The Stowaway Page 5

  Byrd loved her letter and replied via his male secretary, Charley Lofgren, a navy veteran whom he had asked to come on the expedition as his yeoman, for administrative duties: “Won’t you please send me your photograph . . . for I greatly admire your pluck?” There was, however, no place on the expedition for little girls.

  Even the most accomplished women had little chance of being selected, a fact that New York tabloid journalist and author Delos W. Lovelace (who wrote the novelization of the 1933 movie King Kong) made inescapably clear in syndicated papers:

  You would have thought the women could not have failed to see that there was no place for even one of them in such a party as was being organized. What woman could have withstood the rough life, the cold, the rigors of the Antarctic . . . No, we can’t use a dishwasher. Our dishwashers must be six feet tall and be able to lick their weight in icebergs if not in wildcats. Mending? Madam, we’ll do our own mending or wear ’em ripped. Oh, you are as strong as a man, are you? And used to all sorts of hardships? Went hiking for a full month in Yellowstone Park last summer, did you? Well, even at that we haven’t any place. Awfully sorry.

  When was Billy’s last kiss imprinted upon his girlfriend’s cheek? Likely they ended their adolescent love affair in tears near graduation in June. Nevertheless, that painful break set him free to fixate on adventure instead, and pent-up resentment against parental control became additional motivation to get away from his father—and from Bayside.

  During his last days of twelfth grade, Billy tried to appear upbeat. He had been accepted to City College, the college for the aspiring masses, and was still waiting to hear from the elite Cooper Union. He didn’t mention to friends that his father had “spoken to someone” there—even the immigrant class relied on connections. (His pop’s someone was almost always a swimming buddy from the Polish Falcons.) Billy’s teachers were making queries, too. He was not Textile’s number one student, but they really liked the kid. He was high energy—enthusiastic—and he had a wonderful, memorable smile. Billy half listened to reports on their progress. Cooper Union was his father’s priority, not his.

  A few days after the last school bell rang, Billy headed for the June 26 graduation ceremony at City College’s borrowed Harlem auditorium; his parents and grandmother attended with pride. Upon entry, seniors who paid their fee were issued a copy of the yearbook, The Loom. Some thoughts from Principal Dooley were printed on the front page, ending with this advice: “The question may be asked what are the characteristics or qualities that make for leadership . . . The most prominent qualities for leadership are a) character b) personality c) efficiency.” Not listed were the two traits most striking in Billy: a taste for adventure, and an openness to new people and things.

  Billy turned to his page:

  WILLIAM GAWRONSKI

  The Medical Society, The Chemistry Club, and The American History and Law Club

  “He wishes he had the charm of his own white rats.”

  The smart aleck assigned to yearbook captions had an easy quip to write, for the dreary winter day Billy had taken his rats to school was the stuff of legend. Girls had screamed as he raced several rats down the hall with his friends.

  After his family left, Billy hung around, gathering signatures in his yearbook and his brown leather autograph book. Principal Dooley liked Billy well enough to sign his name, as did almost all of his teachers, who left cheerful notes. And the genial boy’s yearbook brimmed with well-wishes from fellow graduates. The Jewish contingent had no problem with this open-minded Polish Catholic: his yearbook was signed by Isaac Bernstein, a nerdy-looking fellow active in the Menorah Society, and by swarthy swim-club president “Happy” Epstein, whose own caption read: “Who refuses to swim the English Channel; claims it is too effeminate.” There was a long, hearty send-off from the president of the senior class, Nathan Budnitz—also voted Most Popular Boy. Then there were the Italians, including the Best Looking Boy, Attilio Tadde, who was off to Princeton University. “Take care,” scribbled Gennaro Fanelli, “the Dancing Wizard of 1928.” “Best wishes!” wrote Silvio Fressola, “the Don Juan of Greenwich Village.”

  Billy’s former girlfriend had dark hair and eyes. Was she in a lower grade? She certainly was not blond looker Gladys Lloyd, vice president of the class, who had been accepted to Syracuse University upstate and wrote “Best wishes!” Was she brunette Gertrude Dickstein, the one who wrote the eyebrow-raising “Goodbye from your sax teacher”? Or could she have been Jewish Ruth Dvoren, voted “Best Looking Girl” and indeed lushly pretty on the page—very pale, with thick black hair and searing eyes. Dvoren wrote a “perhaps” note: “Lots of luck for—always.”

  Much as they liked the boy, Billy’s friends didn’t get his obsession with Antarctica. Why couldn’t he admit that his chances of getting his father’s permission to apply had gotten worryingly thin? Yes, it was an irritation to give in to parental pressure, but what did he think he would do with his life beyond help his father? That was an easy, safe path for him, all could agree.

  Did Billy know he was in the same boat that the missing Roald Amundsen was once in? Not many things in the world frightened Amundsen, except his mother, who had insisted he go to medical school. For a time, Amundsen had listened and was an exemplary student in everything but medicine. He was freed for a life of adventure only when his mother died unexpectedly in 1893, at which point, he dropped out of university. Had she lived to a ripe old age, somewhere in Oslo there might have been a frustrated doctor, and Robert Scott might have been first to the pole.

  The only one in Billy’s family who wanted him to chase his passions was his dear old babcia. His foreign-born aunts and uncles who had settled in America—following Rudy first to the Lower East Side and then out to Queens—were baffled by his polar fixation. So were his cousins, and they’d grown up as Americans. Only Babcia shared his wild beliefs in his future. One day in July she gave him her special spiritual charm engraved with the words “Sacred Heart of Jesus I Place My Trust in Thee.” He wore it around his neck that summer, even in the water, and would wear it on all of his later journeys. (Billy would carry a creased photo of his beloved babcia in each brown calfskin wallet he owned throughout the years.)

  Another day that summer, Billy was called to his grandmother’s half-story attic bedroom, where she stared at him with her age-beaten eyes. His babcia had seen something vonderful in the shiny ball she brought with her to Bayside along with her many amulets to ward off the evil eye: Billy would be with Richard E. Byrd, she insisted. Her grandson laughed. At least she was trying to cheer him up. She loved him.

  However, Billy’s mother had had it with Babcia’s big talk and demanded that her husband tell his mother to stop the unnecessary encouragement. Francesca’s weekly letters to her own mother in Poland were written on postcards and filmy airmail stationery in Kurrent, the Gothic medieval form of German that many Poles in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been taught to write before the Great War. The letters detailed Rudy’s growing business and Billy’s not-so-amusing preoccupation with Commander Byrd. In smaller handwriting, a careful reader of Kurrent (and there are not many left) will find mention of Francesca’s conflicts with her mother-in-law.

  Graduation behind him, Billy joined Rudy on client calls and assisted his color-blind father in picking out fabrics. Only Billy and Francesca knew his father’s secret shame: how in the privacy of their home, Billy described and suggested suitable hues. A few months earlier, Rudy had Americanized the family’s last name to Gavron—but for business only; nothing official with the government. He encouraged his son to do his part and give the wealthy of Bayside a card if he met them on the Long Island Railroad or the tennis courts; he was always to remember that he would inherit the upholstery business.

  Angry with his parents, yet expected to help his father, Billy was without a girlfriend that summer, not to mention hot and miserable—rare was a house with air-conditioning in those days. He didn’t even want to help Babcia in the garden, wh
ere she grew potatoes and cabbage and sunflowers that would soon be tall enough to be photographed by Rudy for the family photo album.

  Then his mood changed.

  • • •

  Of all people, Commander Richard Byrd was moving to Bayside. Billy read the incredible news on July 13, 1928, in a local Queens publication, the Daily Star. Seeking relief from humidity and intensifying intrusion into his privacy, the paper explained, thirty-nine-year-old Richard Byrd and his wife, Marie, had decided to move their four young children from their apartment in sweltering Manhattan’s luxurious but cramped Biltmore Hotel to the lush Bayside Avenue home of sixty-five-year-old performer Andrew Mack, who was summering elsewhere and happy to rent them his home. Not only would the newsworthy couple gain privacy, but now Byrd would be closer to the planes he’d fly over the South Pole—both being serviced in Uniondale, Long Island, east and south of Bayside near Roosevelt Field—and could supervise their maintenance on a more regular basis.

  Andrew Mack was a multitalented man, a vaudevillian comedian and legitimate stage actor who composed “The Story of a Rose,” a barbershop quartet standard and popular Valentine’s Day tune that would remain so even a hundred years later. Mack’s house on Little Neck Bay was close to the water, and his landscaped grounds were heavily scented with roses and gardenia tended to by a private gardener.

  Byrd’s imminent arrival in Bayside was the lucky break Billy had prayed for. He could “bump” into Byrd and pitch him personally. Billy now looked both ways for his hero every time he left the house. Francesca frowned when she spied this from the window. Enough already: she expected her son to help with housework and get past his adolescent fantasies.

  The commander would sail in September, the latest news reports said, seeing his flagship off past the Statue of Liberty and returning to shore by tug as his men continued to New Zealand. Byrd would then set sail later, leaving California in more comfort aboard the whaler C. A. Larsen. The local press also reported that the commander hobnobbed daily with all those fancy folk over at Actors Row and that the expedition was still $300,000 short. Perhaps Byrd had an ulterior motive for moving to the rich enclave.

  Every grueling August day, the commander had something big planned. In an address to the well-salaried industry fellows of the Advertising Club of New York broadcast on local radio, Byrd announced he was honoring his host city by renaming his flagship. The Samson would now be called the City of New York.

  One day, at the beginning of the month, Billy caught sight of Byrd on Bayside’s main street, Bell Boulevard. He thrilled at seeing him away from the chaos of tickertape parades, but his chest thumped so loudly that he couldn’t dare approach. Still, he took this unexpected sighting as an auspicious sign.

  After seeing Byrd on his own turf, Billy braved his luck and pressed his father again about permission to apply. Rudy stared. Was his son botched in the head? Rudy read the papers, too. He knew that some of the wealthiest men in the nation had applied for unglamorous jobs as sailmakers, carpenters, mechanics, oilers, and cooks. Harvard boys would scrub bottles to get a crack at adventure. Couldn’t Billy get that in his skull? Sons of the superpowerful going as bottle scrubbers! Anyone would hoot at an application by a first-generation immigrant’s kid. “The only people who will look after Poles,” he told his son, “are other Poles!”

  Billy fought back as best as he could without getting a lashing. What about Rudy’s good relationships with his Jewish suppliers and his Protestant Bayside customers? This was the modern day! This was America. But the parental consent form remained unsigned.

  A week into August, Cooper Union accepted Billy into its interior design program, all expenses paid. His parents were jubilant. Francesca jabbered away at the remaining Polish summer social events, dragging her son along.

  But every bitter day, Billy read about the latest applicants accepted for Byrd’s expedition. Six national finalists for the Boy Scout contest had emerged, all Eagle Scouts. They would gather in New York for Byrd to decide whom he liked best, with the front-runners living together until there was a victor. When they arrived in mid-August, a wire service photographer brought them to the Gowanus, Brooklyn, shipyard where the flagship was being fixed up and asked the candidates to wave and smile. And they did, holding on from various parts of the mast.

  In Queens, Billy looked at each face. Who would it be? Even if he applied for any task at this late date—scrubbing toilets, slicing potatoes—even if his father signed the waiver, how the hell would a boy like him wangle a spot? That was as likely as a flapper dating a newsboy. He had no experience except assisting his father with upholstery clients and occasionally lighting stoves on Friday nights for his Jewish friends’ families. Byrd wasn’t going to hire a Shabbos goy over a scientist.

  Byrd’s staff continued to evaluate the Boy Scouts over luncheons and administered the US Army Alpha intelligence test. The young men were drilled in stenography, a skill that Byrd though might prove useful on the journey. He might need an extra secretary.

  Beat reporters said a favorite had emerged: Paul Siple, a nineteen-year-old Eagle Scout from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had whomped his competition with a dumbfounding fifty-nine (out of eighty-eight) merit badges, the most of any Boy Scout in the nation. His badges included astronomy, aviation, blacksmithing, carpentry, conservation, electricity, handicraft, hiking, interpreting, journalism, leatherwork, machinery, painting, pathfinding, photography, physical development, pioneering, plumbing, radio, seamanship, signaling, stalking, surveying, and taxidermy. According to reports, he already had “five years of experience as a Sea Scout and had spent thirty-five weeks in total under canvas, including four weeks’ winter camping in snow conditions, often by himself.” Every child in America who had fantasized about taking the trip to the South Pole soon knew Paul Siple’s name.

  Siple was the epitome of wholesome: white, Protestant, well mannered, and eager to please. What a bonus, to have scientific and survival chops. Fifty-nine badges and a dutiful smile clinched the spot: before reporters with cameras, Byrd signed Siple on as an orderly.

  This was Billy’s dream! Paul Siple was living his dream!

  When he stopped by his old neighborhood to play some summer stickball, his friends laughed at how he rattled off the men on the crew list published in the New York Times as well as they could the Brooklyn Dodgers’ roster. Martin Ronne, he was the oldest, Billy explained, and the only one to have been in Antarctica before. He was a tailor and tent maker who had overwintered in minus-60-degree-Fahrenheit weather at the secret camp Amundsen set up on the ice barrier to beat Robert Scott’s British party to the geographic South Pole. Didn’t his friends understand that this man had been at Framheim base with Amundsen? Then there was James Feury from Patterson, New Jersey, a twenty-eight-year-old who had gone with Byrd to the North Pole. Billy’s friends did at least know the name of thirty-six-year-old airplane mechanic Benjamin Roth, raised like them on the Lower East Side, on Avenue A. He would be the first Jew to go to Antarctica. He was even bringing his prayer shawl, the Jewish papers reported.

  Seventeen veterans of Byrd’s 1926 North Pole expedition would be along for the new journey, and twenty-five navy men, with the army and marines represented, too. Legendary dog trainer Arthur Walden would also be on board; for all his expedition’s modernity, Byrd was relying on dogsleds as backup, on Amundsen’s advice. Walden had been a dog musher in northwest Canada two years before the Klondike gold rush of 1898. Byrd’s PR people had hired Walden a ghostwriter and had an autobiography out before the expedition began, and by August, A Dog Puncher on the Yukon was a bestseller. Walden’s real-life story was as exciting to Billy as any adventure novel by Jack London. A Yukon dog puncher who, by his own admission, had never been south of Philadelphia? If Walden could only sit down for a meal with him on Antarctic ice . . .

  Only two weeks before the first ship was due to depart, Billy met one of the expedition members at a well-promoted meet and greet at Gimbel Brothers department store’s
music department, where, on Thirty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue, a seaman named Richard “Ukulele Dick” Konter played his ukulele and talked about the expedition. He was learning Mammy songs, he said, for the Maoris in New Zealand and the unknown native peoples they would perhaps meet in Antarctica. (Mammy songs are stereotypical tunes about matronly black women that would be offensive to modern ears.) In his prior experience near the North Pole, he explained, classical music did nothing for “simpleminded natives”—just jazz. He then played the crowd “That’s My Mammy,” a popular song about black women tending the white children of the South. (When the crew reached New Zealand, Konter would play hundreds of Maoris “Alabama Mammy” before popping off to Antarctica, where, of course, there would never be any indigenous peoples for him to meet.)

  That August, a new dance caught on called the Byrd Hop. According to (confusing) written accounts, the steps involved takeoff, flight, and landing. Likely it was not as much of a fad as the Lindy Hop, named after Lindbergh’s “hop” across the ocean, but it did get good press coverage.

  Those less on-trend could read in the papers about Byrd’s detailed plans for the twelve-thousand-mile, three-month journey south. His armada would consist of four ships: the renamed flagship the City of New York, the supply ship the Chelsea, and two giant whalers, the C. A. Larsen and the Sir James Clark Ross. The latter two would go only as far as Dunedin, New Zealand, where the dogs and planes they had carried would be transferred to the two smaller ships. Some of the men would be left in New Zealand, too; only the luckiest would overwinter on the Antarctic ice.

  Three of Byrd’s ships would begin their journey from the East Coast: the New York, from Hoboken on August 25; the Chelsea, from Brooklyn on September 16; and the Ross, from Norfolk, Virginia, around the same time that month. The Larsen, which would push off from Los Angeles, would not leave for the Southern Hemisphere until October.

  Byrd would travel on the Larsen along with the two planes and a shortwave radio with a wavelength of 32.5 meters that could test the geographical limits of the new technology. He hoped to prove the device—first used for long-distance transmissions only earlier in the decade—capable of communicating with a station in Bergen, Norway, fourteen thousand miles away. A special corded telephone would also be on board for Byrd’s use—a modern device that Shackleton and Scott surely could have used on their doomed voyages.