In 1933 I closed down Caddo Productions. I was a man of twenty-seven, and that’s an age, I think, when you first start feeling you’re a man.
I should qualify that. I felt a man in the sense that I had accomplished part of what I had set out to do. I had made movies – some good ones, some bad ones, but over-all I was not dissatisfied with what I had done. And of course I had made a lot of money. I was proud of the fact that I had stood up to a great many people much older than I was, much more experienced, who had looked at me with a certain disdain and didn’t think I could accomplish my goals.
But in other ways I was not a man and I knew it. I had a long uphill way to go before I reached maturity. I already had one broken marriage behind me, which pained me and made me feel inadequate. A broken marriage is a failure even if it’s a mistake from the word go, as mine was; it’s evidence of an emotional failure somewhere within you. I had also had a broken love affair, and it contributed to that feeling of uncertainty and failure.
There I was in my late twenties, and I had made a splash. I look back now on the age of the late twenties. You may not be a man yet, but you have a tremendous energy and a tremendous manly strength. You’re out of the first flush of youth but you still have all the power of your youth and a little of the experience that comes with age. Most men I know who ever accomplished anything were on the track of it by the time they were thirty or they never did a damn thing.
Toolco was growing steadily. I can’t say it was doing very well, because it was the Depression, but it was holding its own, and even in the years that it lost money there was enough cash flow so that basically I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted to I could put my hands on ten or fifteen million dollars without straining the resources of Toolco. I was worth, all told, about sixty or seventy million. Not too shabby. I already had my base of operations on Romaine Street, I had Noah Dietrich handling things for me in California, I had Ray Holliday and Monty Montrose handling Toolco’s affairs in Houston, and I had a highly competent engineer and pilot ln Glen Odekirk, who was absolutely devoted to me, helping me in my flying ventures.
I had achieved a kind of superficial personal freedom. I had ordered my life so that I could do whatever I wanted to do without any strain.
I looked back eight years to the nineteen-year-old gawky kid standing in a Houston courtroom, listening to the judge say, ‘Okay, Sonny, go out and be an adult,’ and I realized I had done it. I had made mistakes in those eight years, but I had gained a great deal of self-assurance and I had a clearer idea of what I liked and didn’t like.
I avoided one big mistake. That’s the mistake of the young man who says, ‘All right, I’m going to go out and I’m going to make ten million dollars,’ and then suddenly at the age of thirty-five finds himself with his ambition realized and nothing else to do. He set his sights too low.
A lot of people said, ‘You’ve made a hell of a lot of money, Howard. Why don’t you spend some of it? Take a trip around the world. Play golf in Europe. Enjoy yourself.’
I couldn’t do that. Sometimes I went on a vacation aboard my yacht, but after a week, or a week away anywhere, I was restless. I was an active man, always have been an active man, can’t stand sitting on my tail for too long.
Even now, despite the physical condition I’m in, you have no idea how I fret at enforced inactivity. I know it’s absurd – a sick man of sixty-five can’t go out there and do. But I would love to.
But then I was in my late twenties. Okay, what next? I had maintained a continual interest in flying, right along through the movie-making period, and in 1934 I decided it was time to devote all my energies to it instead of working with my left hand.
I thought it out and made a decision.
I assembled a crew of friends, hired some other competent men, and we started building a plane of my own design with which I was going to make an attempt on the world speed record.
6
IN THE EARLY 1930s flying was a hit-or-miss proposition. The world’s best pilots were the eccentric daredevil types who flew by the seat of their pants. Instrumentation was haphazard, standards were indifferent, and the Bendix Trophy winners, practically every one of them, built his own plane in his backyard. I was out to do quite a bit more than that – to set standards for the vision I had of air travel.
The first record I went for was the world land speed record held by the Frenchman, Raymond Delmotte. I wanted to break records, and that was why I started out to build the H-1. The H stood for Hughes.
But if you’re going to build a plane that’s the fastest plane in the world, naturally you have to make some innovations. And while breaking the record may have been my motive at the start, I quickly became so interested in the engineering problems that long before I was finished, and certainly long before I flew the ship, it was the engineering that had begun to fascinate me, to the point where I said to myself, ‘This is it. This is what I want to do with my life.’
I became totally absorbed in the concept and problems of design, and that stayed with me for decades. The rest of it – speed records and even the commercial airlines that I pioneered – took second place. As for the technical stuff, I don’t see how these details would interest anyone except me, and maybe a few airplane buffs. I don’t want people picking up this book and thinking it’s a manual on aircraft design. Let’s just say I designed the H-1, then built it, then flew it on Friday the 13th. I tried a day or so before, but you had to do four runs to qualify for the record and it got dark and I didn’t finish.
Glen Odekirk said, ‘For God’s sake, Howard, don’t try again on Friday the 13th.’
But I did. I was never a superstitious man. I broke the record that day at Martin Field in Santa Ana, California. Amelia Earhart and Paul Mantz were there as witnesses, and a guy named Therkelsen was up in a Lockheed Vega as official observer.
After I broke the record I decided to see what the ship could really do. It was about the sixth or seventh passage and I was all in a lather and could have flown all day. I pushed the ship too hard. We gave out a story that some steel wool had worked its way into the fuel line, which unfortunately led to rumors that there was sabotage, but that wasn’t true. I didn’t want any aspersions cast on the H-1 so that was the simple thing to say, and I said it. The truth is that when I pushed the ship too hard, the engine froze. She conked out. The landing gear wouldn’t come down either. It was still retracted and it stayed that way. I couldn’t make the airfield. I made a dead stick landing on some farm just short of it.
With a small airplane – anything piston-driven, except for something as large as a Constellation or a big passenger jet – you come close to stalling when you land. At a certain point on the glide path you throttle down and put the nose up. A full stall landing, with your nose up high, gives you the slowest possible landing speed and a short ground roll, which you want if you’ve got no engine. Getting the wheels on the ground is only half the battle, especially if you have a tail wheel and there’s no weight resting on it. You still have to bring her to a stop without going ass over tit, and without power that’s not easy. You have, or you had, just as many accidents after a ship touched down as you had on the glide paths.