Fokker F-32 – A New Yorker State of Mind

Fear of Flying

The early New Yorker loved two things about modern life — college football and air travel. Tragedy would bring them together on the last day of March 1931.

April 11, 1931 cover by **Peter Arno**. A brilliant cover, contrasting the skinny, lightly clad runner with one of Arno’s stock characters from the Taft era — a millionaire with a walrus mustache.

The New Yorker’s sportswriter John Tunis was especially keen on Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame football team, which played an annual rivalry game against Army at Yankee Stadium. Tunis’s colleague, E.B. White, was the flying enthusiast, never missing a chance to hop aboard a plane and marvel at the scene far below. In the Nov. 30, 1929 issue, White was eager to join passengers on a test of the Fokker F-32, and suggested that flying was becoming so routine that one could be blasé about its risks:

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?…Title card from a silent Paramount newsreel reporting on a November 1929 test flight of the Fokker F-32 at Teterboro, possibly the same flight enjoyed by **E.B. White**. At right, a celebration of the plane’s arrival in Los Angeles. (YouTube/petersonfield.org)

All of that exuberance came crashing down in a Kansas wheat field on March 31, 1931. It was Rockne’s fame — which the New Yorker and countless other magazines and newspapers helped to spread — that put the coach on a TWA flight to Hollywood, where director Russell Mack was filming The Spirit of Notre Dame. Rockne stopped in Kansas City, where he visited his two oldest sons, before boarding a Fokker F-10 destined for Los Angeles. About an hour after takeoff one of the airplane’s wings broke to pieces, sending Rockne and seven others to their deaths.

(University of Notre Dame) *click image to enlarge*

The accident rattled E.B. White. In his April 11, 1931 “Notes and Comment,” White pondered the eulogies Rockne received from President Herbert Hoover and others, calling into question the fame a college football coach could attain while achievements of college faculty go unheralded. White also seemed to have lost some of his faith in the progress of aviation, suggesting that the autogiro (a cross between an airplane and a helicopter) might be the safest way to proceed into the future:

**Knute Rockne,** in undated photo. (University of Notre Dame)

Ironically, it was thanks to Rockne’s fame that the aviation industry began to get serious about safety. A public outcry over the crash led to sweeping changes in everything from design to crash investigation, changes that have made flying one of the safest forms of transportation today.

SAFETY FIRST…The crash that claimed the life of **Knute Rockne** resulted in a public outcry for greater safety in the air. This article in the July 1931 issue of *Modern Mechanics* suggested parachutes for passengers and for the plane itself. (modernmechanix.com)

As for the cause of crash, it was determined that the plywood covering one of the Fokker F-10’s wings had separated from the wing’s supporting structure — the wing had been bonded together with a water-based glue that likely deteriorated as the result of rainwater seeping into the wing.

Unfortunately, the investigation into the crash was hampered by souvenir-seekers, who carried away most of the large parts of the plane even before the bodies were removed. So much for honest Midwestern values, at least in this case.

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Give My Regards

Back in Manhattan, Dorothy Parker was writing a eulogy of her own, bidding farewell to her interim role as theater critic. Parker subbed for Robert Benchley during his extended European vacation, and often noted that it was just her luck to be stuck with a string of plays that likely comprised one of Broadway’s worst spring line-ups.

In an earlier column Parker had alluded to the fact that Benchley was in Europe, no doubt staying part of the time with their mutual friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, at their fashionable “Villa America” at Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera.

SIGHT FOR SORE EYES…**Dorothy Parker** was glad to have her old friend **Robert Benchley** back at the theater desk, she having endured a “rotten time” reviewing a long string of bad plays. (dorothy parker.com)

Hopeful to review at least one play of redeeming value before her friend returned, Parker was to be sorely disappointed as evidenced in her final review column. Of the terribly dated Getting Married, a play written by George Barnard Shaw way back in 1908, Parker was more afraid of Getting Bored, especially when Helen Westley (portraying Mrs. George Collins) entered the stage to deliver a 15-minute monologue…

Things got no better with the second play Parker reviewed, Lady Beyond the Moon, a “dull, silly, dirty play” that was frequently interrupted by various sounds from the restless audience — “comments, titters and lip-noises…” The play must have been terrible, because it closed after just fifteen performances.

As for the third play Parker reviewed, the misnamed Right of Happiness, the audience had every excuse “for displayed impatience,” yet conducted itself “like a group of little lambs.” Right of Happiness, observed Parker, “fittingly concluded the horrible little pre-Easter season…” The play closed after just eleven performances.

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Turning Up the Heat

If anyone thought he had a right to happiness it would have been New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was preparing to face a grilling from Judge Samuel Seabury. Walker loved the nightlife and left most of his duties to a bunch of Tammany Hall cronies whose activities drew the attention of reformers like Seabury and Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his “A Reporter at Large” column, Morris Markey observed:

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Walking Tall

Raymond Hood (1881-1934) might have been short in stature, but he stood tall among the architects of some of New York’s most iconic skyscrapers — Rockefeller Plaza, American Radiator, Daily News, McGraw Hill (Sadly, both his career and his life were cut short when he died in 1934 at age 53 from complications related to rheumatoid arthritis). Allene Talmey, a former reporter for the New York World and managing editor of Conde Naste’s original Vanity Fair, gave Hood his due (see brief excerpt) in a New Yorker profile, with a portrait by Cyrus Baldridge:

LANDMARKS…The 1931 McGraw-Hill Building and the 1929-30 Daily News Building. (MCNY/Wikipedia)

And of course, Hood’s 30 Rock. I took this last December before everything shut down.

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From Our Advertisers

Speaking of big and tall, Al Smith and his gang took out this full page ad to announce the availability of office rentals in the world’s tallest building. Thanks to the Depression, only 23 percent of the available space in the Empire State Building was rented out in its first year. Thankfully, the building was also an instant tourist attraction, with one million people each paying a dollar to ride elevators to the observation decks in 1931, matching what the owners made in rent that year…

…for those who could afford more than a dollar ride up the Empire State’s elevators, the cooling breezes of coastal California beckoned…

…those with even greater means and leisure time could hop on a boat to Europe…note that you could still cruise on the Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship…also note that the illustration of the posh couple was rendered by Helen Wills (1905-1998), better known at the time as the top women’s tennis player in the world…

HELEN, MEET HELEN…American tennis star **Helen Wills** in 1932, and a self-portrait from the same year. Wills was the world’s top women’s tennis player for nine of the years between 1927 and 1938. She played tennis into her 80s, and sketched and painted all of her life. (Wikipedia/invaluable.com)

…Guess who’s coming to dinner?…hopefully not William Seabrook, who had just released his latest book on his adventures as an explorer…in Jungle Ways, Seabrook devoted an entire section to cannibalism in the French Sudan and how to cook human flesh; apparently he tried some himself…but then again by most accounts he was a weird dude who dabbled in occultism and possibly believed in zombies…Seabrook’s 1929 book, The Magic Island, is credited with introducing the concept of zombies to popular culture…

…speaking of weird, an ad for Michelsen’s “Bay Rum” body rub…

…when Marlboro cigarettes were introduced in the mid-1920s, they were marketed as “luxury” cigarettes and sold mostly at resorts and hotels. In the late 1920s, however, they were marketed as a “lady’s cigarette,” with ads in the New Yorker featuring handwriting and penmanship contests to promote the brand. This ad from November 1930 featured the “second prize” winner of their amateur copywriting contest…

…it appears marketing tactics changed a bit in 1931…still the dopey contest, but instead of real photos of winners, like the schoolmarmish “Miss Dorothy Shepherd” above, this ad featured a rather tawdry image of a model, more gun moll than schoolmarm…

…on to our cartoonists…Ralph Barton, who was with the New Yorker from Day One, had been increasing his contributions to the magazine after a notable absence from spring 1929 to summer 1930…beset by manic-depression, he would take his own life in May 1931, so what we are seeing are Barton’s last bursts of creativity before his tragic end, reviving old favorites like “The Graphic Section”…

…Barbara Shermund entertained with some parlor room chatter…

…Leonard Dove looked in on a couple of frisky old duffers…

…William Crawford Galbraith, and a crashing bore…

…John Held Jr gave us one of his “naughty” engravings…

…and two by our dear Helen Hokinson, stuck in traffic…

…and enjoying cake and ice cream, with a dab of culture…

Next Time: An Unmarried Woman…

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Writer

As a book reviewer for the New Yorker, Dorothy Parker could eviscerate any writer with the tip of her pen, and often did so.

Nov. 30, 1929 cover by **Adolph K. Kronengold.**

One writer, however, who received consistent praise from Parker was Ernest Hemingway, whom she first met in 1926. In the pages of the 1920s New Yorker, Parker particularly lauded Hemingway’s short story collections, In Our Time (1925) and Men Without Women (1927), which bookended his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises (which Parker thought OK but overly hyped). When the New Yorker profiled Hemingway in the Nov. 30, 1929 issue, it naturally turned to Parker to do the honors (although Robert Benchley, a good friend of Hemingway’s, could have offered his own take on the author) :

SHE’S A FAN…**Dorothy Parker** was a long-time admirer of the work of **Ernest Hemingway.** His last work of the 1920s, *A Farewell to Arms*, was serialized in *Scribner’s Magazine* and published in September 1929. The success of that book made Hemingway financially independent. (Mugar Library/Wikipedia)

During Hemingway’s Paris years Parker actually took a boat with him to France (in 1926, along with mutual friend Robert Benchley) and so got a firsthand taste of his bohemian adventures. By the time the New Yorker profiled Hemingway, the Jazz Age was dead and Paris’s so-called “Lost Generation” was a thing of the past. Indeed, Hemingway had already been in the States for more than a year, returning in 1928 with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer (their son, Patrick Miller Hemingway, was born in June 1928 in Kansas City. Patrick still lives in Kansas City, and is now 90 years old).

Biographer Jeffrey Meyers notes in his book Hemingway: A Biography, that Hemingway of the early Paris years was a “tall, handsome, muscular, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young man,” features that were not lost on Parker:

I’M TAKING NOTES…Ernest **Hemingway** (left), with **Harold Loeb, Lady Duff Twysden (in hat),** Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson, Donald Ogden Stewart (obscured), and Pat Guthrie (far right) at a café in Pamplona, Spain, July 1925. The group formed the basis for the characters in *The Sun Also Rises*: Twysden as Brett Ashley, Loeb as Robert Cohn, Stewart as Bill Gorton, and Guthrie as Mike Campbell. (Wikipedia)

…more from Parker on Hemingway’s magnetic appeal…

MAN ABOUT TOWN…**Ernest Hemingway** (far right) in 1926 in Paris, outside the city’s famous *Shakespeare and Company* bookshop. He is pictured here with **Sylvia Beach** (on his right), the shop’s founder. (Collection Lausat/Keyston-France/parisinsidersguide.com)

Although Hemingway remains widely read and revered, such a hagiography — especially from someone as reliably critical as Parker — would be unlikely today. From his safari massacres of countless animals (in pursuit of his manhood) to his mistreatment of four wives and general misogyny, he is a far more complex and controversial figure today. One thing Parker got right: his short stories have held up much better than his novels. As for the profile, Parker concluded:

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Meet the Fokkers

In previous blogs we have established that E.B. White was an aviation enthusiast. He seems never to have missed an opportunity to catch a ride into the skies, so when pilots were conducting test flights of a prototype Fokker F-32 at New Jersey’s Teterboro field, he was there to file this brief for “The Talk of the Town”…

SKYTRAIN…Title card from a silent Paramount newsreel reporting on a November 1929 flight of the Fokker F-32 at Teterboro. Note how the title card uses a railroad reference (“Pullman”) as a descriptive for the passenger cabin. Indeed, early airplane passenger cabins were very much designed along the lines of Pullman cars. At right, a circa 1930 photo, possibly of a celebration of the plane’s arrival in Los Angeles. I imagine the FAA would not look kindly on this behavior today. (YouTube/petersonfield.org)

White’s enthusiasm for the aviation age is palpable in his description of the Fokker as it took off and climbed to a thousand feet:

ROUGHING IT…Passengers in Washington D.C. prepare to board what was perhaps the same plane White flew on at Teterboro. Note how they were required to walk across a muddy field to reach the plane’s entrance. The Fokker was the first four-engine commercial aircraft built in America and the largest land plane in the world at the time (there was a much larger amphibious German plane). At right, the plane’s four engines were configured back-to-back. (Wikipedia/petersonfield.org) *click to enlarge*

I suppose it was in line with the New Yorker’s stance of keeping things light, but White’s dispassionate account of a plane crash earlier that day seemed a bit cold. From the air he described a scene just north of midtown, where a crowd had gathered near the site the crash. The pilot was killed, but a passenger managed to parachute to safety.

DOWN TO EARTH…Pilot **Charles Reid** died instantly when his plane slammed into a YMCA on 64th Street on Nov. 20, 1929. His passenger parachuted to safety. **E.B. White** referred to the crash in his “Talk” article. (digital-hagley-org)

Excerpt from a Nov. 21, 1929 *New York Times* account of the crash. (NYTimes archives)

Speaking of crashes, the Fokker on which E.B. White was a passenger crashed a week later (Nov. 27, 1929) during a certification flight from Roosevelt Field to Teterboro Airport. No one was killed, but the aircraft was destroyed. The design itself didn’t last much longer — considered underpowered for its size, and too expensive at the dawn of the Depression, it was phased out by the end of 1930.

Perhaps after all of that flying, White needed something to calm the nerves, a subject he addressed in his “Notes and Comment” column:

THE WOMAN’S HOUR, according to **E.B. White** in his “Notes and Comment” column. (vinepair.com)

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The Little Gallery That Could

“Talk,” via art critic Murdock Pemberton, had more to say about the new Museum of Modern Art, that is, not taking it very seriously…

UPSTART…Although the *New Yorker’s* art critic **Murdock Pemberton** seemed dismissive of the new Museum of Modern Art, its first month’s attendance was more than 47,000 visitors. Image above from the MoMA exhibition *Painting in Paris*, Jan. 19-March 2, 1930. (MoMA)

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Welcome to Thurber World

In 1931 James Thurber published his second book, The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities, which consisted of pieces he had done for the New Yorker, including eight stories (from Dec. 29, 1928 to Aug. 9, 1930) that featured the marital escapades of a couple in their middle thirties, the Monroes, modeled on Thurber’s real-life marriage to his wife, Althea.

The Nov. 30, 1929 issue included Thurber’s fifth installment of the Monroe saga, “Mr. Monroe Holds the Fort,” in which a fearful Mr. Monroe, left home alone (his wife was visiting her mother), imagines there are burglars in the house:

…like his famous character Walter Mitty, which Thurber would introduce in 1939, Mr. Monroe had an equally lively imagination…

The character of Mr. Monroe would see new life in the fall of 1969 when NBC debuted My World… and Welcome to It, a half-hour sitcom based on James Thurber’s stories and cartoons. The actor William Windom portrayed John Monroe, a writer and cartoonist who worked for a magazine called The Manhattanite. In the show, Monroe’s daydreams and fantasies were usually based, if sometimes loosely, on Thurber’s writings.

THURBER AS A SITCOM…The actor **William Windom** portrayed John Monroe, a writer and cartoonist who worked for a magazine called *The Manhattanite,* on the 1969-70 NBC sitcom *My World… and Welcome to It.* **Joan Hotchkis** played his wife Ellen, and **Lisa Gerritsen** portrayed his inquisitive daughter Lydia. (tvguidemagazine.com/sitcomsonline.com)

HOME SWEET HOME…Left, the opening credits for *My World… and Welcome to It* featured actor **William Windom** (as John Monroe) entering a animated house based on James Thurber’s famous “House and Woman” cartoon, which was originally featured in the March 23, 1935 issue of the *New Yorker.* (mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com)

My World… and Welcome to It was cancelled after one season. Nevertheless, it would win two Emmies: one for Windom and another for Best Comedy Series.

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Thank Heaven for Maurice

Things were looking up a bit in the talking movie department thanks to the Ernst Lubitsch-directed The Love Parade, featuring recent French import Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald. Film critic John Mosher observed:

MUCH-NEEDED LAUGHS…**Jeannette MacDonald** and **Maurice Chevalier** in *The Love Parade* (1929), directed by Ernst Lubitsch. (MoMA)

Mosher was much less impressed by another musical, Show of Shows, featuring an all-star cast and Technicolor that added up to little more than a “stunt”…

IS THAT ALL?…Warner Brothers *Show of Shows* offered “77 Hollywood Stars” and “1000 Hollywood Beauties” — 80 percent of it in Technicolor, but that wasn’t enough to impress the *New Yorker’s* film critic **John Mosher**. At right, **Arte Frank Fay** (l) and comic **Sid Silvers** in a color scene from the film. (IMDB)

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A Guide to Christmas Shopping, 1929

Lois Long’s fashion column, “On and Off the Avenue,” predictably grew in length as the Christmas holiday approached, and in the Nov. 30 issue she offered advice on how to go about one’s shopping duties. Some brief excerpts:

TRAILBLAZER…**Lois Long** guided *New Yorke*r readers through a list of “big, bewildering stores” in her “On and Off the Avenue” column. At left, the B. Altman department store, circa 1920s. (thedepartmentstoremuseum.org/PBS)

…Long’s column was peppered with holiday-themed spots, including this one by Julian DeMiskey…

From Our Advertisers

…we start with a couple of back page ads, including one from the National Winter Garden’s burlesque show and an ad announcing the imminent arrival of Peter Arno’s Parade (just $3.50, or signed by Arno himself for $25)…