English
Photographer Unknown
Norman Rockwell and illustrator Dean Cornwell took seaplane ride after judging the 1923 Miss America contest in Atlantic City, New Jersey
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
Well, the first time I ever went up in an airplane, it was at a beauty contest in Atlantic City, the first one that I went to, and the airplane was a very new one. This was a hydroplane, and they offered any judges that would like to go up, they’d give them a free ride. And we put on our helmets because there was no cabin to the plane, you sat out in the open air. And so we took off and went up, and this fellow in as much as we were free passengers and he was going to have some fun with us, he did that. He didn’t do a loop-the-loop, but he did some beautiful nose dives, and all this was in a heavy old aquaplane that had these big pontoons under it. Well, we were very thrilled with it.
There was a terrible racket because the motor was right behind us, and we came down and right after we got down, the same pilot took up another passenger who happened to be a skywriter. This fellow, I think he was working for the Lucky Strike company, and he’d go up, and in an airplane, not a hydroplane, and make the name Lucky Strike in the sky. We had no more than gotten out or taken off our helmets and off they took. Evidently, they said afterwards that he must have let the Lucky Strike pilot take over the controls, and the Lucky Strike pilot wasn’t used to a hydroplane with the weight of the pontoons. And he must’ve tried to side slip or turn the plane too fast or something, and the two of them crashed and it was a horrible accident. And Dean Cornwell and I were standing there, we saw the whole thing.