Spirit of San Diego : Plans Take Wing to Spotlight City’s Role in Lindbergh’s Flight

The spirit and the money for Charles Lindbergh’s historic flight from New York to Paris may have come from St. Louis, but the expertise and the steely determination to accomplish what many experts thought was impossible came from San Diego.

In 60 days of failure-is-not-an-option frenzy 70 years ago, a financially struggling San Diego company called Ryan Airlines built what proved to be the most famous airplane the world has ever known--on a scant budget, largely without blueprints, and using a tuna cannery as a factory.

It is one of the oversights of history that San Diego’s contribution to Lindbergh’s 33 1/2-hour flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis has tended to get short shrift in the public’s mind.

But now, as the anniversary of the flight approaches, a group of aero-minded San Diegans and an adventurous Texas pilot are determined to set the record straight by celebrating the remarkable bravery of Lindbergh’s achievement and the role of San Diego in making it happen.

“We see Lindbergh’s flight as San Diego-New York-Paris because it started here, and that’s how we’re going to present it,” said John Wadas, an official with the San Diego Aerospace Museum in Balboa Park.

The museum, with a full-size replica of the Spirit of St. Louis in its rotunda, plans an exhibit titled “Flight of the Lone Eagle” to open Saturday--70 years to the day that Lindbergh left San Diego in his single-engine monoplane en route to St. Louis and then to Long Island, Paris and international acclaim.

Sponsored by Teledyne-Ryan Aeronautical Co., corporate successor to Ryan Airlines, the exhibit will last through the end of September and feature a video, recordings of some of the 250 songs written in Lindbergh’s honor, countless Lindbergh artifacts and a squad of Lindbergh-savvy docents.

On the same day the museum exhibit makes its debut, Texas pilot Bill Signs will depart North Island Naval Air Station at the controls of his Cessna 210 in a bid to duplicate Lindbergh’s transcontinental and then transatlantic flight. Takeoff time is set for 4:55 p.m., the same as Lindbergh.

There have been other Lindbergh replication flights on other anniversaries, but this is the first to depart from San Diego in an effort at historic verisimilitude.

“San Diego has tended to be forgotten when people think of Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis,” said Signs, who owns two car repair garages in the Dallas area. “It’s time we did something about that.”

Talk like that is sweet to aviation enthusiasts and Lindbergh fans in San Diego. “The Spirit of St. Louis was built in San Diego by San Diegans, and the world should remember that,” said Richard “Zeke” Cormier, a retired Navy captain, Blue Angels leader, World War II ace and aerospace museum board member.

The San Diegans took a chance on a 25-year-old barnstormer and mail-delivery pilot who was audacious enough to think that he could beat the most experienced and best-funded pilots in the world to win a hotelier’s prize of $25,000 by making the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris.

In his 1953 book “The Spirit of St. Louis,” Lindbergh conceded that he was shocked when he arrived in 1927 at the “old, dilapidated” Ryan building: “There [was] no flying field, no hangar, no sound of engines warming up; and the unmistakable smell of dead fish.”

Before long, however, Lindbergh realized that although the Ryan building was nothing special, the employees were something else. “I have confidence in the character of the workmen I’ve met,” he wired one of his financial backers in St. Louis.

The museum exhibit plans to celebrate the character and dedication of those workers who accepted Lindbergh’s challenge to build a plane in 60 days for $10,580 that could out-fly his competitors’ planes, which were years in the making and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Save for one, they are all gone now, among them:

* Fred Rohr, who devised the intricate fuel system that permitted the plane to fly farther than anyone dared imagine (and who later founded Rohr Industries).

* Donald Hall, the project’s chief engineer, who drew his first designs in the dust with a stick and whose innovations allowed the plane to take off with a fuel load greater in weight than the plane itself.

* Charles “Old Man” Randolph, the ex-Navy submariner who installed periscopes in the cockpit because the oversized fuel tank blocked Lindbergh’s view.

* Douglas Corrigan, later known as “Wrong Way” Corrigan for his errant attempt to emulate Lindbergh.

* “Dapper” Dan Burnett, who worked with Corrigan to build a wing 10 feet longer than the wing used in other Ryan aircraft, providing more lift.

* Hawley Bowlus, who became a pioneer in sail planes and gliders, a later Lindbergh passion.

* The high-living, ever-buoyant Benjamin Franklin Mahoney, who bought the company from Claude T. Ryan and during lean times met the payroll by taking the company’s scant reserves to the Agua Caliente Casino in Tijuana and hitting a lucky streak.

In his biography of Lindbergh, Leonard Mosley notes, “By pure chance, [Lindbergh] had stumbled upon a small group of expert and dedicated designers, engineers and craftsmen.”

Of the 51 Ryan employees who worked on the Spirit of St. Louis, the only survivor is Georgia Mathias Borthwick, now 90 and the widow of prominent banker Andrew Borthwick. In a life-size group picture that takes up an entire wall at the aerospace museum, she stands directly in front of the boyish Lindbergh.

“He was very shy, very quiet, but very self-confident,” said Borthwick, the company’s secretary and stenographer. “He wasn’t frightened a bit. He had confidence in our airplane.”

In the days before Lindbergh left for St. Louis, Lindbergh took Borthwick for a ride above San Diego. She remembers people dropping by the Ryan building or the nearby Dutch Flats runway, near the international airport that now bears Lindbergh’s name.

“I think a lot of people wanted to meet him just in case he didn’t make it,” Borthwick said. “It seemed like what he was trying to do was an impossible feat for one person.”

Indeed, in the days before the Spirit of St. Louis left Roosevelt Field on Long Island, two of Lindbergh’s French competitors were lost in the Atlantic and two Americans died in the crash of a test flight. Not only was Lindbergh’s plane the least expensive, he was the only competitor to attempt the flight solo and without navigational equipment (except for a compass).

Mahoney traveled to Long Island to assist with the takeoff. “Dear God,” Mahoney was quoted as saying, “I hope he makes it.”

Make it he did, and the vaulting adulation was something unforeseen. Upon their return to the United States, Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis toured 48 states to promote aviation, with rallies and parades at every location.

On Sept. 21, 1927, the San Diego Evening Tribune front page blared: “Col. Lindbergh is Home.”

At an overflow rally at the city’s Balboa Stadium, Lindbergh told a cheering crowd that San Diego’s future lay in promoting aviation. A year later the city established an airport, named it for Lindbergh, and installed one of the Ryan employees, J.J. “Red” Harrigan, as its first manager.

San Diego’s dedication to its adopted son has been consistent if low-key. A Ryan plane modified to look like the Spirit for the 1957 movie starring Jimmy Stewart was on display in the museum until it was destroyed by fire in 1977.

A year later a replacement replica was built by Ryan employees, including some who had worked on Lindbergh’s plane. The replica is safeguarded by sprinklers. (The original Spirit is in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.).

Even before Lindbergh took off from New York for Paris, he had set an endurance record by flying from San Diego to New York with a flying time of 31 hours, 21 minutes. It is that record and other San Diego-centered accomplishments that boosters hope the museum exhibit, Signs’ flight and a display at the San Diego central library will champion.

“It is probably true that the first and only city that people associate with Lindbergh is St. Louis because of the plane’s name,” said Gene Bratsch, executive director of the Minneapolis-based Lindbergh Foundation. “But people who know aviation are well aware of San Diego and Ryan.”

Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who immigrated to the United States after World War II and became a leader in the U.S. space program, came to San Diego in the late 1940s and visited the converted cannery that had been the Ryan factory.

By then, the building was owned by Solar Aircraft Co., now Solar-Turbines Inc. Solar engineer Robert Magness was with von Braun as he spotted a plaque identifying the building as the site where the Spirit of St. Louis was built.

“This,” von Braun intoned, “is holy ground.”