The Stowaway Read online

  Indeed, so many across the country delighted in this vicarious chance to stow away that the Brooklyn Daily Eagle couldn’t help but muse, “We only wonder why there were but three stowaways on Commander Byrd’s bark, the City of New York?”

  • • •

  Back in Bayside, Rudy and Francesca were beside themselves, with no note or word from their son. Did he have any idea what turmoil he had caused? Unbeknownst to Billy, as he hid on the shores of New Jersey the previous evening, there had been a rush-hour catastrophe: a ten-car derailment beneath Times Square of an Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway train carrying 1,800 commuters. The breaking news of the second-worst train wreck in New York City history (then and now) led the radio broadcasts and the headlines of the evening papers. Dozens were reported killed. With Billy still gone the following morning, Rudy and Francesca had feared the worst.

  Their son was alive but publicly humiliated, his disheveled picture on the front page of the papers. What was to become of his now-muddled career path?

  After an unpleasant car ride back home with his father from Hoboken detention to Bayside, he did not get any smiles from his parents. What kind of hero breaks the law? Any moral arguments about how he had failed them did not sink in. Upstairs with his bedroom locked, Billy was discouraged but “not licked.”

  FOUR

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE CENTURY

  A dogged New York Times reporter found out Billy’s name, give or take a few letters, and the portrait of an unidentified disheveled ragamuffin that previously graced the first page ran a second time, this time on the front of its photogravure magazine section, called New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial. The “paper of record” misspelled his last name as Gravenski. Even so, Billy’s ascent as a boy hero among New York youth had begun immediately after he first made news.

  The amusing multiple-stowaway story made an even bigger splash in nationally circulated Time magazine, but even there, journalists printed the name Gravenski. (One reporter quipped that the considerable store of booze could account for the fact that they found “another stowaway or two on the flagship every time they looked it over.”)

  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle saw a great local story to expand; many of its expedition articles now focused on Billy, who was, it announced in a scoop, “Doomed to Study Interior Decoration.” After divulging that he was to start Cooper Union in mid-September, the (finally) correctly identified William Gawronski, choked with tears, told the Eagle’s reporter: “I thought [Byrd] might let me go when he realized I, too, was willing to dare anything or put up with any hardship in order to be with him.” He probably cried even more when news broke that one of the other stowaways was on his way to the Panama Canal.

  Rudy calmed Francesca as best as he could when their boy’s face was on the front page of the New York Times not once but twice. But now the distressing episode was behind them, wasn’t it, except for a little residual shame?

  • • •

  As night dropped on September 15, Billy jumped out of his second-floor window and onto the garden, a fall softened by potatoes and cabbage plants and proudly photographed sunflowers. You would think that the boy had learned from his previous stowaway attempt to bring more food or a change of dry clothes. Not the case.

  An overnight subway crossing into Brooklyn took him to the Tebo Yacht Basin in Gowanus. He made for the location he’d written down in his notes: Third Avenue and Twenty-Third Street.

  In 1928 William Todd’s Tebo Yacht Basin was a resting spot—the spot—for the yachts of the Atlantic seaboard’s most aristocratic and prosperous residents. The swanky yard berthed more than fifty staggering prizes of the filthy rich. Railroad executive Cornelius Vanderbilt kept his yacht O-We-Ra here; John Vanneck, his Amphitrite. Here was also where to find Warrior, the largest private yacht afloat, owned by the wealthiest man in America, public utilities baron Harrison Williams; yeast king (and former mayor of Cincinnati) Julian Fleischman’s $625,000 twin-screw diesel yacht, the Carmago; General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan’s Rene; shoe scion H. W. Hanan’s Dauntless; and J. P. Morgan’s Corsair III. The Tebo Yacht Basin’s clubroom served fish chowder luncheons to millionaires in leather-backed mission chairs.

  Todd, a great friend of Byrd’s, lavished attention on his superconnected pal with more contacts than dollars. He had provided major funding for Byrd’s 1926 flight over the North Pole, and helped the commander locate and refit two of the four Antarctic expedition ships for $285,900, done at cost. Todd loved puffy articles about him as much as the next man, and press would help extract cash from the millionaires he actively pursued as new clients; helping out a famous friend might prove cheaper than the advertisements he placed in upmarket magazines. Throughout that summer, Byrd mentioned Todd’s generous support frequently.

  Two weeks after the City of New York set sail, the Chelsea, the supply ship of the expedition, was still docked at the Tebo workyard and not scheduled to depart until the middle of September. Smith’s Dock Company in England had built the refurbished 170-foot, 800-ton iron freighter for the British Royal Navy at the tail end of the Great War. First christened patrol gunboat HMS Kilmarnock, her name was changed to the Chelsea during her post–Royal Navy rum-running days.

  Not long before she was scheduled to depart, Byrd announced via a press release that he was renaming this auxiliary ship, too, after his mother, Eleanor Bolling. But the name painted on the transom was Eleanor Boling, with one l—the painter’s mistake. As distressing as this was (the name was his mother’s, after all), Byrd felt a redo would be too expensive and a silly use of precious funds. Reporters and PR staff were simply instructed to always spell the name with two ls.

  As Billy eyed the ship in dock days after his humiliation on board the New York, he realized here was another way to get to Antarctica. The old, rusty-sided cargo ship would likely be less guarded than the flagship had been.

  As September dragged on, Billy, back in Bayside, stiffened his resolve. No one would think he’d try again! On September 15, once more he swam out during the night to board a vessel bound for Antarctica.

  Since his visit two weeks prior, Billy had studied his news clippings and knew that the Bolling was captained by thirty-six-year-old Gustav L. Brown, who’d been promoted weeks earlier from first mate of the New York when Byrd added the fourth ship to his fleet. Billy liked what he read. According to those who sailed under Brown’s command, this tall and slender veteran of the Great War was above all genteel, and far less crotchety than the New York’s Captain Melville. Captain Brown’s education went only as far as high school, and while he wasn’t against college, he admired honest, down-to-earth workers. Like his colleague Captain Melville, Brown had begun a seafaring life at fourteen. He seemed just the sort of man to take a liking to a teenage stowaway with big dreams.

  Alas, the crew of the second ship headed to Antarctica now knew to look for stowaways. In a less dramatic repeat of what had happened in Hoboken, an Eleanor Bolling seaman ousted Billy in the earliest hours of the morning. The kid had (unimaginatively) hidden for a second time in a locker under the lower forecastle filled with mops and bolts and plumbing supplies. The sailor brought him to Captain Brown, who was well named, as he was a man with a mass of brown hair and warm brown eyes. The kind captain smiled at Billy and praised the cheeky boy’s gumption—his Swedish accent still heavy even though he’d made Philadelphia his home since 1920—yet Billy was escorted off to the dock and told to scram.

  A few hours later, still under the cover of night, Billy stole back on board and was routed out a third time, again from the “paint locker.”

  A third time? The Bolling’s third in command, Lieutenant Harry Adams, took notes on the gutsy kid who had to be good material for the lucrative book he secretly hoped to pen. Most of the major players would score book deals after the expedition; the public was eager for adventure, or at least so publishers thought. The catch was that any deal had to be approved by Byrd: to expose any discord was to risk powerful support. Ada
ms’s book, Beyond the Barrier with Byrd: An Authentic Story of the Byrd Antarctic Exploring Expedition, was among the best: more character study than thriller, his grand sense of humor evident in his selection of anecdotes that the others deemed too lightweight to include.

  Billy was not the only stowaway that September day. Also aboard was a girl Adams called Sunshine, the “darling of the expedition,” a flirt who offered to anyone who asked that she wanted to be the first lady in Antarctica. (In the restless era between world wars, when movies gave everyone big dreams, even girl stowaways were not uncommon.) Brown told a reporter that Sunshine had less noble aspirations, and soon she, too, was removed from the Bolling, but not before she gave each crew member a theatrical kiss.

  As the early sun rose, Captain Brown called Billy over to him from the yacht yard’s holding area where he had been asked to wait with the giggling Sunshine until his father arrived. The captain admired Billy’s gumption, but it was time for the seventeen-year-old to go now and not waste any more of anyone’s time.

  As Lieutenant Adams recorded later, “Perhaps this matter of getting rid of Bill was entered up in the Eleanor Bolling log as the first scientific achievement of the Byrd Antarctic expedition.”

  • • •

  Poor Captain Brown had quite the day. Soon after Billy and Sunshine were given the boot, another unwanted and unnamed guest, “a bewhiskered old fellow with Bible in hand,” boarded the ship and prophesied doom. As if that would stop twenty men setting off for adventure.

  On Monday, September 16, at exactly 6:13 a.m., after three whistle blasts, the Bolling shoved off for Norfolk, Virginia, with considerably less fanfare than her sister ship the New York had and no Commander Byrd present for the official send-off. Still, the Bolling had impressive crew aboard doing eyebrow-raising double duty. Both flying ace Captain Ashley “Ash” McKinley and John S. “Jack” O’Brien, a shift engineer and inspector at New York City’s Holland Tunnel, doubled as coal passers. Esteemed geologist and landlubber Laurence Gould, who had accompanied Gyp Putnam on his expedition to Baffin Island, found himself boatswain, the “bell-bottom” assigned to look over equipment. Dr. Haldor Barnes, a prominent Danish surgeon based in Detroit, who was to be the assistant medical officer once the expedition reached the ice, was presently a first-time quartermaster—tasked with rationing clothing and rooms—unless he had to stitch up someone. William Haines, a respected meteorologist, was for now an assistant steward.

  A brave black-and-white kitten had ventured on board overnight: the sailors promptly named her Eleanor after their vessel, and the resident reporter wisely turned this feline stowaway into the supply ship’s own mascot—a soulmate of sorts to Captain Brown’s tomcat, Rudy, and the New York’s kittens, tiger-striped Mary and little grey Winnie Winkle. Readers loved cats.

  Billy was in some ways fortunate to miss the first brief stretch of the Bolling’s adventure. Halfway to the Virginia Cape (where they would load up on coal), the crew suffered the indignity of being boarded by vigilante Coast Guard commanding warrant officer Carl Grenager, who pulled up on an armed revenue cutter with a team of United States Marshals, suspecting a boat with “Byrd Antarctic Expedition” painted boldly on her side of being a rumrunner. From the deck of his government boat, Officer Grenager (rather hilariously) called, “Heave to ’til I board you!” (The New Yorker shortly quipped: “To this zealous . . . officer goes this department’s infrequent award of the nickel-plated dumbbell.”)

  The crew soon encountered real trouble on the upper Atlantic. The trawler endured terrible storms, capped by one with winds eighty nautical miles strong off the outer banks of Cape Hatteras, the easternmost point on the southern seaboard—a shock to all. (Cape Hatteras is farther south than Norfolk; in the poor weather, they had slightly overshot their destination.) Many of the boat’s academics and volunteers, greenhorns at sea, were seasick. Worse still: the night before, due to high winds, Captain Brown had lost contact with Commander Byrd, who had been following his path by Morse code. Byrd was now justly petrified that a good portion of his crew had drowned. His expedition would be over, humiliatingly, and so close to home.

  Close to noon on September 19, two days later than scheduled, the Eleanor Bolling limped in to Norfolk’s Hampton Roads Naval Base—home during the Civil War to the Confederate States Army—where much to the relief of the waylaid crew on board, their beleaguered ship was tied up at the bustling modernized port’s Pier 2.

  That’s when Billy popped into view on the dock. The crew members, drained from the tempest, faces spattered with grease, cheered out loud. The Bayside kid! Holy cow!

  Billy had ridden home from the Tebo Yacht Basin in his father’s Model A two days before, getting the talking-to of a lifetime, when the twice-scandalized Francesca met the Model A. After hours of chiding, he was sent to his bedroom in disgrace. Only he didn’t sleep: sometime in the middle of the night, he escaped again out an open window from the second floor, once more without a suitcase. Billy thumbed a ride south, telling each gullible automobilist that he was a last-minute employ on the expedition—a replacement scrub-deck-and-bottle-washer—but only if he could reach the ship in time. Each delighted driver drove as fast as he could get away with; one sympathetic man even took him directly to the dock. This time Billy waited for the ship in plain sight.

  George Tennant, the chubby-cheeked and wry chief cook, was tickled by the city kid’s pluck and summoned Billy for a private word. Tennant, toothless and nicknamed “Gummy,” had lived since his youth on South Street in New York’s charitable Seamen’s Church Institute of New York, an organization affiliated with the Episcopal Church to seek dignity for sailors. Tennant’s formal education had stopped after grammar school, and he valued the young Polish striver’s industriousness. The privileged volunteers never needed to develop this trait—those fellows born under a lucky star, like the millionaire’s kid coal passer, Joe de Ganahl, whose father owned sugar plantations in Mexico; or heavy-drinking twenty-six-year-old George “Mike” Thorne, a seaman over on the New York. He was the Yale-educated grandson of George Thorne Sr., one of the founders of Chicago department store Montgomery Ward, who had contributed significant money to Byrd’s cause. De Ganahl, a graduate of Harvard and Yale Universities, spoke with a posh private school accent. He’d been handed the coveted Times assignment to fill in bits of information that reporter Russell Owen would miss; after all, Owen couldn’t be in two places at once. And he was a Freemason, of course, like Commander Byrd: that was no secret. No, Tennant grumbled, even though he was a Freemason himself, kids like that weren’t the ones who deserved to be on board.

  The red-bearded forty-six-year-old cook tentatively offered Billy a job as a mess boy; Commander Byrd, who would be down to see the ship off, would have final say. But he suggested the kid stay put and start washing dishes if he wanted things to work out officially.

  Billy beamed and then Tennant did, too, revealing smile-crinkles around his eyes. He whispered that he had real ins with Byrd; he had been a cook on the commander’s expedition to the North Pole.

  Tennant reminded Billy of a once well-known story about how, just after the turn of the century, Byrd fought for his father’s permission to travel to the Philippines to visit Judge Adam “Kit” Carson, a family friend and the twelve-year-old’s godfather, who was presiding over a bit of Manila after the Philippine-American War of 1899 to 1902. The young Byrd wouldn’t stop asking until his mother took his side; she knew Carson would never let her son get in true danger. But still, a preteen traveling with five hundred soldiers made the papers: Virginia’s Winchester Star called the boy a “manly and handsome youth, plucky and aggressive and brave as a lion,” and wrote that “Dick [was] the youngest person to take such a long journey alone.” That was what had first put Byrd’s name on the map: his tenacity. Tennant would remind his boss of this, and mention—no small thing to a man keen on camaraderie—that the crew of the Bolling loved Billy’s spirit; that they’d clapped and hollered when they spied hi
m on the dock.

  When Captain Brown entered the galley, he guffawed to see Billy already at work. After some words with Tennant, Brown told Billy he could sleep on the Eleanor Bolling for at least Wednesday night. He checked the chart to see where men were billeted in their cabin and where there might be an extra bunk. He would see what more they could do once he conferred with Byrd.

  When Billy was done washing dishes, he explored the ship properly, without fear of getting caught. One of the men showed him to a free berth near the engine room. In each room, the men who knew his face well by now waved.

  Imagine trying to fall asleep amidst dogsleds and snowshoes. Men whose names he had memorized were in their bunks on his every side: flyer Ashley McKinley and chief meteorologist William Haines, who would set the day that Byrd would fly to the South Pole from their base camp on the fragile Ross Ice Barrier. Could Billy feel the heat from the engine room? The rock of any small waves?

  Early the next morning, Commander Byrd arrived by train to inspect the ship and congratulate those on deck for their bravery in the storms. Before Captain Brown could speak with him about the stowaway, Byrd was off to the dock office—a quick stop before a scheduled afternoon visit to his hometown of Winchester, at the edge of the Shenandoah Valley’s Blue Ridge Appalachian Mountains, for a rest in a familiar place. He still had several weeks until his own departure to the Southern Hemisphere on the whaler Larsen.

  The three-story, high-ceiling, cream-colored Victorian manor at 326 Amherst Street was set back behind an extensive hedgerow on a brick-paved block where a strong scent of apple orchards lingered in the air. It had been constructed to Byrd’s father’s specifications fifty years before, a half mile from the senior Byrd’s US District Attorney’s office downtown. The house was covered with ivy, topped by a severely angled mansard roof with dark-green fish-scale shingles, and blessed with a wraparound verandah spiffed up by a bright yellow-and-green-striped awning. Apple trees and a large barn with stables were tucked away in the big backyard, and to the west was Darbe’s Run, a small creek where Byrd and his two brothers had loved to swim. After the expedition, the colorful house would become a popular linen penny postcard: “Admiral Byrd’s idyllic boyhood home.”