One of the venues I frequently found myself at was the Queen Mary. This venerable old cruise ship, having been retired from service in 1967, had made its last voyage to the Long Beach Harbor, on the south side of the L. A. area. It was permanently docked and converted to a hotel and special event center, with many rooms for parties.
On one particular night in late 1983 I was playing with a little trio at a Christmas party somewhere on the Queen Mary, for a bunch of bigwigs of some corporation. At one point a rather important-looking fellow came up and asked to use the microphone.
His announcement was to this effect -- “Ladies and gentlemen - as you may or may not know, the Queen Mary will soon have a companion here in Long Beach Harbor. Just off this ship and a few hundred yards down the wharf, Howard Hughes’ legendary Spruce Goose airplane has been re-assembled inside a huge geodesic dome. The exhibit officially opens next week, but our group has been specially invited to take a walk - right now - off this ship and over to the Spruce Goose for a sneak preview.”
Was there anybody in that room more excited than me ? The Spruce Goose had not been seen in public since 1947. I was well aware of it, but hadn’t heard about this new exhibit.
I’d been a Hughes-aphile of sorts for many years. When I was a kid he was famous for a) being the richest man in the world and b) being utterly reclusive. Nobody understood why he was avoiding the public eye, but he had become a punchline on the Johnny Carson Show.
In 1972 an author took a chance and wrote a phony “autobiography” of “the reclusive billionaire”, assuming that Hughes was actually dead and wouldn’t step out to refute anything.
But just before the book hit the stores, Hughes DID emerge, on the phone at least, with scientific instruments confirming that it was Hughes’ voice. And he sounded sane. He denied any connection with the con artist author. It was a headline story, with the author facing a jail term, and the publisher highly embarrassed. Hughes disappeared again after this incident, in fact became more reclusive than ever.
In 1974-75-76 I was living in Las Vegas, working at the Frontier and Desert Inn hotel-casinos, which made me, technically, an employee of Howard Hughes. However, while I was in Vegas, he passed away, in March 1976, on a plane en route to the USA from Acapulco. This was a big news story everywhere, but especially in Vegas, where he had huge holdings.
And it seemed appropriate that he pass away on a plane, since aviation had been the greatest passion of his life, as a record-breaking pilot, as a designer of airplanes, and as the owner of TWA, one of the giants of the airline industry in his day.
The gigantic Flying Boat nicknamed the “Spruce Goose” was commissioned during World War II, when America’s troop transport ships were getting a lot of trouble from German subs.
Hughes took a large chunk of government money to develop a Flying Boat that would help win the war. But by 1945 America had won the war, and Hughes still had not completed the Flying Boat, which he called the “Hercules”.
Somehow it was necessary for the Big Plane to be made of WOOD on the outside, rather than aluminum. The media -- always trying to be clever -- came up with the “Spruce Goose” nickname, which Hughes hated.
A Congressional Committee accused him of taking government money to build a big useless plane that couldn’t fly. To which Hughes said --
"The Hercules was a monumental undertaking. It is the largest aircraft ever built. It is over five stories tall with a wingspan longer than a football field. That's more than a city block. Now, I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation all rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if it's a failure I'll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it"
Hughes never had to leave the country. A few weeks later, on November 2, 1947, he made good on his claim that The Hercules would fly.
Sitting at the controls himself, he did some taxiing in Long Beach Harbor, the Hercules churning through the water at over 100 mph. Finally, he went full throttle, and the Great Flying Boat, with its wingspan of over 300 feet, lifted 70 feet above the water, for a brief 30-second flight, covering about a mile.
There were skeptics that said the plane was shaky and unwieldy, and never could have transported 750 troops across the Atlantic, this being the entire goal of the Flying Boat Project. And in fact, the Hercules never flew again, for reasons known only to Hughes. He was a mysterious, brilliant, quirky man, not given to explaining himself to people, especially as he got older.
And in his last years, he was eccentric to the point of madness, with other people running his enterprises, and a handful of personal aides attending to his irrational quirks and demands. This last part of his life was well-documented in a tell-all book written by those personal aides. I read the book a few years after I left Vegas, and it left me all the more curious about him.
As a young man he’d made up his mind to be a) the world’s richest man b) the world’s greatest aviator c) the world’s greatest filmmaker and d) the world’s greatest golfer. Well he certainly did not achieve the last two, but he certainly DID achieve the first two.
I stepped away from my keyboards, the drummer and guitarist stepped away from their instruments, and we walked behind this group of suited businessmen who had cleared the party room. Down the ramp, off the Queen Mary we all strolled until we found ourselves ushered into the big domed building. The building had been empty, and we conducted ourselves in the echo-ey ambiance as we would in a shrine, never speaking above a whisper.
The lights were a little dim, as if to add to the spooky feeling. There it was -- the Flying Boat I’d heard about all my life, with that incredible wingspan, and the tail higher than a five-story building.
It was awesome, it was surreal, the immensity of the plane, the immensity of daring to make it fly.
The exhibit, despite its appropriate location in Long Beach Harbor, was not a big moneymaker, and after a ten year run the exhibit closed. The powers-that-be disassembled the Flying Boat and shipped it 1000 miles up the Pacific coast, to a place called the Evergreen Aviation Museum, in a town called McMinnville, just 40 miles out of Portland, Oregon.
I trust that the Evergreen Aviation Museum is not depending on a financial return on the Hercules. As a unique piece of aviation history, it deserves better.
Unfortunately, Long Beach really was the more appropriate home for it -- but the marriage to the Queen Mary now seems ill-considered, a mundane marketing ploy which insulted the old ship as well as the old plane.
On two later occasions I visited the Hercules exhibit, towing along people who might share my awe. And even without the preface, without the whole history lesson about Howard Hughes, an uninitiated person will look in amazement. But of course I’ll go ahead and give the history lesson anyway, to anyone who’ll listen, not ashamed to be one of those whose imagination got captured by this way-larger-than-life plane and the way-larger-than-life man who built it.
The Hurcules at the Evergreen Aviation Museum
