One Summer: America, 1927 (38 page)

So as July dawned in America—in the week that Richard Byrd and his team splashed down in France, that New York suffered its first heat wave, that Calvin Coolidge celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday by donning cowboy apparel, that Charles Lindbergh took off for Ottawa, that Henry Ford’s minions prepared his apology to Jews, and that the world’s leading
central bankers assembled in secret conclave on Long Island—the story that preoccupied the nation was how fit and eager Jack Dempsey was. Scores of reporters filed daily reports from his training camp at Saratoga Lake, New York, suggesting that he was looking menacing and resolute and that his punches had a snap to them not seen in years.

Then came terrible news. On July 2, a police car arrived at Dempsey’s camp to inform him of a family tragedy. Dempsey’s brother Johnny had gone increasingly off the rails in recent months, so much so that his young wife, Edna, had fled to the East with their infant child. Johnny Dempsey had tracked them to a boardinghouse in Schenectady, just twenty miles from his brother’s training camp, and there he had shot and killed Edna, then turned the gun on himself. He didn’t harm their child.

Jack Dempsey was devastated. The police drove him to Schenectady to identify the bodies. Then Dempsey returned to his camp, retired to his cabin, and would not respond to knocking, leaving everyone to wonder what would become of the fight. To universal relief, Dempsey emerged from his cabin after two days of seclusion and grimly resumed training.

In Paris, Commander Byrd’s crew, their formal commitments dealt with, celebrated their last night in the city a little more colorfully than Lindbergh ever had. Bert Acosta—or “sleek, swart Bert Acosta,” as
Time
magazine called him—took George Noville to some of the seamier night spots of Montmartre for an evening of jazz and cheerful abandon. Bernt Balchen was taken out for a drunken Viking evening by a group of Scandinavians based in Paris. Byrd declined to join either party and instead had an early night.

Charles Levine and Clarence Chamberlin were in Paris at the same time, but they seem to have been somewhat excluded from the celebrations. Levine, belatedly realizing the importance of public relations, abruptly gave 100,000 francs, or $4,000, to the Aéro-Club de France to build a clubhouse at Le Bourget. He also called on Madame Nungesser, who was now getting more than a little creepy in her stout refusal to
accept that her son Charles was gone forever and not afloat on the North Atlantic, surviving comfortably on fish that he and François Coli hauled gleaming from the sea while awaiting rescue from a passing ship.

Levine proposed to the other Atlantic fliers that they fly home together in their two planes, but the invitation was declined, partly because the Byrd plane was a wreck (it would never fly again), partly because a westward flight against the prevailing winds was insanely risky, and partly because no one wanted to be that close to Levine. Chamberlin decided that he had had enough of Europe (and probably Levine) and would sail home with the Byrd team on the SS
Leviathan
in a few days. Levine had promised Chamberlin $25,000 for his part in their adventure but in the end paid him much less than half that.

A week after landing in French waters, the Byrd party traveled back to Normandy, to Le Touquet, where they had dinner with the Prince of Wales, then proceeded on to Cherbourg to board their ship home. Their very act of sailing was given a giant three-deck headline and five thousand words of coverage in the
New York Times
, as if it were in itself an act of heroism.

Then things went eerily quiet aviationwise. With Byrd and his team at sea, Lindbergh locked away on Long Island writing
We
, and Levine talking mostly nonsense, there was nothing aeronautical left to write about. On July 12, for the first time in six weeks, no aviation story led the front page of the
Times
. At the bottom of page 1, however, was a small story so curious as to be worth mentioning.

The previous day in Canada, according to an Associated Press report, a plane doing aerial survey work for the Canadian government had taken off from an airfield near Lake Manitoba. The plane carried a pilot, a photographer, and a surveyor. The weather was good. Several witnesses reported that the plane climbed to about two thousand feet in a normal manner, but then, as it emerged from a cloudbank and as onlookers watched in bewildered horror, the three occupants left the craft one after another and plunged to their deaths. What caused them to jump or fall is a question to which no plausible answer could ever be supplied.

The main news by mid-July was of a new and more brutal heat wave
that was settling over much of the nation. In New York City on July 13, the temperature rose to 91 degrees at four in the afternoon, and broke 100 degrees elsewhere. By Saturday, July 16, the number of deaths in the city attributed to the heat was twenty-three and throughout the East it was at least sixty. Half a dozen of the victims drowned while trying to cool off. One lucky survivor was an eight-year-old boy named Leo Brzozowsky, who was found floating in an inner tube five miles out in lower New York Bay. He had been in the water for at least five hours and was roughly halfway between Staten Island and Keansburg, New Jersey, when he was rescued by a passing motorboat. The boy was fully dressed—he was even wearing shoes—and was unable to explain why he had gone into the water fully clothed or how he had gotten so far from shore. Doctors said he was exhausted but would make a full recovery.

On July 16, a torrential afternoon downpour cooled things off but brought chaos, too. Lightning knocked out power in several neighborhoods and killed a couple sheltering beneath a tree on Staten Island and a policeman on a street corner in Brooklyn. Trains to and from Coney Island were stalled by flooded tracks and short-circuited electrical systems just as several hundred thousand people were trying to get home from the beaches. The rain caused much flash flooding. In Brooklyn, a twenty-seven-year-old man managed the unusual feat of drowning in his basement when six feet of water flooded in.

The worst heat-related disaster of the summer was not on the East Coast, but on Lake Michigan at Chicago. It occurred when some seventy-five people, mostly women and children, crowded onto a commercial pleasure launch for a trip onto the lake in the hope of catching a breeze. As the boat cruised just offshore, a squall blew up. The passengers merrily raced to the sheltered side of the craft to escape the driving rain, but this unbalanced the boat, which then capsized. Twenty-seven people drowned. Among those who rushed to the rescue was Johnny Weissmuller, not yet famous as Hollywood’s Tarzan but celebrated for having won three gold medals in swimming at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Weissmuller happened to be on the beach at the time of the capsizing and reportedly recovered a number of people, both living and dead.

The
Leviathan
arrived in New York in rain and fog on July 18. Byrd and his crew, accompanied by Clarence Chamberlin, were transferred to the mayoral yacht, the
Macom
, where they were surprised to find waiting for them, rather secretly, Charles Lindbergh. Byrd was clearly touched that Lindbergh had come to greet them, but he was also no doubt relieved that Lindbergh declined to join them for the afternoon on the grounds that this was their day and he didn’t wish to be a distraction. Lindbergh was surely glad to let someone else have the world’s attention for a day.

As it was, the celebrations that followed were a little muted by Lindbergh standards, though this owed at least as much to the sodden weather as to jaded public sentiment. Byrd and his men, accompanied by Chamberlin, were placed in open-topped cars for a parade up Broadway. Unfortunately, the heavens opened in a clattering torrent just as they set off, driving many thousands of onlookers to scatter for cover and leaving Byrd and his men as drenched as if they had swum ashore. At city hall a big viewing platform had been erected for a presentation ceremony, but about a hundred of the chairs were conspicuously empty, and about half the crowd melted away during the speeches as the rain continued to fall heavily.

A thought on many people’s minds was whether the rain would ease for the Dempsey-Sharkey fight. Happily, it did. Though the air was thundery, the rain held off and the fighters and spectators enjoyed a comparatively cool, dry evening on July 20. Eighty-five thousand people turned out at Yankee Stadium (more than had ever attended a baseball game, but then for a boxing match thousands of extra seats could be put on the playing field—and never mind that many people in those seats couldn’t see very much)—and the gate of $1.25 million was a record for a non–title fight. Among those attending were Mayor Jimmy Walker, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the cowboy star Tom Mix, the publisher Bernarr Macfadden, and the Maharajah of Rutlam (or very possibly someone who fooled the world into thinking he was a maharajah). Two people
who went almost entirely unnoticed in the crowd were Richard Byrd and Clarence Chamberlin.

Sharkey was the 6–5 favorite based largely on the consideration that he was twenty-five years old and on the rise while Dempsey was thirty-two and all but retired. Jack Sharkey was from Boston, the son of Lithuanian immigrants who had endowed him with magnificent strength and a name that no one could spell. It was variously rendered in official records as Zuhauskay, Zukauskas, Coccoskey, and Cukochsay before Sharkey chose his more sleekly American-sounding nom de ring. He took “Jack” from his greatest hero—Jack Dempsey.

The fight was disappointingly restrained. Dempsey was much less aggressive than of old. Sharkey dealt with his cautious attacks easily, and led comfortably through the first six rounds. In the seventh, however, Sharkey did the most brainless thing a boxer can do. Frustrated by Dempsey’s repeated low blows, he turned to the referee to complain and Dempsey tagged him on the chin, knocking him out cold. Photographs show Sharkey dropped on the canvas like a discarded overcoat. Dempsey was declared the winner. He would now meet Gene Tunney in a rematch on September 22 in Chicago. It would be the biggest fight in history, and the most controversial.

An ecstatic Jacob Ruppert announced plans to increase the seating capacity at Yankee Stadium by extending the decks down the left-field line, which would let him accommodate ninety thousand spectators at boxing matches. This news was greeted with a certain cynicism among newsmen, who pointed out that many spectators were already so distantly seated that it had been like watching a bout through an inverted telescope. As one reporter put it only semi-wryly, at the conclusion of the fight hundreds of fans rushed from the stadium and “bought late extras to find out what had happened.”

The next day Sharkey was rushed to the hospital with severe internal bleeding. Happily, he made a full recovery, but it was a striking reminder that Dempsey, even in restrained mode, still hit with mighty force.

On the afternoon following the Dempsey-Sharkey bout, Charles Lindbergh, now embarked on his national tour, arrived in Boston in an unusually perky fashion. Coming in to land at the recently opened Boston Airport (on the site of the present Logan Airport), he raced across Boston Harbor just above the water line, then at the last possible instant shot straight up into the sky to the point where it looked as if his plane must surely stall, then nonchalantly rolled to one side in a graceful arc and made a pinpoint landing, coming to a halt just before the doors of the hangar set aside for his arrival—all this in a plane with no brakes or forward visibility. The delighted roar of the crowd could be heard on Boston Common, three miles away.

The center of Boston was a mass of people—“the greatest throng that has ever gathered in this city to greet any man or body of men,” in the words of one commentator. Though the crowd was good-natured, it was so vast and rolling as to be essentially beyond control. When the Lindbergh motorcade arrived at the common, the mass instinctively surged forward for a better view. Such was the momentum, reported the correspondent for the
New York Times
, that “those nearest the middle were lifted bodily from their feet by the human pressure.… Many women and children fainted and were saved from serious injury because the very weight of others round them prevented them from falling to the ground and being trampled under foot.”