L.T ,-_gUN>t MONDAY. MAY 14, 1954. in GOOD ETON IMG EVERYBODY : Today marked the beginning of the season for trans-Atlantic flights. They are a familiar feature every year now when the weather begins to get warmer. Sometimes ltfs hard I d figure why these spectacular trans-oceanic adventures are pulled off time after time at great expense and still greater danger* But# just the same, there!s still a spine-tickling thrill when word eomes that a plane has taken off to make the big jump across the ocean. And an extra thrill always goes with the first ocean hop of the season. II. Today*3 flight got off to a flashing start when the Sellanca monoplane appropriately christened ^Leonardo Da Vinci11 soared into the sky at Floyd Bennett field this morning. I like that name for a plane, ^Leonard Da Vinci0, in honor of that magnificent old artist and scientist who studied the problems of flying centuries before other men gave it any serious thought. It is also appropriate that the monoplane Leonardo Da Vinci is hdaded toward Italy and the Seven Hilled city where the Roman eagle used to do its imperial II FLYERS - 2 aviating. One of the fliers out there over the Atlantic tonight_ n f f 'H over the Atlantic, not in it — is an Italian, Cesari Sabelli, former lieutenant in the Italian Air Corps, A persistent, stout-hearted Italian who has been preparing for this flight for six years. But the kingpin flier at the controls is George Pond, who used to do sky stunts for the U.S. Navy. It*s getting dark out there above the Atlantic along about now. A roaring plane, night, a lonely ocean, | i and two gentlemen unafraid. Herefs hoping that right on schedule. they’ll be seeing the familiar dome walls of the Homan Coliseum. Here’s hoping! CANADA* FOLLOW WHEAT The zooming climb of the price of wheat is sending up the prices of all other commodities. This has brought considerable alarm to our Canadian neighbors. They think prices are going up at such speed that there will be another epidemic of speculation. Financial experts in Montreal are afraid that a flood of capital will be sudden­ ly let loose on the market, producing another boom with an inevitable nose-dive to follow. This fear of too much prosperity may sound curious. But itrs a healthy sign that at least some people are remembering that lesson of Nineteen Twenty-nine and the lean years that have followed ! I I I 1 I E I Ii i Z. 7’ '$j£htrrl /^7 I DETROIT Ifm Detroit agairs tonight — came out to help make an in­ dustrial film, 'ly director on this is Cullen Landis. Remember when he used to be the matineer Idol or the movies, the Clark Gable of his day? Well Detroit is to the making of Industrial films what Hollywood Is to the other end of moviedom and here I found Cullen Landis. But what I intended to say was:- Detroit is busy. The Ford and Chrysler people are going full tilt. Packard Is launching its new car in the low priced field. Hudson and Terraplane, In four months have made fourteen thousand more cars than in the whole of last year. Maybe that Canadian hunch is right. ROOSEVELT The building industry, instead of being up in the air, has | I been down in the dumps. Sp far neither the N.R.A., nor the F.W.A., * i nor the C.W.A. have been able to afford it any reason for exaltation. So not only home owners but builders, architects, masons, bricklayers. carpenters, will rejoice over one particular item of President Roosevelt1s latest series of special messages. I mean that part which will extend the help of Uncle Sam to those who want to build new homes or repair the ones they already have. President Roosevelt’s idea is not to dash immediately Into spending the public funds for this purpose. But he does hope that it will result in no less than one billion and a half dollars being laid out for building. The proposal is to stimulate banks, % mortgage companies and others to lend money to people who want either *o repair their houses or make them more modern or build new ones. All such mortgages to be partially guaranteed by Uncle Sam. In other words, the govern­ ment doesn’t lay out the cash but stands ready to back up part of ’ I Ir % I each mortgage. The President’s advisors are hoping ohat it will put hundreds of thousands of men in the building trades to work all over the country. ACOSTA Well, well, well - and, but all isnTt so well. Here*s a familiar, reminiscent name in the news on this the first day of the trans-Atlantic flying season. Bert Acosta — the irrepressible Bert who soared to renown in the historic Byrd trans-oceanic jaunt _ seven years ago, Hefs one of those blithe-carefree souls so common in aviation, and he*s been in another of those blithe and carefree adventures of his — an automobile mishap, more arguments with a copy, and locked up again. Yes, Bert Acosta’s latest high jinks is a reminder of one of the oddest incidents of the celebrated Byrd flight. Wild Man Acosta himself tells of it in an article in that magazine I am editing — the magazine Saga. You remember how the Byrd plane got lost in the fog and landed just off shore in the English channel? Bert says he was all in when they lanued. Balchen was at the controls. They got out into the water. Bert is a strong swimmer, and he started to swim ashore. The weather was so hazy and Bert was so hazy that he swam in the wrong direction. He was heading right out for the open sea. out Luckily he found it/in time and turned around and made his way to shore. A trans-Atlantic flight and a trans-Atlantic xwim all rolled ACOSTA Into one wist would be a S.-..ga• But. Bert Acosta Is lust the sort to try It* Sc chatter waere he Is the lap oi* perversity seeas to lead him in the «rrong direction — towards some police station. But he sure can fly. And hereT s anotaer chap who can fly I IKTRO TO GU...,.T S MSM Tonight seems to be a time for telling of adventures * not only transoceanic, but also transcontinental. I heard that there was suite a thrilling angle to that record air mail flight across the continent in which Jack Frye took a load of mail from Los AngnLes to Me?/ York in eleven hours and thirty-one minutes. An average speed of 227 miles an hour. This air mail speed business is turning into quite a race. First Cantain Eddie Rickenbacker and. his companions broke the transcontinental record the day the companies turned over the mails to the Army. Then the military fliers broke the record when the Army turned the mails back to the companies. And now ciiilian aviation has come right back and smashed the record once more. The racing plane record is still held by Colonel Roscoe Turner. But these recent flights have been made in the worfiaday business of carry the mails. The thrilling angle comes with the fact that Pilot Jack Frye made this latest flight under huge difficulties of weather, storm, and blind flying. He is not only an aviator, he is also Vice President of Transcontinental and Western Air, an executive who laiRQ TO GU^bT dx -^^ER #p. believes in keeping up his flying. He’s at my regular microphone in New York right now, at least he’d better be or I'll be in a tail spin. friffy*:>:Yiryyyirw And I'll just ask him If he'll break in on the ether waves for a moment and tell us what happened when he started out from Los Angeles to break the transcontinental record and bucked a terrific storm and deluging rain all the way from Durango, Colorado to Columbus Ohio. Shoot Jack. Take the throttle FOR JACK FRYS; I111 tell you how It looked up there in the cockpit as I was treaking along. My plane was built at the request of the Post Office Department for overnight mall service from coast to coast. I was flying In clear bright weather till I hit Colorado. Then I saw dark stormy clouds ahead, a blinding rainstorm. I climbed over it. I had to climb to twenty-one thousand feet. I had to use the super-charger in my Wright-Cyclone engine. I was on the lookout for that lazy sleepy feeling. That*s the way you get in the rarified atmosphere away up there, tod pretty soon it began to come over me, that weak indolent feel­ ing. So I got out the oxygen tube and put on the oxygen helmet. It was like trying for an altitude record and a speed record at the same time. All the while I couldn1! see the ground. But I was equipped for flying blind, with a Sperry artificial horizon, direc­ tional gyro and radio pathfinder. It was a case of flying blind across half of this continent. I had to land flying blind at Kansas City to take on fuel. It was still raining cats and dogs, but I took off in ten minutes and did some more blind flying — all the way to Columbus, Ohio, There I ran into clear weather, and the rest of it was easy FOLLOW SPEAKER And that*s the off-hand way in which Pilot Jack Frye tells about climbing to twenty-one thousand and breaking another cross-continent flying record. Ifd call it the conquest of space and defeat of the weather. And, the weather can stand a good deal of defeating just now. hoover I It may startle a lot of you to learn that Herbert Hoover is going to run for office again. He is going to run for Congress on the Republican ticket in Ohio. Before anybody gets all up in the air about this, I*d better hasten to add that ltfs not Ex-President Herbert Hoover of Palo Alto, California,. It is Mr. Herbert Hoover of Akron, Ohio. One can hardly imagine the ex-president stepping down from his eminence to become one of the boys on the floor of the House FASCIST A couple of months ago. Premier Mussolini predicted that people who lived until the year two thousand would see a Fascist !: world. I wonder what the Duce thought of something that has just gathered to hear a, speech by a man who used to be a Laborlte member of Parliament and is now an English Fascist, broke it up after injuring several prominent Black Shirts. The riot rescue of the Fascists. They escorted them to their headquarters. But no sooner had the police gone back to their barracks than the mob returned for the attack and besieged the Fascists in their stronghold. And this time it took the utmost strength of the Newcastle bobbies to break up the riot. clared in a sermon that England needs the leadership of a personality such as Italy, Germany and America now have,j"^rtTa His Lordship the Archbishop. Ij happened over in England, In Newcastle-on-Tyne? A large crowd had A mob of several thousand swooped down upon his meeting and was so serious that the mounted police of Newcastle had to come to the And that looks as though Fascism still had a long hard road to travel before it gains real ground in the land of John Bull, than the Archbishop of Canterbur FRAHCE On the other hand Mussolini might point to Paris and say nthat’s all very well about England, but look at the French, k couple of years ago, even a few months ago, nobody would have be- lived that the Royalists, the Fascists, the Nationalists of the Right Wing and the organization of War veterans known as the Fiery Cross would march shoulder to shoulder in one parade. That’s what happened. There were sixty thousand in the line of march. The show was designed for the usual annual Joan o^Arc celebration. But they turned it into a triumphal march for all the militant advocates of the Right Wing, And one effect of this parade was to bring sharply into the limelight the veterans of the Ftwrty Fiery Cross and their leader. Colonel Robert fiwi de la Roeque, President General of the Fiery Cross, has hitherto shunned publicity. But the cheers which greeted him and his soldierly followers as they stepped snappily down the boulevards has given all France something to think about. Is Colonel de la Rocue the "Man-on-Horseback*, whose arrival French Republicans have been fearing all these years? j I Will he be the French Mussolini? Or will he be a gallic Hitler? The cries of the mob as those fifteen thousand Fiery Cross veterans passed the statue of Joan of Are were "Long live the King!" and "Long live the army!" Of course there were jeers from some parts of the mob, even a couple of revolver shots. But no casualties. AUTOMOBILES Here1s an obscure item about an automobile accident at Fredericksburg, Virginia. A car swerved suddenly and crashed into the pillars of a bridge. It swerved to avoid hitting a dog. And at almost the same time a similar tragic aficident in France. A race blazing with speed through the forest of Fountain- bleaul A young naval officer, an amateur speed demon, burning up ' 1 the road I A dog runs suddenly in front of the on-rushing machine. The driver wrenches at the wheel. Yes, he avoids hitting the dog, but his car lurches out of control and plunges into the crowd. Seven killed and as many more badly injured. I ■ They were basically the same — that obscure accident ! ] in Virginia and that spectacular disaster in the gala automobile race in France — all because of somebody's concern for a dog. You know how it is when you're driving along, how we all hate the "i j thought of hitting a wandering animal, even a rabbit. SOOTH AMERICA Trouble in Peru. The Premier has resigned as a protest against a new divorce law. He describes that divorce law as:- "Disapproved by my reason and execrated by my faith." The Peruvian clergy are up in arms. The archbishop declares that the institution of divorce violates the institution which guarantees to the people the integrity of their religion. The new law makes Peru the second South American nation to recognize divorce. All this will seem odd to people among whom divorce is old and familiar, but there are nations that consider the legal sundering of the marriage bond a blow to the institution of the family. Trouble in Argenina also There it was horse racing. "They*re off!" was the cry — or however you say it in Spanish. The horses ran fast and the crowd cheered loudly. The favorite won and the cheers were still louder. Then the judges announced that there had been a false start and the race would have to foe run over again. This time the favorite, exhausted by winning the first time, came in last. And thatTs when the real fun began. The crowd tore SOUTH AMERICA - 2 down the fences, stoned the betting booths and tried to burn the grandstand. It took a company of police reserves and two fire engines and quantities of tear-gas bombs to quell the disorder. And that ends my evenings race with the news/ off — and so long until tomorrow