The Stowaway Read online

  But before Byrd could head home to his widowed mother (his father had died not long ago in 1925), a Virginian-Pilot reporter decided to outfox the others on the dud supply ship beat, which was considerably less interesting than anything to do with the flagship. His only real rivals were reporters for the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch; the major out-of-state papers hadn’t even bothered sending down anyone. Knowing that the commander was due in that day, the Pilot’s man found Byrd at the dock office in conference with his brother, Harry, governor of Virginia, who was in town to say hello. Governor Byrd knew the reporter well enough to call him over to meet his baby brother the explorer.

  The reporter eagerly recounted the story of Billy’s arrival on the ship. Byrd half listened, perplexed. Why was this reporter talking about that rapscallion again? This was old stuff, Byrd told him, mixed-up gossip from the boy’s shenanigans in Brooklyn, back at the Tebo Yacht Basin the week before.

  No, insisted the reporter, he was here! Really, in Virginia, for a new try. Hadn’t the commander heard?

  Byrd laughed hard, in a grand mood now that his missing ship had been safely moored after those horrendous storms.

  Byrd hadn’t known that Billy was here? The crafty newsie knew now he had a scoop—and with a bit more meddling, he could orchestrate an even better one. Wouldn’t the commander like to speak to the boy?

  To the reporter’s delight, Byrd said yes.

  The newspaperman rushed back to the Bolling and found Billy in the mess room with a plate of beans in his hand. Byrd wanted to see him about a possible spot! In the meantime, would he speak to the press?

  Surely Billy was being ribbed. “I’m busy,” he said. “They’re giving me a job here, and I have to keep working.”

  Tennant smiled overhearing the exchange: “But maybe a new news item will help you get a berth.”

  Billy took the cook’s advice. He told the man his name was “William Gavron,” though the reporter listened knowingly, having read the New York stories—reprinted by wire service around the nation—with the kid’s real name (spelling inconsistencies aside). Billy said he planned on being a mineralogist and that a trip to the Antarctic would help his career. (This was the only time Billy uttered the word mineralogist to the press, and it was never mentioned in his notebooks.) The reporter convinced him to pose for a photo in the Bolling’s galley, a picture that would run in the Pilot before long.

  Then it was time to see Byrd and have the scary second chance to plead his case. The scene was staged at the governor’s and the commander’s (unnamed) dining spot near the dock. The “lucky” reporter who was orchestrating his own story jotted down that Byrd smiled at Billy and declared himself impressed by the boy’s “earnestness and ambition.” He’d just said he had “practically made up his mind to hire him as a mess boy,” the scribe wrote, when the police arrived.

  • • •

  With Billy gone for the third time now, Rudy was at wit’s end between Francesca’s hysterics and his own fear. He’d wired the Norfolk police for information—where else could the boy be? His son had never been so far from home, not alone. Yes, he’d gone to Poland with his mother as a child and once to Washington, DC, with his class, but he’d been chaperoned. What mischief was he getting up to on his own?

  After too many no-news days, Rudy took the car and headed to Virginia. Somewhere along the way, he received word by telegram that Billy had been found.

  Norfolk police arrested Billy as a truant while Byrd watched. (This, despite the fact that Billy had turned eighteen days earlier, on September 10, and was now legally an adult.) If there was a warrant out for the kid’s arrest, what could he do? He didn’t need bad press.

  “But I’m going on that trip!” Billy told the officer on the way to the detention home where he’d be kept for the night, once again angrily (and, hopefully, with a touch of shame) waiting for his father to drive him home. He decided that he would show up at the next juncture, even if that meant hitchhiking to San Pedro, California, from where the Larsen would be leaving.

  He was treated kindly by staff, who could see this articulate delinquent was no danger, and was escorted back to the pier for parental pick-up come morning. When Rudy arrived, the mortified father grabbed his disobedient offspring, but Billy refused to get in his father’s Model A. The Virginian-Pilot reporter was back (Would he miss this for the world?), eavesdropping as Billy pleaded with his pop in tears, calling him sir, calling him Father, begging him to consider what the expedition meant to him. He loved his parents, but his mind was made up. Besides, he was an adult now—didn’t his father realize? Perhaps Byrd would let him sign on without his father’s permission. (Or maybe Byrd would never risk that bad press?) He was equal parts angry and terrified. Maybe Mr. Gawronski wasn’t listening anymore, but the Pilot reporter was all ears.

  Energy drained from the battle with his son, Rudy asked to speak with Captain Brown, a request swiftly granted. And then a miracle: Rudy relented.

  Brown radioed Byrd, who came out to shake Rudy’s hand. “A lad as persistent as you will always come out on top,” he said to Billy as the boy’s father looked on. Rudy was a Józef Piłsudski man, but here was a famous American aviator—a hero, the papers said—who thought highly of his good-for-nothing son. He’d been won over.

  “You can be our mess boy, and I am confident you will be a good one,” Byrd told the kid. There was an ear-ringing yes. Byrd laughed, adding, “I’ll see you soon at New Zealand.” There he would decide whether to let the kid continue on to the ice.

  Billy had no time to rejoice just yet, as he was put to work lugging cargo straightaway. (He can be spotted in a press picture of the crew preparing to leave port doing just that. Perhaps the boxes were connected to a new radio generator that Byrd decreed was warranted after her original one failed in the terrifying storms off the coast.) When Rudy returned that evening to say good-bye, he had with him a telegram. News traveled fast in the modern age!

  The Textile High School is proud to have one of its graduates on the Byrd expedition and knows that you will be a credit to your school and to Commander Byrd. Kindest regards from Dr. William H. Dooley, our Principal, and from all of your teachers and associates . . . Let us hear from you often.

  At 5:55 p.m. on September 20, the Eleanor Bolling sailed for Panama with three hundred tons of supplies and twenty-eight people, including William Gregory Gawronski. The Pilot reporter with the juicy exclusive was there to see him off, and Billy tried to get in a word about how his narrative should be framed. “Start it off by saying my dreams have come true,” he said. “I’m the happiest boy in the country! But about that other story! Do you have to put in the paper that the cops here had me?”

  Aboard the ship, there was no special attention for the stowaway. For now, Billy was ordered to see Dr. Haldor Barnes: every man sailing had to be immunized for typhoid and smallpox. No kid was ever happier to get his shots. His measurements were taken so that later he could be issued clothing for the snow. They would work out how to get him the extra underwear and toiletries most stowaways couldn’t be bothered to bring along.

  Soon after the Bolling pushed off, the expedition’s chief publicist, Hilton Railey, called the Times with the breaking news. Now the story hit big: a stowaway had been taken onto the Byrd expedition, when tens of thousands had been turned away. The Times pinched whole lines from the Virginian-Pilot article without accreditation: “My dreams have come true. No more hiding in the hold for me. I’m the happiest boy in the country.”

  The startling turn of events flitted through the national and even international press.

  BYRD GIVES JOB TO STOWAWAY!

  STOWAWAY WINS HIS GOALS TO POLE WITH BYRD!

  BYRD ENLISTS NEW YORK STOWAWAY YOUTH!

  The headline in New York’s Daily News called it “The Triumph of the Century.” Even Times adversary the Herald Tribune was wowed. Who cared if the story helped the Times circulation; it would help theirs, too. What paper could now say that Paul Siple was st
ill the luckiest boy of all?

  With a little nudge from a certain smooth-talking expedition publicist (the same man who had made a heroine out of Amelia Earhart), the story of Billy’s astonishing pluck was picked up in Germany, Australia, Poland—even as far away as New Zealand, where people were especially eager for stories of the men soon expected on their shores. The Dunedin Evening Star reported that Captain Brown marveled at “the boy’s dogged spirit.” In London, the Evening Telegraph said the lad would join the rear party, or backup crew. Poland magazine declared the boy would go down in history “as the Kosciuszko of the Byrd Expedition.” (Big praise there: every Polish child in New York knew of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, an American Revolutionary military hero and friend of Thomas Jefferson’s who had a bridge named after him in the city.)

  Francesca had a lot of clipping to do after buying all the New York papers, and started yet another family scrapbook.

  • • •

  Rudy may have been nervous meeting Commander Byrd, but that encounter was not nearly as intimidating as going home to face the wife. Upon his return to Queens, he was, as he feared, in the doghouse. Francesca had told him to bring home her only son. That was the only thing he was supposed to do. And had he done that?

  Things were so bad that a few days later Rudy hurtled past newly installed speed limit signs as they argued. The couple was too busy screaming at each other to notice, as reported by the New York Sun in an article headlined “Father of Polar Ship Stowaway Fined as Speeder.” Magistrate Thomas F. Doyle of the Long Island City Court heard the case. Motorcycle Patrolman William Van Cleef had stopped Rudy’s Model A speeding thirty-five miles per hour on Northern Boulevard, where automobilists where expected to keep to the thirty-mile-per-hour limit. Rudy pleaded guilty and begged the judge for mercy. According to the Sun, he offered the explanation that his wife “was shaken by her son’s adventures, and he was running his wife home! He declared his wife was in ‘a very upset condition,’ over her son’s several attempts to hide himself away on the Antarctic ships.”

  Magistrate Doyle was not moved and spoke sternly to Rudy. “I don’t see that has any connection with the charges of speeding made against you,” the stenographer recorded.

  Rudy paid the $25 fine.

  FIVE

  SOUTH POLE OR BUST

  For his first major stretch at sea, Billy was the “greenie,” an easy target for pranks. Times auxiliary correspondent Joe de Ganahl sent the poor kid to look for green oil for the green starboard light and red oil for the portside one; Billy persisted in looking for colored oil for some time. On a rare break, the boy would sit by himself watching V formations of birds and writing letters, which he was told were to be dropped into a supposed mail buoy just beyond the surf line, to be picked up in the Gulf Stream. (The details make little sense, but alas, it took the poor newbie days to catch on.)

  Forty-nine-year-old third mate Lieutenant Harry Adams was still taking notes for that book deal he hoped to score. He was five foot seven and a scrawny 136 pounds; a good Protestant with tattoos on his on chest and arms. He’d served thirty years in the navy, but unlike some of his elite armed forces peers, Adams had nothing more than a general education, though he had more of a way with character and story than those who had gone to university. He listened to people and was sure that in recording the small stuff, he got the big stuff.

  Billy he sized up as “a normal loud-mouthed, fair-skin, blue-eyed, wisecracking, flapper-chasing buttinsky sort of fellow . . . a New Yorker by speech, outlook, and sophistication.” The kid was getting a bit of a reputation on board as a know-it-all (though he wasn’t obnoxious about it), his obsessive scrapbooking having given him all sorts of random trivia about the Antarctic climate, geography, and habitants—animal, vegetable, and mineral. He seemed restless for adventure but not especially fussy about what sort. Adams thought he “may have set out on an expedition to fight nonexistent Indians had the Byrd expedition not come to his rescue.”

  Restless he was. The Bolling sailed through the West Indies: past Haiti, past the Bahaman island of Mira Por Vos, which Billy called Voss Island in his letters home. There wasn’t all that much to see—blue seas, more seas, sometimes a school of porpoises playing—and nowhere to go for a kid used to kicking around the five boroughs of New York on his own. It was hot, too—hot enough that the men would walk on deck naked to feel the breeze, until the sudden Caribbean rains sent them scampering to the cramped hold below.

  The brutalities of seafaring life are not always the waves. There are arguments, the snorers, the disgusting personal hygiene. There are those who control the radio and the phonograph, and fights over what music will be heard. That is, if there is a station, and pity the man forever trying to pick up a signal from the Caribbean islands they passed.

  When Billy’s letters did make it home—mailed weeks later, when the ship docked in Panama—they were tinged with surprising melancholy. “The reason that my writing and wording is poor is because of the ships rolling and because they’re all joking around me,” he wrote his parents, not mentioning that rich daddy’s boys like de Ganahl made him the butt of their jokes. His letters showed a jarring mix of his old silly, go-lucky attitude and a new seriousness—almost a sense of regret. In one particularly wistful letter to Rudy and Francesca, he wrote:

  I am of course very homesick and wish I could go home when we reach Panama, but I want to stick it out, to show them that I want to be a man . . . [I’m] improving morally as well as physically. Haven’t even had time to bite my nails! I hope that you are all well and happy, as I can tell you frankly I wish I were home.

  This explorer business wasn’t all it was chalked up to be.

  • • •

  It was all ashore October 4 at Cristóbal, on the Atlantic Ocean side of the Panama Canal. The Bolling, as the New York Times put it, was “scarcely bigger than a tugboat,” and dwarfed by freighters and oil tankers. It entered the locks heavily laden with coal. At port, every man raced off board except for the unlucky four left on watch. Cristóbal was well known to mail-deprived and sex-starved sailors, and the shore-going men—letters from home waiting for them in duffels onshore—knew exactly what they would spend their pocket money on: for some, opiates; and for most, prostitutes the seamen called putas, who waited on the dock to do business with the randy crew, including the eminent academics on board. Longtime sailors were wiser than that, racing in hungry packs to the crooked, narrow streets of “wet” Colón, just blocks away. (Cristóbal was “dry,” part of the American territory leased from Panama for 999 years.) Married men might have stopped at flirtation and the American-style partner dancing the local ladies had mastered from watching motion pictures, but rare was discretion after so many weeks at sea. Billy, not the virgin his mother thought he was, likely joined in with some of the money his father had slipped him in Virginia. But if he did, his experiences on land were wisely not chronicled in letters home.

  With a post office in Cristóbal, now was a chance for drunken crew members to send private love letters instead of Radiograms via the official shipboard radio that were received over shortwave radio and transcribed and printed, like a telegram. They were managed by the Expedition, so were fair game for any Times article, if a great way to save money on stamps. Maybe one thought to send a more private letter to Sunshine.

  Seamen with beery breath were late reboarding the ship after “toot stops” at Colón’s dance parlors and cantinas such as Over the Top and the Atlantic Café. With a wink, Harry Adams coded dodgy behavior for his readers, writing: “We were but men and of the so-called ‘he’ variety—we did very little singing in the choir . . . [and] had more than a dash of whoopee.” By his account, everyone took part in the fun except for one bluenosed sailor who stayed on board reading the Bible. George Tennant, the Bolling’s cook and Billy’s first friend, later recalled his crewmates being treated to an arena fight between a bull and four tigers, ending, he added salaciously, in death for all creatures except the men of the Expe
dition.

  Captain Brown caught up with Captain Melville in Cristóbal. With both the City of New York and the Eleanor Bolling briefly in harbor together, men were shuffled on paper and a few switched ships to fill open spots. A low-level seaman on the New York slipped on the wet deck and sprained his back, and a twenty-three-year-old coal passer on the Bolling was sent home to Ohio with a sinus infection, even after pleading with Byrd. His illness was not contagious, and he had served three weeks without complaint, but the expedition physician was not taking any chances of a crew member falling seriously ill at sea.

  Billy was offered his first promotion: from mess boy to a coal passer in the Black Gang, the nickname for the unfortunate souls in the fire room who worked stripped to the waist and drenched in sweat in tedious shifts of four hours on and eight off. One of the ship’s coal passers, and already a good friend, was the witty twenty-six-year-old ex-marine corporal Charles “Kess” Kessler from Washington, DC, who had served with Byrd on his North Pole trip and was somewhat cavalier about his rough and largely unappreciated days below the equator, wiring home: “We almost lost our coal (overboard), [and] when the weather is rough, you have to do the Charleston to say upright.”

  Billy was hesitant to leave the sanctuary of the galley, but Tennant told him to man up: Byrd would notice big-time if he accepted an unpleasant assignment in the grubby, hot stokehold. “Byrd will notice” were magic words. And, indeed, having the stowaway in the fire room eased any qualms that the boy was getting off too easy. Billy was back on the commander’s radar, and, just like in a Horatio Alger tale, a good kid pulling his weight after all.