Pacific Musick: Personal life of Captain Ed Musick, Chief Pilot, Pan American Airways China Clipper

By Ross Detwiler

It’s January 1938. . . For two years, Pan American’s magnificent Martin M-130 flying boats have been safely and routinely carrying passengers from San Francisco to Hong Kong. It’s a trip considered by many to be a fairytale ride through the deserted Pacific islands equipped with luxury hotels and dining facilities. However, the corporate expansion continues. New Zealand will be the stepping stone to Australia and Singapore. The Martins can’t be spared. The shorter-range Sikorsky aircraft will have to be used. As with Hong Kong, this route will be blazed by Pan American’s Chief Pilot, Edwin C. Musick. This operation is so perilous that one fueling stop is made next to a tiny atoll, that, at high tide, was only one hundred yards in length. Flight crews will stay overnight there on an ocean-going freighter. On one of these flights, Musick has an engine problem and is faced with a choice. Does he dump fuel to comply with John Leslie’s always accurate performance numbers, knowing that could lead to a catastrophic fire? Or does he, this time, one time in his life, break with procedure… PHOTOS ON BACK COVER COURTESY OF JON KRUPNICK FROM PAN AMERICAN’S PACIFIC PIONEERS: THE REST OF THE STORY.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781645368786

Ross Detwiler

Ross Detwiler is a retired air force combat fighter pilot, retired corporate chief pilot, retired AF reserve heavy transport pilot, and now professional writer and journalist. Like the subject of this story, Ross has devoted his life to aviation and to the one woman that made that life a joy to live. COLOR COVER DESIGN OF SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE PICTURE BY FRED WOLFE. WWW.SFWGRAPHIC.COM

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Foreword

Pilot and author, Ross Detwiler, tells the story of a boy who in the earliest days of aviation learns about plane building and flying. Ed Musick learns to fly, survives a few mishaps and soon is a lead teacher of pilots on their way to Europe to fight in World War I. Musick wants to be sent overseas but his superiors have noticed his skill as a pilot and his understanding of aspects of airplane construction. He is too valuable to send overseas.

After the war is over, he has several adventures in civil aviation’s earliest days. He becomes one of the best-known American pilots. The epic crossing of the Pacific Ocean in 1935 by an airplane able to carry passengers and freight was headline news. Author, Detwiler, captures a moment in time when America was at a low point, the Great Depression of the 1930s. Our national self-esteem and confidence was in shatters. Lead by aviator and businessman, Juan Trippe, a team of gifted and forward-thinkers had overcome the many hurdles of cross ocean aviation. They started in 1929 with a 90-mile trip inaugurating the first US airmail service overseas: Florida to Cuba. It was headline news.

Six years later, they set forth to fly across the Pacific Ocean in four engine flying boats that could span huge distances, the longest leg being the first, 2400 nautical miles from California to Hawaii. The pilot was Ed Musick, Pan Am’s Chief Pilot. On November 22nd, 1935, The China Clipper departed San Francisco. Seven days later, after 159 hours in the air and overnight stops at Honolulu, Midway Island, Wake Island and Guam, it landed in Manila to a tumultuous welcome.

I grew up with this story because my father, John Leslie, was Pan Am’s Division Engineer for the Pacific. He worked closely with Chief Pilot Ed Musick, the principal character in this book. The two men and their calculations of flight management were based on hours of patient flying with Ed Musick, Pan Am’s legendary, pioneering pilot at the controls and my father behind him with a clipboard requesting higher or lower, RPMs, more or less propeller pitch, more altitude or less, with crew members painstakingly moving fuel with hand pumps forward or aft to balance the load and improve the aircraft’s efficiency.

When I read Ross Detwiler’s account of these momentous events in the increase of the range of airplanes, I noted my father is often referred to by his colleagues simply as John or the mathematician. The pilots and crews say to each other simply, Do it John’s way, and Just stick to what the mathematician says. I remember what my father often said: I was just one member of a great team. I also know that he could strip down and put back together a Wasp engine. He had a flight mechanic license. He was one of them.

My father was in the first class of aeronautical engineers graduated from MIT and he was Pan Am’s first aeronautical engineer. I know that the saddest moment in his professional life was having to deliver the eulogy for Ed Musick.

I think only a skilled, experienced pilot and writer like Detwiler could capture the special character, intellect and skill of Ed Musick which made him America’s second-best known pilot after his friend, Charles Lindbergh, and earned him a special place in the Valhalla of American Aviators.

Peter M. Leslie,

Director-at-Large,

Pan Am Historical Foundation

June, 2020

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Hawaiian Clipper moored at Wake Island.

Credit: Pan Am Historical Foundation

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China Clipper heading West over partially completed Golden Gate Bridge, 1936.

Credit: Pan Am Historical Foundation

Introduction

Sometimes, flying feels too godlike to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see.

-  Charles A. Lindbergh,The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953

Pressures.

In mid-1935, preparations were underway for that fall’s debut of Pan American Airway’s giant Martin M-130 ‘China Clipper’ on its historic first flight to Manila. For the previous seven years, the men in this story had been, as Horace Brock wrote, ‘Flying the Oceans,’ for Pan Am.

That April, Pan Am’s chief pilot, Captain Edwin C. Musick had flown a smaller Sikorsky S-42, ‘Pan American Clipper,’ on a survey flight from San Francisco to Hawaii and back. Nations were spellbound. Families ate dinner by the radio. Children, while listening, curled, and slept on tattered, depression-era rugs. Unbelievably, politicians listened and did not talk. Hawaii and back, the single greatest decrease of time over distance in the history of travel was complete, ‘on time, routinely.’ Through those two April nights, Americans held their breath then smiled, laughed, and cheered madly at the flight’s completion. They were proud and they knew there was more to come.

Ed Musick had performed the 1930s technological equivalent of an Apollo moon shot many times in the eight years prior to 1935. The directors of Pan American Airways knew nothing of the fears, tensions, emotional highs and lows, or the bone crushing fatigue their chief pilot and his crews faced as they undertook their tasks. They knew only that Pan American had set out to make international air travel a routine matter; a ‘have a seat and check out the menu’ matter, a ‘sleep in this comfortable bunk while the Giant Clipper carries you through the night safely and routinely’ matter, a ‘welcome to our luxurious hotel in the middle of the Pacific on an island the size of a football field’ matter. Going to the orient in the 30s on a Pan American Clipper was the absolute pinnacle of commercial travel. The directors would provide the money and organization for that task. Musick, John Leslie, the mathematician behind the long-range achievements, the flight crews that worked for Musick, and the maintenance and ground crews that constructed ‘civilization’ in the most remote locations were all expected to deliver the performance.

This story is not meant to be a detailed, event-based history, of the flying boats. It uses the corporation and airplanes as a backdrop only. It looks at the events, as the public saw them, and then imagines the desires, fears, elations, depressions, and emotional ups and downs of the characters in that performance, especially Musick. Many different people from all walks of American life and the events of the early 20th century are fitted in and around the Musick’s remarkable story.

As Larry Weirather in The China Clipper, Pan American Airways and Popular Culture has told us, Pan American Airways ‘was’ the United States of America. What Ed Musick and Pan Am were doing, the country was doing; establishing footholds, carrying the mail, blazing new routes, all the while flying into the rising Japanese sun in the west.

All of the personal characteristics that we currently know about Ed Musick come from carefully crafted press releases of the day, and a biography by his best friend written after his death. They tell us he was a sphinx; stoic, dead serious, meticulous to the nth degree, and more interested in airplanes than women. There was no need for the corporation to have a self-serving, outspoken PR man at the tip of the Pan Am Spear. The brass would take care of the fanfare, hand shaking, and public events. At the beginning of a record-breaking flight, Musick would stand, stone faced, next to them. Then he would go out and do his job. As each flight was completed, he arrived, quietly accepted the nation’s adoration then left the dais while others adjusted the microphones. Musick was an emotionless performance machine.

That was the hype. No more need be said in this day than perhaps the media got it wrong. Don’t take out a history book and follow the events I write about here because there’ll be bumps in your literary journey if you do. I follow the skeleton tale of Musick’s life as put down in the biography his friend wrote after his death.

I’ve been around men and airplanes long enough to know that the ‘schtick’ on Musick is, if not wrong, probably grossly understated.

What if Musick loved life, laughed, enjoyed socializing with his friends, and chased the opposite sex? Suppose that was his true personality, but he knew enough to go along with the image the corporation had crafted for the public? The above description certainly could fit a man in Musick’s position much closer than the public image created for him.

That’s the personality I’m going to give Ed in this story. Nothing I say will damage the reputation and dignity of the captain because I have too much respect for what he accomplished, but I hope you will agree it’s entirely possible and, as an inside look, it makes for a much more interesting story.

The story moves around a lot between Musick, Americans going about their daily routines, and other men and women involved in the extremely high pressure push of the 20s and 30s to advance commercial aviation. Yes, the U.S. government used the commercial expansion of Pan American to help finance footholds closer to the growing threat of Japan, but that is not what grabbed and held the American people’s attention. The public watched the effort as a marvelous story about transportation and new flying records, technological achievement, and romantic intrigue. Ed and his crews gave Americans heroes in which to believe.

More Pressures.

In mid-1937, nearly two years after that first ‘China Clipper’ Martin M-130 flight to Manila, the pressures continued on Musick as he flew his first survey trip to Auckland, New Zealand. He’d been ordered to accomplish the exhausting trip and be home on schedule so the plane, one of the smaller Sikorsky S-42s, could be used for the company’s inaugural passenger service from Manila to Hong Kong. Additionally, he was expected to take other headlining flights of the day in the Martin M-130 Clippers, as often as possible. Weather came and went, airplanes broke, but none of this was allowed for in the schedule. Each delay squeezed Musick to finish what he was doing, because more was planned as soon as he returned.

To fill Pan Am’s demand for routine Martin ‘China Clipper’ flights to the orient while simultaneously developing the South Pacific route to New Zealand. In January of 1938, Ed was on his third trip to Auckland, his second in less than two weeks. In 1937 and 1938, that route involved an 18- to 20-hour flight from San Francisco to Hawaii. Then an 8 ½ hour flight to the only landing site that could be found, Kingman’s Reef, in the middle of the ocean. The reef was so small that it barely existed at high tide. From Kingman’s Reef, it was over 10 hours to Pago Pago in American Samoa, on the edge of civilization in the mid-30s.

Pago Pago to Auckland was another 12-hour trip. With an absolute minimum of rest, the crew would board the plane and return along the same route. Doctors, checking these crewmen out after one of the Pacific flights, found them in states of total exhaustion and weariness, yet none of these facts changed the requirement of these crews to attend ceremonial dinners and receptions overseas each time a new record-breaking flight was completed. It was a routine primed for disaster.

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China Clipper with Pan Am Alameda Maintenance and other employees. Used as Christmas Greeting 1936.

Credit: Jon Krupnick collection

Final pressures.

Pan Am was getting its corporate feet under it and the ‘World Famous Captain Musick,’ the Time Magazine cover Musick, the Harmon Award winning pilot of the Collier Trophy award winning airline, was demanded in front of the news cameras. While there were dozens of men that Musick himself had trained that could’ve flown any of the flights he captained, that didn’t matter to the world. The world waited to see what was going on in the ‘Route of the Flying Clipper Ships,’ and Captain Ed Musick was the primary mover of those airplanes.

Finally, sadly, the time crunch caught up with the airline and Ed Musick and his crew picked up that tab.

I hope you enjoy this story of one of America’s proudest accomplishments and one of our greatest aviation heroes.

Last First

Talking about the Marker on Kingman’s Reef. As the oceans rise, that lonely monument and its island will, like the men it commemorates, disappear beneath the waves. Edwin Musick’s and their achievements deserve, at least, this memorial.

– Amazon book review by Bilagaana on December 21, 2008

January 1938.

This third ‘survey’ flight of Pan American Airways to New Zealand was a slave to diplomatic pressures. The U.S. was withholding landing rights for the British carrier, Imperial Airways, in the U.S. Until those rights were granted, Pan American was not going to enter Europe through the front door of the United Kingdom. Then when Pan American turned its concentration to the orient and Australia, England held back on landing permission in Australia to keep the American airline out and to aid Qantas in the development of that airline’s routes. Finally, representing Pan American, Harold Gatty, the world-famous Australian navigator that had taught Anne Morrow Lindbergh navigation and flown an around the world flight with Wiley Post, had secured permission to land from the government of New Zealand. To try and break their isolation, New Zealand would buck the crown’s desires to keep Pan Am out. This was the back door that Pan American needed to further establish itself as a Pacific powerhouse.

That permission had required the route to have established regular service, defined as three successful trips, by the end of 1936. Other developmental problems with Pan American forced it to request a one-year extension, which was permitted. Nevertheless, if Singapore and maybe Australia were to be reached through the New Zealand door, that door must be opened. Although a month late, the completion of this trip would count as having established service to New Zealand in three survey trips.

Pan American’s giant Martin M-130 flying boats, all three of which were known to the public as ‘The China Clipper,’ were too important to the corporate public image to be used on the low visibility, high risk flights to Auckland, New Zealand. Smaller Sikorsky seaplanes would be used to establish the new route.

The previous summer, on his first New Zealand trip, Musick landed in the Kingman’s Reef lagoon in a blinding rain shower. There was not enough fuel to go anywhere else. The landing had to be made.

The second Auckland trip had been accomplished just two weeks earlier in late December of 1937.

It was a tenuous operation.

In W. Somerset Maugham’s story, Rain, a woman named Sadie Thompson, who had fallen from social grace in San Francisco, came to the remote Pacific Ocean island of Pago Pago to find a new life. The role of that woman had been played in the silent movies by Gloria Swanson. Now, ten years after the film, Captain Edwin Musick and his crew slept in the Sadie Thompson Inn. They had arrived the day before after flying from Kingman’s Reef.

Ed Musick was again at bat for the airline.

Pan American II, later, Samoan Clipper moored in Pago Pago.

Credit: Pan Am Historical Foundation

He lay quietly in the predawn darkness, his body outlined on the sheets by the dampness that the tropical temperature, humidity, and nerves created. The Sadie Thompson Inn was silent. He mouthed a silent prayer.

This is your show, boss. Help me touch the correct keys.

He turned to his side and imagined Cleo, curled up against him. If she were there, he would slowly run his hand down her side. Quiet, soft spoken, and beautiful. Each time he thought of her, he marveled at the effect those thoughts had on him. More than any other physical trait, the softness of her skin aroused deep sensual pleasure in him every time he caressed her in bed. All it took was a touch and a little ‘throat giggle’ at a comment he might make and his spirits would rise. She leaned her head back for a tender kiss. Her presence calmed him. Ed smiled. Her image slowly melted away.

It was the few moments before rising. He’d been awake for the last half hour. Regardless of the fact that they had flown an exhausting trip down from Honolulu over the previous two days, they were to takeoff on this, the very next day, for Auckland.

Nothing in the world was moving except his heart. The water in the lagoon across the street had stopped lapping against the shore. The mooring lines on the big Clipper Ship were no longer creaking. The breeze stopped. The birds stood still on the branches outside. No one spoke. No one moved.

He heard the door from the front desk room quietly open and the old porter’s feet shuffle down the hall. The appointed hour was at hand.

A gentle knock. Four fifteen, Captain.

Thank you.

Musick showered and dressed. He’d laid out his immaculately pressed uniform and starched shirt the night before. Heat and humidity did not alter the requirement that Pan American crews always look like they were in the presence of the president himself, and ‘Meticulous Musick,’ although hating the public relations requirements of the job, went along with them because he so deeply believed in the job itself. Pan American Airways, in its far-flung global air travel empire, represented the United States of America. Ed Musick was the international ambassador for Pan American. His presence overseas represented the good wishes, diplomatic backing, and technological power of the United States.

Musick was nearly as important as the president would have been had he been there.

He walked toward the bright light at the end of the narrow hallway. The dining room where the rest of the crew was waiting for the captain was shrouded in a veil of hushed quiet, waiting for the ‘boss’ to arrive. It was precisely 4:45, the appointed breakfast hour.

Cecil Sellers, the first officer of the trip greeted him first. Big, friendly, laughing, Cecil Sellers regularly flew Captain on this very Sikorsky on the Manila to the Hong Kong legs of Pan Am’s trans Pacific routes. In fact, the plane had previously been named the Hong Kong Clipper. To feed the PR machine, it had been renamed the ‘Samoan Clipper’ for these second and third trips to New Zealand. Ed liked Cecil and was glad to have him along.

Good morning, Captain, Great day for an airplane ride.

Sure is, Cec.

To the radio operator, Finley, T.D., good morning, sleep well, I trust.

Skipper.

Musick nodded to each of the crew; his crew; men he had trained. Men he knew he could count upon.

Jack, how’s baby this morning?

She was fine when I hit the sack last night. I’m done here, Skipper. You enjoy breakfast and I’ll go start ’em up. No need to rush.

Thanks, we’ll be there in about 20 minutes.

J.A. ‘Jack’ Brooks left the room and walked across the street to the airplane.

Brooks, the mechanic, had enlisted in WWI to fix the new Army Air Corps airplanes. After the war, he had run his own garage in San Francisco until signing on with Pan American in 1934. The navigator, F.J. Mclean was very good at his job and Ed felt good that he was aboard. Still, the absence of Fred Noonan, the navigator Ed had used on the early Pacific survey flights in the Sikorsky and on the inaugural Martin ‘China Clipper’ flight to Manila, weighed on his mind. Fred had been lost with Amelia Earhart in mid-1937.

There were no stewards as there were no passengers. Pan Am was after an airmail contract first and foremost. Other than the huge fanfares that had been put on in New Zealand as Musick had arrived on the previous two occasions, the company was unusually quiet about these New Zealand runs. They had not gone smoothly and only the determination of Musick and his men had pulled them off. The lack of the larger Martins’ performance was apparent to everyone involved. The company didn’t want the all too possible potential for failure to be prominent in the headlines. The entire New Zealand operation was not the typically high profile Pan American publicity event.

In the background, the sputtering start, steady hum, and finally, intermittent roar of the Pratt and Whitney engines announced Jack’s completion of engine and systems checks. The propellers could be heard as their pitch was checked and rechecked, surging warm oil up into the moving parts of their variable pitch mechanisms. The noise settled as the checks on the airplane moored across the street were completed. The slow rhythmic ticking of the engines told the crew, subconsciously, they were due at the plane.

Ed finished his eggs and gulped the last third of his coffee.

What you men say we ride on down to New Zealand for dinner.

Murmurs, groans, and laughs were mumbled. Spirits surged with the élan that men feel when they and their ‘comrades’ embark on a dangerous undertaking.

Let’s go.

Yeah, move, move, move.

They got up in unison and started toward the door. It was a mere hundred yards out onto the mooring dock where the plane had been tied just twelve hours ago. Ed smiled and greeted the folks that had come out to watch the takeoff. Tourists from America couldn’t believe their luck at watching this event during their vacation. Here was the American hero, Ed Musick, just a few feet from them as he began another long-range flight. Ed touched one or two of the outstretched hands but decided not to sign any autographs as time was the driver. This plane had to be in Auckland today.

The men clump clumped down the heavy wooden planks of the dock, up the loading stairs and into the airplane through the hatch. Entering the cockpit, they took off their outer jackets and ties, hung them up, opened their collars and settled into their duty stations. The engines were running when he sat down and everything was ready for Captain Musick.

Precise…on time…routine…

Cast off the tether line.

Roger, Captain…line clear.

They taxied one hundred yards to the start point of the takeoff run, and Musick ruddered the big ship onto the proper heading for the rundown Pago Pago Harbor and into the Southern Pacific sky. At the far end of the harbor, he could see the waves crashing against the mountain and the rocky protectorate of the break water.

Unbelievable, thought Ed, all this modern capability out here in the middle of nowhere. It was a touch of home and a touch of the most remote of South Pacific paradises mingled with the most current of American technology all in the same location.

On takeoff, the plane, heavily laden with high octane aviation gasoline, mail, and aircraft maintenance supplies for New Zealand, at first wallowed, then slowly started to undulate from front to rear along the water. Each movement back and forth required the practiced captain’s hand to help dampen the oscillations. Too much correction and the undulations could become severe. That could quickly lead to destruction.

As the payload weight went to the wing from the hull of the craft, Ed eased the ship up ‘on the step,’ or front part of the underneath of the fuselage. By reducing the amount of hull in the water, the drag on the ship was greatly reduced. It accelerated faster. After forty seconds and over half a mile of takeoff run, the ship skipped along the swell tops, finally getting off the water about the precise point Ed Musick had figured it would happen; as John Leslie had calculated it would happen. At 5:38, just over ten minutes after sitting down in the airplane, Ed gently banked to the right and eased out over the mouth of Pago Pago Harbor. He called for the engineer to ease the throttles back and slow the propellers rotation to climb from the maximum takeoff power they had used to get off the harbor’s waters. The reef at the mouth of the harbor passed below them.

Pago Pago harbor was a teacup with one small opening through the mountains at its southeast point. That harbor mouth had seen the arrival of the natives over three thousand years ago and the sporadic landings of European trading ships throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sometimes with profitable results and sometimes with a lot of bloodshed. In 1872, U.S. Navy Commander Richard Meade established a harbor with the Navy officers, becoming ‘presidents’ of the locals. Being in a hurry, Meade did not get permission before raising the flag over the island and battles with natives opposed to the new ‘government’ led to it being hauled down shortly after. But six years later, the U.S. confirmed the base and became local administrators. The Samoans had been rumored, because of the occasional bloodshed, to be violent, but the opposite was true. The vast majority had converted to Christianity by the mid-nineteenth century when Pago Pago had become a whaling port.

If the Clipper should have to return once again to that harbor today, the prevailing easterly winds dictated the required procedure. They would have to be light enough to glide down over the trees on the slope of the mountain at the west end of the harbor, level off, land, and stop before the mountain and the reef on the east end. Add to the steep approach the necessity of keeping the ventilating cowl flaps around the engines closed to keep the engines from rapidly cooling. This reduced drag. Then the pilot had to keep at least some RPM’s on the four Pratts, so that they would respond if power were needed for a sudden and unexpected climb out. The crew had their hands full getting into the volcanic harbor. Even Ed had missed the approach the previous year on his first attempt. It could only be done with the plane at its lightest weight, practically out of fuel.

Those thoughts passed through all the crew’s minds as the echo of the four magnificent Pratt and Whitney 750 HP engines against the mountains in the rear decreased markedly with the power reduction and the decrease in rotation speed of the Hamilton Standard Propellers. Pan American Airways NC16734, the ‘Samoan Clipper’ was off the harbor waters at Pago Pago.

That departure was the highlight of the day in the otherwise quiet, remote outpost.

Radio, advise Alemeda airborne at 1632Z.

Roger, Captain.

How nice it would’ve been to be able to lounge around and enjoy the beauty of this remote place as any other tourist or inhabitant would do after the Clipper departed, to join fellow Americans and the locals and just talk about the wonderful job Ed had and the future of his company in that region.

Out of the question. The trip had to go.

Weather conditions weren’t bad. An early shallow mist had lifted and there was a gentle breeze from the mouth of the harbor.

The ‘Samoan Clipper’ had been the ‘Pan American Clipper II,’ after the ship Ed had flown, while the world listened, on his first survey flight to Hawaii. After that, it had been named the ‘Hong Kong Clipper.’ Other than naming the ship, there had been little fanfare for this trip. ‘New York’ keeping publicity of an event low sent a subconscious disturbing thought to all the crew. Nevertheless, to the crew, this was ship 734. Names came and went as part of the insatiable appetite of Pan Am for news coverage of its events.

Reaching his chosen cruise altitude, Ed called for ‘cruise power’ and gave the engineer a horsepower rating to set on the engine and propeller combination that would result in a cruise speed equal to the plan. Next stop, Auckland.

One hour out, Little flickering on the oil pressure on Number 4, skipper.

The Dream

Ed Musick at about the time he visited the 1910 Dominguez Hills Air Show in Los Angeles.

Credit: Pan Am Historical Foundation

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk, and run, and climb, and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

From the book, From Crate to Clipper with Captain Musick:

In 1912, Los Angeles was an overgrown country town, and Eddie Musick was an overgrown, gangling brown-haired lad of eighteen. From boyhood, he and his pal, Harry Reynolds, had been intensely interested in ‘horseless carriages.’ Barney Oldfield was their hero. They attended the first air meet in the United States at Dominguez Field in 1910 and became fascinated with aviation. Lacking the ‘six thousand bucks’ to buy an airplane, they determined to build their own. With much hard work and ingenuity, they finally managed to complete their task and were ready for the first flight. Unfortunately, the attempt was a failure, the plane was a total wreck, but Musick survived to fly again.

When Edwin Musick and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1900, the Pinkertons were still pursuing Butch Cassidy and the ‘Hole in the Wall Gang.’ In many places in the west, arguments could still be settled with a gun. It had only been 31 years since the magic steel rails on which the train travelled had been originally put down.

It had been a long train ride from St. Louis.

Hour after hot and dusty hour, the train and cars chugged, clunked, and clattered over the barren prairie and into the hills, and later the mountain passes of the Union Pacific Railroad. There were still ‘uncivilized savages,’ most cruelly contained on reservations, visible as a reminder of who had been here first. Just over twenty years earlier, Custer and the seventh cavalry had perished at the Little Big Horn. Ed couldn’t get over the size of the land.

In the front of the train, the giant steam engine conquered the 1,700-mile route, one valve cycle at a time. Departing the many stations and watering tanks along the route, steam pressure in huge cylinders forced against the driving pistons pushed them back in long slow strokes as the engine began to move. Sometimes, there was so much pressure, the huge steel wheels would spin on the steel rails until the engineer turned the pressure down.

At the end of their travel, the pistons would trip a release valve that dumped the pressure in the cylinder and allowed it to be pushed forward by the other piston as the cycles continued. The huge chug, chug, chug, departing the station became a half second chi, chi, chi, as the valves allowed much shorter quicker less powerful strokes as the monstrous machinery reached top speed.

Each time the train stopped for water or fuel, Ed would run to the front to watch the engineer. After the third time, the engineers passed the word to each other to look for the young inquisitive boy.

It was an old gray-haired engineer that took the time to walk Ed through his inspection of the huge wheels of the locomotive as the water and coal were being added to the tender.

This is a machine, son. It runs because people like me know its limitations and never ask more of the old girl than she can give. You understand?

I think so, sir.

Well, let me tell you what I mean. I mean that it’s designed to pull up to forty cars on the straight and level of the plains, but up here in the mountains, we can’t put more than eleven behind her. That would be putting more weight behind than she could pull uphill and much more than she could stop on the downside of one of these hills. Some man back at a big factory in Pennsylvania determined the capabilities he could design into this engine and that’s how it was built. Step by step. Need leads to design. Design leads to production, and production leads to me and the other engineers you’ve met taking care of her out here on the route and not asking more of the machine than it was designed to do. And we take care of her at each stop, oiling the moving parts, checking the valves, seeing there is not too much dirt in the water. Get it?

Yes. Yes, sir, I do.

"Machines aren’t complicated, but they don’t do things they weren’t designed to do. If you try to get more out of a machine than the designer thinks, you’re either a fool or running a test for that same engineer to see if he can make his machine better. Out here with a load of folks like your family and the others on board, we don’t experiment. We just run the machine the way we’re told. It keeps running that way and should take us all the way to San Francisco where you’ll change to a smaller train to get down to LA, safe and sound.