Putangirua Pinnacles

Rush hour at Petone Beach

The 'suicide club' of the early US Air Mail Service

In August 1918, the [US] post took over airmail operations from the military, and the department's own civilian pilots began to fly its own biplanes, which were either custom-built or remodeled for postal service. (De Havilland's DH-4, which had a more powerful 400-horsepower engine, superseded the Jenny as the fleet's workhorse). Much like the Pony [Express] riders, the aviators were expected to satisfy their employers' obsessions with speed and sticking to the schedule regardless of conditions. They raced their finicky, flimsy, unreliable aircraft through dense fogs, blizzards, and towering mountain ranges, protected mostly by the small planes' responsiveness and slow speeds. Of the 200 pilots who belonged to the service's "suicide club" between 1918 and 1926, 35 died on duty, but many more emerged bloody and battered from crashes.

Somehow, the Air Mail Service managed to complete 90 percent of its flights, although emergency landings were common. Pilot Dean Smith telegraphed a cryptic explanation to headquarters after his engine quit in midair, causing an unusual disaster: "Only place to land on cow. Killed cow. Wrecked plane. Scared me. Smith." While carrying the mail from Elko, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho, Paul Scott was forced to land by a broken oil line; then, followed by a pack of wolves, he walked 27 miles for help. When Henry Boonstra's carburetor froze during a snowstorm, he set the plane down on a 9400-foot-high Utah mountain, grabbed the mail, and stumbled through heavy drifts for 33 hours before reaching a ranch house. The resident shepherd lent him a horse, and the pilot finally reached the nearest village and phone three days later. The aviators accepted such hair-raising risks less for the salary than from the desire to hold one of the few jobs in the world that allowed them to fly. As Smith put it, "Alone in an empty cockpit, there is nothing and everything to see. It was so alive and rich a life that any other conceivable choice seemed dull, prosaic and humdrum".

Thrill-seeking behaviour has a strong genetic component, and the right stuff clearly ran in the family of Katherine Stinson, the first woman authorised to fly the US mail. Her parents operated a flight school in Texas, her sister Marjorie trained combat pilots in World War I, and her brother Eddie founded the Stinson Aircraft Company. The "Flying Schoolgirl" took America by storm with her loop-the-loops and skywriting, to say nothing of her leather garb and trousers, then still a rarity for women. In 1913, she amazed the crowd at the Montana State Fair by dropping mailbags from her sketchy wood-and-fabric plane, then went on to enthrall fans abroad before volunteering to be a combat pilot in 1917. She was rejected because of her sex but helped the cause by flying for pledges that brought $2 million to the Red Cross. In 1918, Stinson signed on as a regular Air Mail Service pilot and, despite a crash landing en route from Chicago to New York, managed to break a record for covering 783 miles in 11 hours. (Around 1920, tuberculosis forced her back to earth; she moved to New Mexico for her health, became a successful architect, and lived to the age of 86).

- Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, New York, 2016, p224-5.

See also:
Blog: From London to Amsterdam, 1922, 20 February 2017
Blog: Seattle Museum of Flight, 25 April 2013
Blog: Le Bourget Air & Space Museum, 18 March 2011

Marlene Dietrich's 1929 screentest for The Blue Angel

Last night's viewing was Emil Jannings & Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). The 1930 film produced in both German and English-language versions made Dietrich a trans-Atlantic star and landed her a hefty Hollywood contract with Paramount, which desperately needed some European glamour to rival MGM's Swedish star, Greta Garbo. And when this is your screen-test - replete with its feisty, unconcealed disdain for the risible material - why wouldn't you get the gig? The 1929 screentest was thought lost for decades until it turned up in Austria in 1992, just before Dietrich died. Unfortunately I can't find a version that will permit embedding, but just follow the link below.
 
Marlene Dietrich's Screen Test for Josef Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel from Justin Bozung on Vimeo.

Cuba Dupa 2018

Pilate's role in the crucifixion and its use for anti-Semitic purposes

Author Ann Wroe discusses the depiction of Pontius Pilate's role in the crucifixion and how the early church writers turned it to the service of anti-Semitism:

'...[F]antasies [of far-fetched miraculous cures by Jesus] would be laughable if they did not carry a dark undercurrent: the determination of early Christian writers in every branch of the church, whether Greek, Coptic or western, to shift the blame for the crucifixion from Pilate to the Jews. This could reach grotesque levels, as when Origen in his commentaries on Matthew and John simply pronounces Pilate innocent, and ascribes to the Jews all the cruelties that were clearly inflicted on Christ by the Romans. Once the gospel-embroiderers had lost sight of the fact that crucifixion was a uniquely Roman punishment, uniquely in Pilate's power, they could take Jewish 'responsibility' to absurd lengths: even, in the Coptic apocrypha, causing the Jews to crucify Pilate himself as a loathesome 'Egyptian'.

The reason for these inventions, at least at first, was not simply to hurt the Jews. For at least three centuries after Christ's death, as the new religion struggled to establish itself, it was vital to have a Roman official who would say, repeatedly, that Jesus posed no threat to the empire. Pilate had to be Christ's advocate, even his friend, and this made the Jews the villains. As Christianity became accepted and official - starting with the Edict of Milan in 312, when Constantine recognised it as a religio licita throughout the empire - Pilate's fortunes fell into steep decline, and he became a villain in his own right. The Nicene Creed of 381 could state unequivocally that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, with no mention of the Jews.

Nonetheless, medieval anti-Semitism was still based squarely on the notion that the Jews had killed Christ. Pilate - who has always been used as men want to use him - became a witness to their supposed intractability, their emotionalism, their capacity to sow evil in the world. Although there was probably a core of truth in Pilate's reluctance to kill Jesus - for whatever reason - it was expanded and embroidered. Even the most tyrannical Pilate put the Jews in a bad light. In invented story after invented story he complained that they had misled him, made him do what he had never wanted to do. He had tried every subterfuge to save Jesus, but they had insisted on his death'

- Ann Wroe, Pilate, London, 1999, p.315-6.