Published: July 23, 2008 12:51 am            

'Coast to coast' plane travel different in 1928

Eighty years ago commercial airline passengers couldn’t fly non-stop from New York to Los Angeles in one afternoon. As a matter of fact, they couldn’t fly from New York to Los Angeles in one day. As a matter of fact, they couldn’t fly, at least not all the way, from New York to Los Angeles, period.

In fact, America’s first stab at transcontinental airline service had passengers traveling by air during the day and by rail at night, because flying at night still was a pretty risky business in 1928.

The small Woods County town of Waynoka here in northwest Oklahoma played a role in the first transcontinental airline service. West of Wichita, the new airline had to build its own airfields, terminal buildings and hangars.

They built a brick Spanish-style air terminal with a tile roof at Waynoka, and furnished it with wicker chairs. At Waynoka, Clovis, N.M., and Winslow, Ariz., the runway surface consisted of a four-inch base saturated with oil to accommodate the all-metal Ford Tri-motor passenger aircraft — appropriately nicknamed “The Tin Goose.”

Charles Lindbergh, who was one of the group who inaugurated the transcontinental air service, picked Waynoka as a stopover on the cross-country route because Waynoka had a Santa Fe railroad depot with a Harvey House restaurant that had been operating since 1910, plus plenty of space to build an airport. Celebrities like Lionel Barrymore and Will Rogers stopped at Waynoka’s Harvey House.

Amelia Earhart was a passenger on the inaugural trip, which started in New York the evening of July 7, 1929.

A band played “California, Here I Come” as the Airway Limited train left the Pennsylvania Station. The train reached Columbus, Ohio, at 7:55 a.m. July 8. Twenty minutes later two Ford Tri-motors took off. At 6:30 p.m. they landed at Waynoka, where passengers boarded the Santa Fe train for Clovis, N.M. Two more Tri-motors took them from Clovis to Los Angeles, arriving 48 hours after the train left New York City. Today an airliner on a non-stop flight could make the same trip in 4-6 hours.

The first eastbound trip of the airline started in Los Angeles with Lindbergh himself piloting a Ford Tri-motor that was christened by movie stars Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford. The combined one-way rail/air fare between New York and Los Angeles ranged from $337 to $400.

But this, America’s first attempt at transcontinental air service, eventually became a victim of circumstances. Two months after the first flight one of the airline’s planes crashed in New Mexico, resulting in a sharp drop in passenger traffic.

The airline promoted Harvey food, in-flight movies, radio service, and reduced prices, but it was the Great Depression of the 1930s that put an end to the rail-air experiment.

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It was in the fall of 1968 that George Wallace, running for president of the United States on the American Party ticket, brought his campaign to Enid. The former Alabama governor, an avowed segregationist, received a lukewarm reception, that included a number of anti-Wallace signs, but there was little heckling. The crowd included a large number of youthful, well-dressed, protesters carrying the signs.

Wallace’s speech on the south steps of the Garfield County Court House drew a crowd estimated at 4,500-5,000. They filled the south courthouse yard and Broadway Street between the courthouse and post office. The street had been closed temporarily for his speech. Just weeks later Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, was elected the 37th president of the United States, succeeding Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat.

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Sometimes we forget an unwritten American Indian language played a huge role in U.S. victories against the Japanese in the Pacific Theater during World War II. A group of 29 Navajos were the core of a group of Indian “code talkers” who relayed messages among units on the battlefield. The original 29 were the first to use their language as part of the code.

Navajo is not a written language. Some Navajo words are guttural and vocal inflections can give a word a completely different meaning. The Navajo language is derived from Athabascan language used by some northern U.S. and Canadian-American Indians. Other American Indian languages, such as Comanche, also were used by other code talkers.

Although the Navajo language was considered vital to the war effort, the American school many Navajos had attended discouraged use of the language, “as part of their Americanization.” One of the Navajo code talkers said administrators at the school would wash out their mouths with thick yellow soap if they spoke Navajo. But the code talker said that only made them use their native language more often.

However, today, learning the language and their tribal heritage is encouraged in American Indian Head Start schools.



Brown is a former managing editor of the Enid Morning News.