the Spruce Goose in his community.

“You’ve got the symbol of aviation, the biggest plane that ever flew,” McCaffery said. “Whatever you think of it, the guy made it fly.”

McCaffery envisions the flying boat operated under the protective eye of the Nevada University system and reposing on casino row, the focal point of aviation events and pilgrimages by hordes of gawking hotel guests.

Some interested developers have even proposed making the proud vestige of aviation’s past into a centerpiece for their commercial malls, reducing the Spruce Goose to a shopper’s sideshow.

But such a “wacko” notion has been rejected by William Schoneberger, president of Spruce Goose owner Aero Exhibits Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Aero Club of Southern California. His organization’s task is to find a new owner who will display the flying boat “with dignity” and, hopefully, not have to disassemble it for long-distance travel.

There’s no price on the airplane--Schoneberger just wants somebody to pay for setting it up and treating it right.

The Spruce Goose, with some doing, is capable of flying, but nobody wants to risk damaging the venerable old wooden airplane that was airborne only once, during its minute-long maiden flight.

Yet the flying boat is beloved by many who lived the glory days of the aerospace industry, days that never seemed so long ago as just last week, when Hughes Aircraft announced it would lay off 9,000 workers over the next 18 months and close 92 company facilities. Two-thirds of the layoffs will be in Southern California.

The disclosure confirmed the obvious, that the industry is in decline because of curtailed federal defense spending and the high cost of doing business. In 1990, McDonnell Douglas cut 17,000 jobs, 9,000 of them in the Southland.

The Spruce Goose is a vision of another era, when bold and eccentric industrialists and aviation pioneers like Hughes made things happen through their indomitable will.

Stan Soderberg got out of the Navy after World War II and took a job as a mechanic on the Spruce Goose. He carries the image of seeing Hughes seated in the cockpit, relentlessly testing the airplane’s deafening eight engines.

“He was totally obsessed with the engines,” Soderberg recounted. “He’d sit and crank those engines for eight hours.”

Hughes’ creation was obsolete by then.

The war against Germany, Japan and Italy was over, and the U.S. government no longer needed the special airplane it had ordered for $18 million in 1942 to transport equipment or up to 750 troops through the sky, avoiding the killer Nazi U-boats below.

The flying boat was actually the idea of Henry Kaiser, famous for building freighters called Liberty ships. Hughes would make the plane from various woods, mostly birch but with much smaller amounts of maple, balsa and, of course, spruce.

As the war was winding down, the government lost interest in the airplane, but Hughes stubbornly insisted on completing the prototype and invested $7 million of his own money on the craft.

Why did he go on?

“Pride, ego,” Soderberg believes.

Pieces of the airplane had been built in Culver City, but Hughes needed to get them to a waterfront site in Long Beach for assembly and testing. Schools were let out and thousands of spectators watched during the two days in June, 1946, as dollies slowly carried the wings and fuselage along the 28-mile route to the coast.

As the craft was being put together, Hughes was bedeviled by problems, foremost among them, allegations by U.S. Sen. Owen Brewster that Hughes profited by his wartime government work. Ultimately, Hughes was vindicated after appearing before Brewster’s Senate investigating committee.

On Nov. 2, 1947, while hundreds of spectators watched--including Soderberg, who was part of the launch crew--Hughes coyly taxied twice along the water, letting a small contingent of news reporters on board get a feel for the story. He had said he wasn’t going to fly that day.

The reporters then left to bang out their stories on clackety old Underwoods. As they departed, Hughes pushed the throttles, picked up speed, and did the unexpected by taking the Spruce Goose aloft for a brief, one-mile flight.

To the one news reporter who had reluctantly remained on board, Hughes remarked, “I like to make surprises.”

A beaming Hughes emerged from the airplane, and Soderberg recalls, “that was one of the two times when I saw Howard really happy.” The other occasion was when he prevailed over his accuser, Sen. Brewster.

For some mysterious reason, the Spruce Goose never flew again, and Hughes put it in a temperature-controlled hanger, where it remained for 33 years.

Soderberg ponders the question of Hughes’ strange decision, but throws up his hands, saying, “who knows. Only Howard Hughes would know.”

Hughes, who grew increasingly isolated and eccentric, died in 1976. The Spruce Goose was going to be cut up and distributed among various museums, but a protest by the aviation community and state officials resulted in it being put on display near the Queen Mary in 1980.

Soderberg has retired from Hughes Aircraft, and these days, he works on a contract basis, advising how the historic airplane should be properly maintained. He visits often and never tires of exploring the cavernous craft, peering inside the wings (which are so huge, a person can step inside standing up) and walking along their tops, which span the distance of a football field.

It’s been a long relationship, 46 years, Soderberg and the Spruce Goose.

“A lovely thing, just like a good marriage,” Soderberg said. “This plane has been a big part of my life.”

Nobody knows for sure what will happen to the Spruce Goose until the 24-member board of Aero Exhibits meets late Thursday to review the proposals and possibly choose a new owner.

Schoneberger stressed that his organization wants an owner with financial backing to preserve and display the plane and ideally move it without taking it apart.

“There’s a significant amount of sentiment that it belongs in California,” Schoneberger said, but noted that’s not the sole consideration in making a decision that’s kept everybody guessing.

But then, Howard Hughes said he liked surprises.