note: there are two books linked below, both of which are free to digitally borrow and read with an Archive.org account
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 spy thriller Foreign Correspondent is not the most well-known film of the legendary director’s long career, but it is generally praised both as an influential early spy genre piece and as a historically relevant window into the atmosphere of pre-war Europe. The source material for Foreign Correspondent was a 1935 memoir by American journalist Vincent Sheean entitled Personal History which describes the author’s time working as a foreign correspondent in the 1920s and 30s. While the dozen-or-so screenwriters who created what would be the eventual screenplay for the film did not ultimately keep all that much from the source material, Sheean’s editors certainly would have appreciated the image boost that comes from an Alfred Hitchcock stamp of approval.
Vincent Sheean himself, however, would not have been in much of a position to enjoy the fruits of his labor. By the time Foreign Correspondent released in the United States, Sheean was watching battles off the coast of Dover and dodging air raids in what would become known as the Battle of Britain. While the wartime censorship boards severely restricted his ability to publish accounts of these battles in real time, Sheean maintained a record of events and would later compile them into Between the Thunder and the Sun, which was first published by Random House in 1943.
This third and final memoir of Sheean’s career covers the transition period going into the war, starting with the 1939 Salzburg Music Festival and ending with Sheean’s enlistment into the Air Corps in May of 1942. In Chapter 8, Sheean recounts a journey he took from Manila to San Francisco on the Pan-American “American Clipper” right before Pearl Harbor was attacked. Also aboard the plane were “the crews of the Consolidated flying boats (PBY’s), who were being ferried back to San Diego.” Rodney H. Jackson was among this group of pilots, who had been ferrying new aircraft from Consolidated’s factory in San Diego to various locations in the Pacific for several months.
1940 aerial view1 of a PBY-5 “flying boat” over San Diego’s Consolidated aircraft factory
Manila and Guam
The first mention of the pilots comes early in the chapter,2 while Sheean is describing the attitudes of his fellow passengers on the first leg of the journey from Manila to Guam.
The ferry pilots—there were parts of four bomber crews aboard—chiefly slept. They had been too gay and noisy the night before to feel talkative today. We had had a false start from Manila. The Clipper had absorbed all its passengers and luggage at the Cavite seaplane base and started its run at about half past three in the morning. It made a longish run, tugging to get off, and then the second starboard engine emitted a decisive noise and ceased to function.
“Plug,” the ferry pilots said to each other; this was on the night of the false start, when they were feeling gay and talkative.
It was all repeated the next morning, except that this time the excitement of departure was lacking. The Clipper took off with something like a maximum load, waddled into the air like an elephant and set its course for Guam. After the dense and humid heat of Manila it was pleasant to climb into the upper air and feel more or less cool again.
American Clipper passenger manifest from Manila. Note Vincent Sheean’s name on line 9 and Richard “Mitch” Mitchell on line 12.
After talking further about the heat of Manila, Sheean goes on to describe the atmosphere of impending war that would have greeted the ferry pilots in Manila.
I remembered the delegation of schoolboys who came to ask me what they ought to do in air raids. I had told them to go to their local office of civilian defense and they said there was none. [Manuel L.] Quezon in emphatic, clipped accent, his violet silk necktie and his fresh violet boutonnière quivering in sympathy, leaned across the luncheon table. “Either we shall have war immediately, very soon, or it will never come at all.” The great sleepy city, with no anti-aircraft guns and no air-raid shelters, spoke of war day and night, and in the shop as in the palace, in the club and on the street. An army wife, a very amusing woman, had said at a cocktail party only two nights before: “Evacuate? Catch me doing it. It’s sheer heaven here for an ageing female. Two or three hundred men to every woman. I’m staying.”
Some were not convinced that war was inevitable.
Douglas MacArthur, striding up and down in his shaded office within the walls of the old city, emphasized his every statement with gesture and ornate imagery: he harkened and heard, coming nearer every hour, the trumpets of immortality. Mr. [Francis B.] Sayre, the High Commissioner, in gentle, thoughtful words, depreciated it all: it was all so unnecessary and at the same time improbable. He did not really believe it. “You journalists,” he had the air of saying, without ever putting it so rudely into words, “are always alarmists.”
The “American Clipper” (NC 18606) two weeks after the journey described here3
The account of the Clipper journey continues:
We had our usual Clipper meals at the usual frequent intervals. Time is so fluid on these journeys that I have long since given up the attempt to change my watch more than once a day. You eat when you are fed, and let the stewards decide whether to call it breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The passengers never failed to do justice to the meals no matter how often they occurred. The ferry pilots displayed a rare talent for finding places to sleep. When I went back into the tail of the ship to get some cigarettes out of my overcoat I found three or four of them there, rolled up in blankets on the naked metal floor.
It was in the middle of the afternoon, as it seemed to us, when the stewards went the rounds of the windows, blacking them out. This blackout consisted of pulling down the curtains and fixing them at the bottom. They remained loose at the sides, and many passengers shamelessly gawked through the crack thus provided. We swooped down through the clouds and alighted on the smooth blue water of the seaplane base at Guam; the amateur blackout was lifted, and we looked out upon the scurrying launch of the Pan-American company.
The passengers were taken ashore by boat and released into a customs and immigration shed. It was warm on shore, but not as hot as Manila. Officers in khaki sat behind two desks in the shed, checking our names off a list, marking our nationalities. Except for a mysterious Swiss, a Chinese general and a Siamese jeweler (at least he said he was a jeweler), we were, I believe, all Americans.
After clearing customs, Sheean is invited to a dinner at Governor George McMillin’s mansion that evening by the Governor’s Aide-de-camp (A.D.C.), Captain Charles S. Todd. The passengers go their separate ways to wash up and those attending the dinner meet up later to drive to the mansion. Sheean continues:
The lounge of Pan-American Hotel on Guam in an undated photo4
When we emerged into the lounge of the Pan-American Hotel5 most of the bomber crews had already washed and changed. Many of them wore violent Hawaiian shirts, green and orange and blue and red, with shorts or slacks of almost any color. All this riot of habiliment gave the hotel lounge a look of the musical comedy stage. Captain Todd saluted some of them and we went out to get into his car. As we drove across the island in the brief and opulent sunset he told me about Guam, his Governor and his job. It was a paradisiacal island, with an equable climate, agreeable inhabitants and no income tax. The Chamorros, natives of the island, were the best-looking and probably the cleverest of the Pacific island peoples, a mixture of Polynesian and Filipino and Spanish, with some touch of American navy added in the past few generations. The inhabitants had no political rights or functions, all power being lodged in the Governor. Captain Todd, as A.D.C. to the Governor, was also chief of police for the island and head of the insular intelligence.
“It’s a wonderful job, really,” he said, his whole face crinkling with laughter. “I get reports on what everybody’s doing, all over the island. And then maybe I’ll see them the next day at the club and I have to pretend I don’t know what they’ve been up to. It’s pretty funny, sometimes. Now that the women have all been moved back to the States it isn’t so funny any more, but it used to be. And then I try cases, too, in the police court.”
He told me the story of the Spanish Governor, who, when the American warships approached and fired a broadside, in 1898, sent out his A.D.C. in a launch with a white flag and the message: “The Governor presents his compliments and regrets that he is unable to return the American commander’s salute, owing to the lack of gunpowder.”
The road led through woods and over hills, through two or three villages and past the marine officers’ quarters, where we stopped for a few minutes to talk to the commander. The villages looked Spanish or Filipino. In Agaña, the capital of the island, the single street was lined with bares entitled “Dirty Dick’s” and other humorous names. It seemed that there were about forty thousand Chamorros living on the island, a population very large for this limited area. Captain Todd, leaving the district of bars behind, turned smartly into the Plaza and drew up before the Palace.
It was a Plaza like that of any small provincial town in a Spanish country. One whole side was occupied by the jail; facing this was the Palace; on the third side was the Cathedral and the palace of the bishop; on the fourth side was the barracks and the museum. In the swift tropical dusk the white buildings looked remote and shadowy; we might have been in Andalusia. Captain Todd left the car at the Palace gate; a marine saluted; we went up the broad staircase of Filipino hardwood to a colonnaded terrace above the patio. This terrace apparently connected the two parts of the Palace, and was open to such breeze as stirred on the outer side. The Governor, Captain McMillin, was seated on the terrace playing with a Chow dog. His movements were deliberate, his speech slow, and he seemed a little sad.
As we sat there talking, the Governor told me about a delegation of the islanders who had come to see him a few days before about a routine matter, drains or roads or something of the kind. When they had finished their business the spokesman of the delegation cleared his throat and made a little speech extending his sympathy. Captain McMillin was surprised.
“I am very grateful, but I do not know why I stand in need of your sympathy,” he said.
“Pardon, sir, but we think you are in the same position that the Spanish Governor was in 1898,” the spokesman replied.
Indeed, Guam would fall to the Japanese on December 10, 1941— about a month after these Clipper passengers passed through the island. Both McMillin and Todd were captured in the conflict and would go on to spend the war in POW camps.
Captain McMillin was in the navy, and Captain Todd was in the marines; the difference of rank is great. So was the difference in ages: Todd (addressed as “Charlie” by the Governor) was perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight. They talked of some cases he had recently tried in the police court. A Chamorro had illicitly invaded the mined part of the beach and caused an explosion in which two people were injured. This was typical, and all the cases sounded more like accidents or misunderstandings than crimes.
“It’s an innocent island, sort of,” Todd said with his cheerful grin. “I’ve never had a serious case to try since I came here.”
We went in to a completely American dinner, in which even the vegetables and fruits were the sea-borne and ice-preserved product of the homeland. Governor McMillin talked a little about the visitors who had passed his way this past summer and autumn, the Duff Coopers, the Lucas and others. It was becoming apparent to me that this grave, dignified officer was lonely. His position made it impossible for him to circulate as younger men might; the club and the hotel, the houses of the islanders, were not for him. His daughter had gone home; indeed all American women had been peremptorily ordered out of the smaller islands over a month before, on October 18th. He liked to listen to the radio at night, preferably to San Francisco, although he did not disdain the excellent broadcasts in English which came from Tokyo and Shanghai. It was his custom to drive out alone, for a little air, just before going to bed.
The brass band of the Insular Navy was playing outside in the Plaza. The only music I recognized was “La Golondrina,” which made me think of similar plazas in Mexico. Just as we finished dinner the concert came to an end and we stood on the balcony to watch the white-clad musicians return to barracks. The Governor went in after a bit and tried to get some news on the radio, without success.
“In the event of a Japanese attack, Governor,” I asked, “what would happen?”
“A serious attack,” he said slowly, “could have only one result. I think you knew that before you asked the question.”
Wake Island
The Clipper left Guam the next morning at dawn. The next stop was Wake Island, where the Pan-American flight made an unexpected stop for nearly a week.
A storm had arisen in the Pacific—not a typhoon, but an ordinary storm of great violence. Its center was around Midway somewhere, and the Pan-American installations there suffered considerably; one seaman was killed. All the Clippers on the ocean, the ones at Honolulu and Manila as well as ours at Wake, were immobilized by the storm. Afterward I heard that Midway had never seen a worse storm since the seaplane base was created. While it was going on, we at Wake were going through days of exquisite weather, in a heat that was never stifling or unpleasant, on the white coral sand and over the clear blue sea.
That afternoon when we alighted in the lagoon and came up to be moored to the pier we had no idea of it. To the best of our knowledge we were going on to Midway at dawn. It was Thanksgiving Day. We had had turkey aboard the Clipper, for lunch; we expected a large Thanksgiving dinner that night, and, by the vagaries of the calendar, we expected another Thanksgiving Day at Midway. It so happens that the day you gain – the extra day – tacks itself onto your existence between Wake and Midway Islands. I had lost twenty-four hours in the South Seas, going out, and still felt a little puzzled over the events that had apparently taken place during that non-existent day. It was all explained to me, but in the learned language which does, in the words of Bacon, “wonderfullie obstruct the Understanding.” This lost day was now given back again, and with a certificate of the Pan-American company to make it legal.
The Pan-American Hotel on Wake was like all the others, two long, low wings and a central lounge and dining room. The wife of the station manager had not yet gone home; she and the wife of the manager at Midway were the only American women left in the Pacific Ocean. Mrs. Wake had an autograph book which she asked me to sign. The signature before mine, occupying a whole page in English and Japanese, was that of Saburō Kurusu. He had come through on his way to Washington just two or three weeks before. Mrs. Wake was looking forward to the next Clipper because it was bringing [Maxim] Litvinov. “But I don’t know,” she said reflectively, “if I’ll have the nerve to ask him to sign. He’s Russian.”
Thanksgiving dinner was a lively affair. By this time we were beginning to know each other. The PBY crews, which had been a unit before, crystallized out into individuals. Their tacitly acknowledged leader was Dick Mitchell, addressed as Mitch, who looked like a hero and no doubt was one. He was very big, strong and handsome, so that it seemed downright unfair that he should also be a first-class pilot and a born leader. Most of the others deferred to his judgment and tended to imitate him (unconsciously, of course). There were three other captains, one of whom was Rodney Jackson, a thoughtful youth who did a lot of reading and writing. Among the navigators, radio operators and engineers were my friend Cunningham from Boston, red-haired, freckled and intelligent, young Kerry Coughlin from Mitch’s crew, and a demon poker player from Texas, named Aycock. Soon after dinner some of the PBY men settled down to the poker game they had started on the Clipper. That night I was tired and went to bed.
We had our customary early start in the morning and flew out two and half hours toward Midway before we were ordered back to Wake. The storm had begun. For the next five days, although we saw nothing but fair weather, we listened to radio reports and waited.
The author was not alone in recognizing “Dick Mitchell, addressed as Mitch,” for his leadership qualities. Richard S. Mitchell was named head of the Consairways division of Consolidated Aircraft Group just eighteen months after the trip described here.
Sheean goes on to describe his daytime activities on the island, the layout of the worker areas and Pan-American property and the construction workers there. It makes for very interesting background information, but it comprises several pages which have nothing to do with the PBY pilots so I won’t repeat it all verbatim.
Over on the Pan-American side of the island there was also an open-air movie theatre which most of the Clipper passengers and crew and a good many marines attended every night. After the first night I settled down as a regular customer in the poker game run by the PBY crews and had no time for film going. To start with, I was God’s gift to the game, which had been going on for so long – seven or eight ferry trips across the ocean – that it stood in need of fresh money. However, after my second night I began to win and kept it up so relentlessly that some the more aircraftsmen began to look upon me with disfavor. The game went on for as many hours as anybody wanted to play, and then afterward we raided the kitchen for food. To the astonishment of all, the Pan-American company never catechized or reprimanded, even when we had practically cleaned out the ice-box.
The principal sporting event on Wake Island was rat-shooting. Mitch had an air pistol and at night when everybody but the PBY crews and I had gone to bed the shooting began. Mitch was exceedingly good at it. A vast brown figure in a violent Honolulu shirt, shorts and sandals, he would creep about the place stealthily, killing rats as much by his cleverness as by bullets. He has by far the highest record in this respect. The rats were innumerable and most bold. They roamed over our feet as we played poker, ran at liberty through kitchens, dining room and lounge, and swarmed over the island outside. Any rumor they have been, or could be, exterminated, is hereby denied. As a matter of fact, I thought them rather harmless little animals after a while. As they sat back and considered us with twinkling eyes, they reminded me much more of squirrels than of rats. Mitch was in earnest about his duty to destroy as many of them as possible. “What do you suppose would happen here if one infected rat got ashore?” he asked.
One night we were practicing with the air pistol and Kerry Coughlin, who was tired of rats, tried to hit the dinner gong on the other side of the lounge. This was a challenge to all present, and we accepted it. Alarmed Clipper passengers could be heard slamming and locking their doors. Nobody hit the gong.
Another couple pages of background information, and then Sheean addresses Rodney directly.
The sheer theatricality of the Pan-American Hotel there, with all the bright-clad and half-naked people talking about war, made me think of a play. Meeting Rodney Jackson one morning on my way over to the construction camp, I said: “I want to write a play about Wake Island. It’s made for that purpose.” Rodney answered: “That’s funny. I’ve started a story about it. What’s your play?”
My play, of course, was going to be about some Clipper passengers stranded on Wake Island. There was a Chinese lady and Japanese diplomatist – a sort of Madame Sun Yat-sen and Mr. Kurusu, although neither would have been a portrait – and there were the PBY pilots and crews and a sad-eyed girl from Guam. Oddly enough, Rodney’s short story was going to be about roughly the same people, although he had also added a tramp newspaper man to his cast of characters. We thought it out separately and then compared notes, inviting the comment of our PBY friends on the result. They made some quite constructive suggestions, I remember, including one to the effect that the dauntless aviator and the sad-eyed girl from Guam might get together in an argument over shooting rats. I incorporated this into my play at once. Rodney wrote a full outline of his story and was about to begin writing the characters, setting, and general idea—which is about as far as I am likely to get with any play. The climax of both play and story was the same: the Clipper was disabled by a Japanese attack and the passengers were saved by the PBY pilots flying them to Honolulu. We argued for a long time about whether there ought to be one PBY or several. Neither the play nor the story survived our departure.
47 passengers arrived in Honolulu on the Clipper; the Manila/Honolulu segment contains records of the Consolidated pilot names as well as Vincent SheeanHonolulu Star-Bulletin announcement of Clipper passengers 7
After arriving in Honolulu, Vincent Sheean and the Consolidated pilots would go their separate ways. Rodney and some of the other crew members boarded the SS Monterey bound for San Francisco. Their ferry flights from San Diego to the South Pacific continued throughout the war.
A list of First Class passengers departing on the SS Monterey towards San Francisco. Rodney Jackson’s name is on line 25.
According to Broken Spear: The Roller Coaster Existence of Sumay, Guam, a paper by Guam historian James Oelke Farley, the Pan-American Hotel was the first (unintentional) target of the Japanese bombing raids on Guam less than two weeks after the visit described here, when their bombers overshot their intended targets and hit the hotel kitchen instead. ↩︎
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 Census12The Golden Gate Manufacturing Co. office on Desbrosses St.
Georgia’s parents, William CunninghamSavage (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 correct18Lawrence 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.
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. ↩︎
1905-08-24. Airship Puts Kink in Knickerbocker’s Neck.The Evening World (pg. 5) ↩︎
Both illustrations on this page come from this Evening World article. ↩︎
1905 New York State Census. A.Dist. 21/E.Dist. 47 (pg. 74, lines 31-36) [Ancestry][FamilySearch] ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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). ↩︎
1914. Map of White Plains, N.Y. G. W. Bromley & Co. (sheet 12) ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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)
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
English, Dave (2003). The Air Up There: More Great Quotations on Flight. McGraw-Hill, NY. ↩︎
