Invisible Themepark

Category: Bizarre Transport

Top 3 Cars of Supercilious Grouchy Old Bastards

Robert Novak, Patron Saint of Supercilious Old Bastards

Being somewhat in the market for a new car and being somewhat of a guy who is getting (snort!) older, I figured the first order of business was to determine which cars I should not buy.

That compelled me to reflect on the class of cars that I call Cantankerous Old Bastard Cars. First, let’s define Cantankerous Old Bastard:

The Old Bastard is pushing sixty, divorced, and monied. He is–as he likes to tell people often–successful. Two kids, grown, out of the house. Often he is a lawyer, a word which he pronounces in a gravely, Jilly Rizzo-type East Coast voice as: loyah.

Reading glasses perched on the end of his nose and white-collared dress shirts help complete the picture.

Now that Cadillacs no longer define the crusty old man, what kind of vehicle are we looking at?

3. Jaguar XJ Series

Jaguars have famously been absolute mechanical pieces-of-shit. Where else can you spend $73,000 for the privilege of owning a car that leaves you stranded in the broiling heat near Wendover, Utah? Jaguar, of course! Even Jaguar itself admits that its “old reputation for having spotty quality lingers from long ago and hurts us.”

But if you’re an Old Bastard, you need an appropriately haughty car. A car with a predatory beast as a hood ornament, announcing to the world: I, too, am a predator! What better than a Jaguar XJ series?

2. Corvette

Corvette? Old Bastard-type car? Gee, no kidding. You say?

When I lived in Washington, DC, we would occasionally hear about Robert Novak, the now-dead Washington columnist and patron saint of all Old Grouchy Bastards, terrorizing people with his black Corvette.

In one incident reported in The Washington Post, Novak screamed at a pedestrian: “’Learn to read the signs, asshole,” before speeding away. In the worst incident in July 2008, Novak hit-and-ran a pedestrian around 1700 K Street. Asked later about the event, the self-proclaimed “compassionate conservative” said, “He’s not dead. That’s the main thing.”

Johnny Carson also drove one of these. Need I say more?

1. Mercedes SLK

The Mercedes SLK is a touchy subject because, unlike Corvettes, it doesn’t reach out and grab you, shouting, “Old Bastard Car!” It takes awhile to notice this; some empirical data-gathering.

If you had asked me several years ago, I would have said, “Well, it’s a sporty enough car. Looks like anyone would drive one.”

But in years since, I have yet to see anyone under age 60 driving an SLK. The SLK is interesting, too, in that you’ll find the Old Bastards’ female counterparts driving them, too. Perhaps as spoils of a divorce?

My theory? The Mercedes SLK is for a certain class of discerning men who may even be aware of the taint of Old Bastardom, and are seeking to avoid it. They know about the cultural associations of ‘Vettes (and besides, Corvettes are just old-school Detroit iron). But a Mercedes? And one with a trim back end, as the SLKs have? Just perfect.

July 20, 2010
Where Is the Missing $3 Million From the Lost Hawaii Clipper?
It’s strange enough that a boat-plane with $3,000,000 in cash would go missing. It’s also strange that it would be so underreported.

PanAm Clippers were flying passenger boats that flew from mainland U.S. to China. Because of the Clippers’ limited range, the Clippers hopped from island base to island base, much like a toad hopping rocks: Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Guam, Philippines, Macao, and China mainland.

On July 28, 1938, the Hawaii Clipper took off from Guam with six passengers and nine crew. Destination: Manila.

The Clipper Vanishes

At 12:11pm, the Clipper navigator reported to Manila that they were about 2 hours away. Everything was going smoothly, and weather was fine. At 12:12pm, Panay Island (just south of Manila) tried to contact the Clipper, but there was no response.

Panay sent several other messages, but with the same result.

No rescue team was sent out immediately because the Clippers knew these waters well, and were equipped for safety. After all, these were flying boats. At the worst, they could always put down on the water.

As a Time magazine article of August 8, 1938 says:

Trim and seaworthy, she could ride out rough weather as easily as a small yacht. She had four watertight bulkheads. She carried rubber inflatable boats, a stock of small balloons to drop behind her in hare-hounds fashion to show her course, kites for an emergency radio aerial, a shotgun and fishing tackle in case she piled up on a coral reef, enough food for 15 people for a month.

Yet the Hawaii Clipper has simply vanished. Nothing was found. No debris. No oil. Nothing.

The $3,000,000 Twist

What few people knew at the time: the Hawaii Clipper was transporting $3M in U.S. currency, serious money for 1938 (about $45,000,000 in 2010).

A New Jersey Chinese-born restaurateur, Wah Sun Choy, was carrying this cash in his position as President of the Chinese War Relief Committee. This was money that had come from fundraising in the U.S., to be given over to the Chinese government.

One theory was that Japanese agents had skyjacked the Clipper and forced it to fly the 100 miles to Japanese-held Tinian. But that’s complete pie-in-the-sky theory; no evidence at all to back this up.

The Mystery of the Mystery: Little Credible Information

The odd thing is that this event has been lost to history. After the flurry of contemporary newspaper accounts, little has been written about the Hawaii Clipper.
- There is a book by Charles Hill titled Fix on the Rising Sun: the Clipper Hi-jacking of 1938—and the Ultimate M.I.A.’s. Hill’s is a book with fun but potboiler details of conspiracies and reverse-engineering of airplane engines. Hill–is he even alive anymore?–cares so little about the subject anymore that his site, HawaiiClipper.com, has overgrown with spam. It’s now called My-Home-Gold. Nice.
- The State of Hawaii has a gallery of images of the Hawaii Clipper, but little mention of the mysterious event.
- Not at all a primary source, a site called Historic Mysteries has an article called “The Hawaii Clipper Disappearance” that is interesting only because it wraps up everything in a few short paragraphs and has a newspaper link.
Update

Since my article was first published, a new and authoritative site has come along: Lost Clipper. Find images of crew members, passengers (including the elusive Wah Sun Choy), and of the Clipper itself. Lost Clipper also reprints the CAA investigation into the crash.
August 20, 2009
PanAm Yankee Clipper Cutaway Drawing, ca 1930s

PanAm Yankee Clipper Cutaway Drawing

This cutaway drawing shows the PanAm Yankee Clipper (B-314), which was built by Boeing on the base of an XB-15 bomber fuselage. On December 21, 1937, Boeing delivered the first Yankee Clipper to PanAm.

The Yankee Clipper was the result of over 6,000 engineering drawings, 50,000 parts, and one-million rivets. But with such complexity came problems. First, it was the spark plugs. Then Boeing discovered that when the plane was loaded light, it was no match for the admittedly weak winds blowing across South Lake Washington (Seattle, WA).

And when the test pilots got the B-314 up in the air, then had yet another problem. As pilot Eddie Allen succinctly put it, “The plane won’t turn.”

But Boeing ironed out these wrinkles and eventually the Yankee Clipper became a graceful, reliable craft. Each Clipper cost $668,908; needed 3,200 of clear waterway to take off; and weighed 84,000 pounds gross.

Boeing eventually stamped out six of these Clippers for PanAm.

August 15, 2009
Hindenburg “A” Deck Cutaway

One of the best, and cheapest, books that I have ever had about the Hindenburg is called Hindenburg: an Illustrated History, by Rick Archbold, with paintings by Ken Marschall. The art is too beautiful to even talk about in this space. But because one interest of Invisible Themepark is cutaways, let’s look at one cutaway drawing of the “A” Deck of the Hindenburg.

The Hindenburg’s Cabins

On the “A” Deck were 25 passenger cabins that had two beds apiece, in bunk-like fashion. The walls between the cabins were fairly thin, just foam and a layer of fabric. The cabins could be quite noisy if you had a loud tenant in the adjoining room. Unlike the outer cabins in a cruise ship, none of these cabins in the Hindenburg had windows. The cabins were not a space where you spent a lot of time. Most time was spent in the more spacious public rooms.

Public Spaces: Promenade, Dining, Lounge, and Reading Room

On either side of the “A” Deck were promenades where passengers could sit or stand while looking out at the angled windows to the ground or clouds moving below. On one side was the large six-table dining room, hardly the cramped, all-purpose public area found earlier in the Graf Zeppelin.

On the other side was another big lounge complete with an aluminum piano. Two men could easily move the piano because it was made of pigskin-covered aluminum and weighed less than 400 pounds. For a greater sense of quiet and peace, the reading and writing room provided a small library, two writing desks, a mailbox, and stationary.

The main thing that distinguished the Hindenburg’s public places from that of other airship: space.

July 12, 2009
Zeppelin Sub-Cloud or Spy Basket: The Ultimate Secret
Zeppelins, despite their mammoth size, are by nature secretive modes of transport. Even when they plied the skies on a regular basis, zeppelins were largely misunderstood by the general public. I think I will puke if I read another book with an overly simplistic wrap-up like this:

And the the fiery destruction of the Hindenburg effectively marked the end of the airship age. The End.

God bless my Time-Life Books Epic of Flight series book, The Giant Airships, but that’s pretty much the neat ‘n’ tidy way they wrap up this whole, complicated saga. Nothing is that neat. There were many factors that contributed to the demise of airship travel (or I should say lull, since it is starting to come back) in the late 1930s. One tiny factor, out of perhaps hundreds, is the fact that helium, the heavier but safer gas, came mainly from two sources: the U.S. and Russia. In other words, not in Germany. But I digress.

That said, let’s look at one super-cool, secret part of the airships: the sub-cloud or spy basket.

Sub-Cloud Facts

As one crewman described the experience of being in a sub-cloud:

There I hung, exactly as if I had been in a bucket, down a well.

A sub-cloud was an aerodynamic “car” that was lowered on a cable below the zeppelin for purposes of spying or simply “spying” the conditions below the clouds.
- Often, the sub-cloud hung up to 500 feet below the zeppelin. Sometimes, the sub-cloud would be lowered as far as 750 or even 1000 meters–well over half a mile.
- Because of the isolation and lack of comfort, the sub-cloud could be equipped with a wicker chair, chart table, electric lamp, compass, and telephone.
- The support wire was steel with a brass core, and would also be used as the telephone line.
- Later spy baskets were not so much “baskets” as they were fully aerodynamic, fish-shaped cards–with fins, tails, and even small windshields.
- Crewmen loved one aspect of the sub-cloud: because smoking was forbidden on the hydrogen-filled airship, the sub-cloud was one place where they could smoke.
Lehmann and the Observation Car

Graf Zeppelin officer and Hindenburg Captain Ernst A. Lehmann, in his classic book The Zeppelins, describes the first usage of what he calls the “observation car”:

I did not see the preparations, but they must have been bungled somewhere. When the airship had reached a sufficient height Strasser got into the little car and gave the signal which would lower it a half mile below the ship. About 300 feet down, while the winch was allowing the cable to unwind slowly but steadily, the tail of the car became entangled with the wireless aerial. It caught the car and tilted it upside down. The cable meanwhile continued unwinding from the winch above and was beginning to dangle in a slack loop below Strasser, who only saved himself from being tipped out by clinging to the sides of the car with a deathlike grip. Suddenly the aerial gave way, sending the car and Strasser plunging down until it brought up at the end of its own cable with a sickening jolt. It was not a propitious introduction for the new device.
July 9, 2009