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  • Rodney H. Jackson: Early Years

    Rodney H. Jackson: Early Years

    Birth to High School — 1905-1918

    Rodney Hoisington Jackson was born on August 23, 1905. On the same day was born Ernie Bushmiller, cartoonist famed for creating comic strip character Nancy, and Constant Lambert, founding music director of the Royal Ballet. The newspapers of the morning would have heavily featured various elements of the Russo-Japanese War — the New York Times led with an article about President Roosevelt-mediated peace talks which ultimately led to the end of the war a month later,1 but also featured an article about shipwrecked Japanese sealers who had been shot off the coast of Russia while awaiting rescue2 — and the ongoing Russian Revolution which began several months earlier.

    The front page of the New York Times on August 23, 19053

    In New York City, where Rodney was born, much would have been made of a historic dirigible flight in the city. A. Roy Knabenshue – an early pioneer of aviation – had promised the first dirigible flight over New York City the previous Sunday, which drew large crowds (the New York Times claimed that “not less than 300,000 witnessed” the flight4) as he piloted his ship from Central Park to the Times headquarters (now known as One Times Square) and back, “steered with perfect ease” at heights up to 1,000 feet. This success was front page news the next morning and the announcement that it was merely the first in a series of trial flights over the city drew great excitement for the coming days. The crowds gathered outside the tent across the street5 from Central Park on Monday waiting for the one-man dirigible balloon to rise above the compound, but some eventually trickled away and the rest finally left after it was announced that no flight would be attempted. “The machinery was not quite in order and the wind was a little too strong,” said the Tribune.6

    Knabenshue’s dirigible balloon in 1905. The pilot was not strapped to the structure.

    Tuesday morning brought more disappointment. The winds were even stronger and the 28-year-old inventor was not willing to brave them for the benefit of the gathered throng. On Wednesday, The New York Times printed criticism from other aviation pioneers who used the repeated failure as evidence that airplanes, not dirigibles, were truly the airship of the future.7 “Within a year I expect to see dozens of aeroplanes gliding through the air” said Israel Ludlow, a New York lawyer and prospective airplane builder (who was left permanently injured when his own invention later crashed).8

    While the Times was criticizing his methods, Knabenshue spent Wednesday piloting the balloon on his highest flight to date. Rumors that Knabenshue was planning to distribute surplus money from his backers by scattering paper checks from the sky ensured that the streets were as packed as they had ever been and that the crowd was buzzing with excitement for the promised attempt. While it seems like the scattered money was a bit of an urban legend, the multitudes would not have gone home entirely disappointed as the flight itself proved to be the most successful yet attempted in a dirigible. Knabenshue bested his previous altitude record by over double.

    Mr. Knabenshue said later that he knew he must have reached a height of 5,000 feet at least because the safety valve was forced open by the increased pressure of the gas from within as the air grew thinner. 9

    “I’ve got a case of air ship neck today”

    This success did not dissuade the doubters. Despite the higher altitude and the relative ease in returning to his starting point, Knabenshue’s struggles with wind were still apparent. “His experiment proves no more than that the dirigible balloon is an interesting plaything,” the New York Times header on page 7 reads. Despite the fact that “any breeze faster than six miles an hour” spelled defeat to the prospective dirigible entrepreneur, the Times still admitted that…

    …as a plaything, pure and simple, there are few human inventions that can beat the dirigible balloon, especially on a cloudless day like yesterday, when the bright silk of the bag stands golden against the luminous blue of the sky, and the framework of the ship looks like a gracefully shaped sleigh with silver runners. Thousands of Manhattan folks nearly twisted their necks out of joint in their eagerness to behold that picturesque spectacle.

    The Evening World chose more colorful language in their description of these eager onlookers:

    AIRSHIP PUTS KINK IN NECK

    Thousands of Twisted, Dislocated and Fractured Vertebrae Swathed in Liniment and Bandages To-Day as Result of Knabenshue’s Cavortings in Heavens

    August 24, 1905 — The Evening World

    New York has a kink in the neck today from its Knabenshue rubbernecking orgy. All sorts and varieties of strained collar-bones are undergoing divers treatments to recover suppleness of the upper dorsal vertebrae. Not since the three tailed comet of 1823 have the inhabitants of this town done so much sky-gazing as they did at that airship, and, after the strain, it is hard for them to pull their necks down to a normal poise.

    Veracious observers report that men and women can be seen in the main thoroughfares carrying their heads high with a singularly painful haughtiness, also that there are some swan-like stretches of neck that would put a flamingo to shame, so weird are the twists and kinks wrought in them through watching the upper circumambient while Roy of the Clouds soared along the sky line in his dirigible balloon.1011

    While others in Manhattan were twisting their necks out of joint to marvel at the latest innovation in aerospace technology, Rodney Jackson was a few miles uptown entering the world.

    Rodney was the first child of Lawrence Stelzner Jackson and Georgia Hoisington Savage. Rodney’s parents, in their 20s at the time, were living with Georgia’s parents. The 1905 New York State Census, taken just a couple months before Rodney’s birth, tells us a lot about their living situation at the time.

    Savage/Jackson entry in the 1905 New York State Census12
    The Golden Gate Manufacturing Co. office on Desbrosses St.

    Georgia’s parents, William Cunningham Savage (written as “Wm” in documents at the time) and Ida Corina Bowman, had a house at 415 Riverside Drive on the upper west side of Manhattan, just north of the upper edge of Central Park and well isolated from the hubbub of the day’s aerial excitement. Besides Rodney’s parents and grandparents, the only other residents were two Swedish kitchen staff, Julia Nelson and Gustava Benson. Julia was 25 and waited on the family, while Gustava was 38 and cooked.

    A patent that William filed for a brass pipe coupler. One of the witnesses was Abraham Wendell Jackson, Rodney’s grandfather.

    William Savage called himself a brass goods manufacturer13 in the 1905 census, and Lawrence worked for him as a salesman. The Golden Gate Manufacturing Co. based their factory operations in San Francisco, but their east coast office was in New York City. They were primarily known for manufacturing brewery equipment, but they served a wide variety of industries in their heyday.

    Both of Lawrence’s younger brothers lived close by with their mother Alice at St. Nicholas Park while the youngest, Evert, finished his schooling. Rodney’s grandfather Abraham spent 1905 on business in Paris.

    The living situation that greeted Rodney upon his birth did not last long. His grandfather William sold the five story, 25×99′ Riverside Drive house to a Helen S. White in 1906,14 and the structure was replaced in 1910 with another five story townhome that today serves as faculty/staff housing for Columbia University.15

    Lawrence S. Jackson, meanwhile, moved his family just a few blocks away to 116th St. in an apartment rented out by Carolina T. Paterno, mother of the Paterno Brothers who built Morningside Heights. While the Paterno family legacy is incredibly apparent in the character of the neighborhood to this day, Lawrence was less concerned with the historical significance of his flat or historical legacy of his landlord than he was the practical realities of winter in New York City.

    [Jackson] alleges that from November until March the temperature in his rooms never got far from the freezing point, and he was forced to do a continuous Marathon while indoors to keep warm. Mrs. Paterno denied this, and alleges that there was no attempt to economize on the heat.

    Jackson lived there for a year, and when he departed he began an action to recover $350, alleging in his complaint that he had been damaged to that extent. He won in the Municipal court, the Appellate term reversed him, and now the Appellate division has affirmed the finding of the court next lower in jurisdiction.16

    Unfortunately for Lawrence, the Supreme Court of New York ultimately decided that he would have been entitled to damages had he moved out of the apartment early or spent his own money on gas heating, but as he waited until the lease was up to raise a complaint he was instead entitled to nothing.

    This incident seemingly marks the end of baby Rodney’s time living in Manhattan. By the time of the 1910 US Census, Lawrence had moved the family out to a rented house on Lincoln Ave (now known as Beach 124th St.) in Rockaway Beach, Queens. The intervening years had also brought two new siblings for Rodney: a brother, Berkeley, came along in 1908, and his sister Merle was born in 1910.

    The Savage grandparents moved back in with their family by this census, but this time are shown as Lawrence’s tenants rather than the other way around. Also living with the family at the time of the census were a 25 year old German servant named Gertrude Scheneberg and a 42 year old English servant named Nellie Spiel. Nellie had two children and was widowed. Gertrude had moved to America when she was nine years old and Nellie when she was 12.17

    The 1910 US Census incorrectly lists Lawrence Jackson’s name as Thomas and his parent’s nationalities as English, but the rest of the family information is correct18
    Lawrence S. Jackson leased 9 Woodcrest Avenue in White Plains from 1910-1919.

    Shortly after the 1910 census was taken, the Jacksons moved all the way outside the city to White Plains, New York, and finally settled down. Lawrence ultimately rented 9 Woodcrest Ave for close to a decade before buying property in town. These first years that the Jackson family resided in White Plains were a time of great expansion for the Westchester county seat.19 White Plains would not formally incorporate as a city until 1916, when Rodney was 11 years old and the family had lived there for six years already.

    Woodcrest Avenue, where the Jackson family first lived in White Plains.2021

    In 1912, when Rodney was seven years old, his grandfather Abraham W. Jackson spent some time in the international press due to the private loan that he orchestrated between Birch Crisp & Co. of London and the nation of China. His father Lawrence spoke to the press about the deal at the time, and interviews and articles about the loan were printed in newspapers across the country and around the world.22

    The press interviews with Lawrence do give some tidbits about the family’s life at the time. His mother Alice was staying with them temporarily while Abraham was off traveling between China and London. Despite living in White Plains, Lawrence was still working out of the same office in lower Manhattan for his father-in-law, and he refers to the White Plains house as a “summer home.” It’s unclear exactly where the family’s winter home would have been as records going forward generally give either the White Plains address or else the address of the office.

    1913 brought Rodney’s youngest brother, Eliot Savage Jackson, who was born on August 25 (just two days after Rodney’s birthday on the 23rd). This birth was the start of a very tumultuous time for the young family. Ten days after the birth, Georgia unexpectedly made Lawrence a widower.23 The mother of four was 35 at the time; Rodney was hardly 8. The exact cause of death is unclear.

    In the immediate aftermath of his wife’s sudden passing, Lawrence traveled aboard the RMS Olympic (which had been retrofitted with new safety features after the sinking of the Titanic) to London and returned a couple weeks later on the RMS Celtic sailing from Liverpool. The exact purpose of his visit is unclear, but he was reported to have been visiting Paris24 where his father Abraham was living at the time.

    Lawrence’s return to New York was no happier. Two weeks after the Celtic deposited Lawrence back on New York’s Pier 54, William C. Savage died at home in Manhattan.26 Besides being Georgia’s father and the grandfather of their children, Savage was still Lawrence’s employer, so the death impacted the family in more ways than one.

    The period following this upheaval was quiet. No one in the family was in the headlines, and no major family events made their way into the record books. The next record of the Jacksons is the 1915 New York State Census, taken when Rodney was nine years old. His grandmother Alice had moved in to help with housework, though how much housework she was needed for is unknown given that the family also had three servants living with them. Their cook, Emma Johnson, was 45 and Swedish. The other two servants were Nannie Dallan, a 35 year old from Sweden, and Marry Keller, a 33 year old from the US.27

    The quaint dirigibles of Rodney’s birth year had, by this point, given way to slightly less-quaint reconnaissance airplanes, and by the end of World War I, even less-quaint fighters. By the time Rodney entered high school at the end of the war, aviation had gone from the domain of the crackpot inventors to that of the warmonger; within a few years the commercial uses were clear and the only job he would ever hold, commercial airplane pilot, would come into existence.

    1. 1905-08-23. President Advises Sakhalin Payment. The New York Times. (pg. 1) ↩︎
    2. 1905-08-23. Russians Shoot Castaways. The New York Times. (pg. 2) ↩︎
    3. 1905-08-23. The New York Times. (pg. 1) ↩︎
    4. 1905-08-21. Knabenshue’s Airship Sails Over City. The New York Times (pg. 1) ↩︎
    5. Several articles mention his work tent’s location being at the corner of 62nd St. and 8th Ave. (8th has since been renamed to Central Park W. Ave. for the segment adjoining the park), but none mention on which side of 62nd. the compound was located. ↩︎
    6. 1905-08-22. Pegasus Remains in Stall. The New York Tribune (pg. 10) ↩︎
    7. 1905-08-23. Too Windy for Airship. The New York Times (pg. 3) ↩︎
    8. https://www.earlyaviators.com/eludlow.htm ↩︎
    9. 1905-08-24. Sails In His Airship Down to the Flatiron. The New York Times (pg. 7) ↩︎
    10. 1905-08-24. Airship Puts Kink in Knickerbocker’s Neck. The Evening World (pg. 5) ↩︎
    11. Both illustrations on this page come from this Evening World article. ↩︎
    12. 1905 New York State Census. A.Dist. 21/E.Dist. 47 (pg. 74, lines 31-36) [Ancestry][FamilySearch] ↩︎
    13. The company he was president of, Golden Gate Manufacturing Company, produced a variety of brass goods (including things like automobile grilles) but were most known for bar equipment like faucets and valves. The manufacturing seems to have all been done close to the San Francisco headquarters from what I can tell, so the New York office likely dealt more with the sales/client relations side of things— though records are spotty so it’s hard to say. ↩︎
    14. 1906-10-30. Operator in Big Deal. The New York Tribune (pg. 14) ↩︎
    15. https://residential.columbia.edu/content/415-riverside-drive ↩︎
    16. 1908-11-14. Heating of Flats. Syracuse Herald-Journal (pg. 2) ↩︎
    17. 1910 US Census. Queens, N.Y. Dist. 2/1245 (pg. 3A, lines 36-44) [Ancestry][FamilySearch] ↩︎
    18. Censuses were taken by hand and mistakes were not common, but also not uncommon. ↩︎
    19. https://www.cityofwhiteplains.com/469/History-of-White-Plains ↩︎
    20. The construction of the I-287 Cross Westchester Expressway changed the house numbering system of Woodcrest Avenue while also eliminating a number of lots and changing the road layout nearby. I’ve gone so far as to decipher handwritten property deeds from the 1800s in an attempt to pinpoint where 9 Woodcrest was, but I haven’t been able to come up with a definitive answer. However, official property maps from the era only show one possible lot that fits the dimensions specified in the lease: the lot which now contains the 1927-era farmhouse known today as 15 Woodcrest (shown as lots 4-6 on the left side of Woodcrest Ave in the map). ↩︎
    21. 1914. Map of White Plains, N.Y. G. W. Bromley & Co. (sheet 12) ↩︎
    22. These articles are found in print newspaper archives that have not been digitized, so there is no easy way to link to a source. I plan to reprint some of those here eventually but the entire affair is a pretty complicated web of business dealings and I want to untangle it a bit first in order to understand the historical context of the articles published at the time. ↩︎
    23. 1913-09-06. Died. The Yonkers Statesman (pg. 6) ↩︎
    24. 1913-10-07. Paris Personals. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (pg. 26) ↩︎
    25. 1913-10-24. Died. New York Tribune (pg. 9) ↩︎
    26. 1915 New York State Census. A.Dist. 4/E.Dist. 3 (pg. 13, lines 23-28) ↩︎

  • Rodney H. Jackson (1905-1981)

    Rodney H. Jackson (1905-1981)

    Rodney in 1939, photographed for an article he published in Popular Aviation1

    Rodney Hoisington was born to Lawrence and Georgia Jackson on August 23, 1905 on the upper west side of Manhattan. He was the oldest of four children. The Lawrence Jackson family moved to the White Plains area shortly after his birth and Rodney would grow up there. After graduating from White Plains High School, Rodney attended Harvard College where he studied aeronautics and founded the Harvard Flying Club,23 often claimed to be the first collegiate flying club in the world.4 Post-graduation he joined the Naval Reserves which sent him to Detroit – where he was a founding board member of another flying club56 – and subsequently to San Diego’s North Island. While stationed at North Island he married Marion Virginia Englebright, the daughter of a railroad engineer.7 The pair were legally married in Yuma, Arizona, but had their civil ceremony at Mission Hills Congregational Church in San Diego (now Mission Hills United Church of Christ).

    After his year of active service at North Island was up, Rodney and Marion moved to Red Bank, NJ, where Rodney had been hired to pilot a private seaplane for a General Howard S. Borden, industrialist heir8 and longtime commanding officer of the New Jersey National Guard. Rodney’s first son, Barry, was born shortly after moving to New Jersey, and his second son Bruce was born a few years later.

    Rodney occasionally flew charter flights for a service based out of Long Island while working for General Borden, and the connections formed there eventually led him to his next venture. General Borden would eventually give up on flying altogether, but this retirement did not impact Rodney’s career for long. In May 1935, industrialist Louis Root purchased an airplane in order to commute from his Southampton estate into his office in New York City, and he hired Rodney Jackson as his pilot. Seeing an opportunity to serve other businessmen in the Hamptons, the pair quickly became business partners and opened the Hampton Air Service, where Rodney served as vice-president, general manager, pilot, and manager of the airport operated by the service.9

    The Hampton Air Service only existed for a few years, but Rodney gained a fair bit of local notoriety during that time in his work as both the manager of the air service and the manager of the airport itself. The long hours he worked and the variety of roles he took on in managing the airport ensured that he became well known to local fliers. Rodney wrote about his work in an article published in the August, 1936 edition of Aviation magazine:

    Hampton Air Service, Inc., whose one airplane is bringing in a gross revenue of over $1,50010 a month during the summer, is an example of what a one-man airline can be made to do. The pilot goes by the title of vice-president and general manager, and as such divides his time between managing the local Hampton Airport, which is operated directly by the company, and conducting the airline.

    While the Hampton Airport that Jackson managed has since been effectively lost to time, it was the only airport in the Hamptons in the mid-1930s and thus was rather important to fliers of the day. Howard Hughes was a regular customer and would have known Rodney personally.11

    The East Hampton Airport was approved for construction by the WPA in the fall of 1936. The construction of a rival airport across town was essentially a death knell for Jackson’s business; while I have not found anything specifically detailing the downfall of the Hampton Air Service, it hardly seems coincidental that they stopped printing advertisements in local newspapers around the same time that the much larger and federally-funded East Hampton Airport opened in 1937. Rodney ultimately resigned from his job there in 1938, and it is unclear whether the enterprise survived whatsoever after he left. Local maps only showed the location of the airstrip for a few more years, and the farms that replaced it have done an effective job of erasing any trace of the old facility from the property.

    The sudden death of a wildly profitable enterprise may have been a bit of a blow, but Rodney was not one to stay down. The reason Rodney had resigned from his position in the Hamptons, American Aviation reported,12 was that William Kissam Vanderbilt II needed a pilot. Vanderbilt owned a Sikorsky S-43 – the largest privately-owned seaplane in the world – and the resignation of one of his pilots left an opening that Rodney was happy to fill.

    Rodney’s job with Vanderbilt came with lots more publicity as newspapers tended to talk about the large Sikorsky, and would often mention the pilots by name in their reporting. The Vanderbilts lived between New York and their private island in Miami, so Rodney purchased a home in Coral Gables and the Jacksons became snow birds as well.

    This career move, ideal as it seems to have been for someone with Rodney’s background and temperament, was not to be long lived. Vanderbilt wanted to go airplane shopping, and the shopping trip Rodney flew him on would drastically alter the course for every member of the Rodney Jackson family.

    The flying boat in question was Consolidated-Vultee’s PBY, and Rodney took Vanderbilt to San Diego to hear the sales pitch. The salesman at Consolidated was an old friend, and (in addition to his sales pitch to Vanderbilt) he had another pitch for Rod: war was looming, and flying for Vanderbilt would not be a good enough excuse to avoid going on Active Duty with the Navy. Evidently the young father was not keen to be suddenly sent into a combat zone, and Consolidated had a flying job that would allow Rodney to contribute to the war effort without leaping headfirst into harm’s way, so it was not long before he reluctantly turned in his resignation and packed up the new house in Miami.13

    Rodney began ferrying newly built seaplanes from the Consolidated aircraft factory in San Diego to strategic positions in the South Pacific and elsewhere. On moving back to San Diego, the Jacksons settled in Del Mar and quickly became notable figures in the tight-knit beach community. Their next door neighbors at the time were the John Lloyd Wrights, and the home they lived in was around the corner from the historic Canfield-Wright House.14

    While any pilot spends time away from home during the course of their work, this new job took Rodney away extremely often and for extended periods of time. The trip to drop off the aircraft was a multi-day affair involving continual refueling and rest stops throughout, and the return trip typically involved the usage of an even slower ocean liner. At the end of the war Rodney continued flying to the South Pacific on United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) flights, which were much the same pattern except that he brought the airplane back with him rather than leaving it behind. Marion had remained back home with the children during all of his time away, and after the war was over it was decided to make that arrangement permanent.

    The divorce was amicable enough. Marion stayed in Del Mar with the kids, while Rodney moved to Ontario, CA, which was a major hub for flights to Asia. There he had several boarders – mostly other divorced men, all much younger than himself – and he remained for several years. In the mid-1950s he moved close to his companies headquarters in the Bay Area. There, he married a woman named Ethel Young and had two children, Linda and Larry. This final chapter of Rodney’s life was by far the quietest; he largely stopped appearing in the press and remained in the same general area until his death in 1981.

    While he’s largely been forgotten to history, Rodney’s contributions to the history of aviation remain in newspaper records, magazine archives, and – more recently – aviation quote compilations and books:15

    Real confidence in the air is bred only by mistakes made and recovered from at a safe altitude, in a safe ship, and seated on a good parachute.

    – Rodney H. Jackson, “A Lesson In Stunting,” Aeronautics Magazine (Feb 1930)

    1. 1939-02. Check Yourself Out. Popular Aviation (pg. 57) ↩︎
    2. 1926-05-10. Harvard Flying Club. Aviation Weekly (pg. 10) ↩︎
    3. 1927-03-16. Harvard Flying Club Begins Third Season. Harvard Crimson. ↩︎
    4. 1952-10-29. Aviation Club Mixes Flying and Partying. Harvard Crimson. ↩︎
    5. 1928-06-08. Sparks from Detroit. Automotive News (pg. 2) ↩︎
    6. The cited article mentions that the president of the club was 35-year-old Warren Packard, father of two and heir-apparent to the Packard automotive fortune, who tragically perished just a year later when his own seaplane stalled out south of Detroit. ↩︎
    7. 1929-04-07. Social Affairs of Army, Navy. The Los Angeles Times (pg. 64) ↩︎
    8. General Borden was the grandson of M. C. D. Borden and the great-grandson of Col. Richard Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts. ↩︎
    9. 1936-08. One-Man Airline. Aviation (pg. 32) ↩︎
    10. Equivalent to nearly $35k/mo in 2025 ↩︎
    11. 1972-02-16. Recalls Exciting Day With Howard Hughes. Red Bank Daily Register (pg. 1) ↩︎
    12. 1938-01-15. Vanderbilt Pilot. American Aviation (pg. 2) ↩︎
    13. Del Mar Voices: Marion Morgan Interview ↩︎
    14. The Canfields were long gone by the time the Jacksons got to Del Mar, but Charles A. Canfield was one of the oil tycoons who inspired the novel Oil! and its adaptation There Will Be Blood. ↩︎
    15. English, Dave (2003). The Air Up There: More Great Quotations on Flight. McGraw-Hill, NY. ↩︎