Long before test pilot Chuck Yeager climbed into a co*ckpit, back when author Tom Wolfe wasn`t so much as a gleam in his daddy`s eye, Alfred Sporrer had the Right Stuff.
He learned to fly the way everyone did in 1924–by the seat of his pants. In that time, barely two decades removed from the Wright brothers` first flight, the ability to soar with the birds was passed from person to person the way a good recipe might be. Forget your fancy aviation schools, your military training. Forget, too, your sound barriers. Al Sporrer came of age when it was Mach None.
At 19, when he made his first flight under the tutelage of his buddy Arlie Emmes, Sporrer raced through the skies at 80 miles an hour, wondering if the engine of the OX5 Curtis Canadian would quit. He flew out of his hometown, Menominee, Mich. The site of his first landing was Green Bay. Not the city
–the bay.
”It was winter, and the bay was frozen over,” Sporrer recalled. ”Arlie had a set of skis on the plane. So we had a landing field that was 120 miles long and 20 miles wide.”
That beat heck out of some of the places Sporrer set the cloth and wood biplane down on over the next couple of years. Airports were few, fuel tanks were small. A body counted himself lucky to find an expanse of grass, and if all he ran over were a few cow chips, well, thank the Lord.”When we looked for a place to land, we always looked for one close to a highway so we`d have a way to get into town and buy gas,” Sporrer said. ”We naturally looked at the size of the field to see if we could get out of it once we got in. We`d circle the field to see if there were any obstructions, tall chimneys, high power lines, things like that. We`d look for ditches and rocks and things that might damage the aeroplane.”
That`s right, aeroplane. Sporrer, 81, is of a vintage that prefers the European pronunciation, and no one is going to correct him. A colleague once referred to him as ”a walking aviation museum.” Surely, the basem*nt of his home in Morgan Park on the city`s Far Southwest Side could serve as the archives of early flight.
There is a meticulous sense of organization in the room, from the hundreds of wrenches, clamps and other tools hung individually from a pegboard above the workbench to the dozens of carefully arranged aviation files. Stacks of yellowing newsclips, letters and easily 1,000 photographs rest atop the bench, several card tables and a long dormant stove. In sum they recount the aeronautical exploits of Sporrer and many of his better known comrades. Here is Sporrer`s pilot`s license signed by Orville Wright; here are folders labeled ”Charles Lindbergh” and ”Jimmy Doolittle” (Sporrer met both men); here`s a black and white picture that Sporrer claims is the last photo taken of Will Rogers and Wiley Post before they died in an Alaskan plane crash in 1935.
Shoved against one wall is a box that holds some fleece-lined flyer`s boots, several pairs of goggles and Sporrer`s first pilot`s helmet, a 1920s leather model with bulging ear pockets. It looks like something descended from Red Grange instead of the Wright brothers.
Sporrer, on this day wearing a brown shirt, burgundy pants and house slippers, moves happily through the memorabilia. He is trim, stands erect and speaks clearly. His stories flow with a careful sense of chronology, though they are frequently interrupted with anecdotes the way a thick novel might be. In the spring of 1924 he flew with Emmes from Menominee to Chicago where he completed his flight training with Pop Keller. Keller worked out of Ashburn Field, a private airfield established by a rich seed merchant, Charles Dickinson, at 8300 S. Cicero Ave.
But Sporrer wasn`t long for the city. He wanted to make a living in aviation, and in those days there was only one way to do that.
”Arlie and I went out barnstorming,” Sporrer says. ”We were just a couple of vagabonds, flying and picking up passengers for so much per flight. We would go from town to town, landing in farmers` fields.
”We were getting $15 a ride for 15 minutes. Then as the aeroplane became a little more common, we had to go down to $10 a ride, then $5 a ride. When the competition got real bad, why we were taking them up for a penny a pound. So if the passenger weighed 200 pounds, it would cost him $2. If a 100-pound girl wanted to ride, it would cost her a dollar.”
This was exhausting, but it was a living. During one dollar-a-passenger promotion at an airport in Davenport, Ia., Sporrer made 108 takeoffs and landings in a single day. By taking two passengers up a time, he earned $216. That kind of money was the exception, not the rule, and so Arlie and Al got into exhibition flying. They hustled jobs at county fairs and any place else willing to pay them.
”We`d take the aeroplanes and loop de loop them, spin them,” Sporrer said. ”We`d do Immelmann turns (a half-loop ending with a roll, named after World War I German ace Max Immelmann) and falling leaves (side slipping with the plane tilted first to one side, then the other).
”As time went on and we got a little better, we added wing walking and parachute jumping. I would fly the plane and Arlie would climb out to the end of the lower wing, hang out and wave to the crowd. Then he`d fasten himself to the top wing and I`d turn a loop.”
To spice things up the barnstormers decided to hang a rope ladder from the landing gear. On Sporrer`s first pass by the grandstand, Emmes would be hanging by both arms from the bottom rung. On the second, he would dangle by one arm. On the third pass, he would be hanging by both knees. On the fourth by one. Finally, in the only bit of chicanery the duo regularly perpetrated, Sporrer would make a pass with Emmes apparently hanging by his teeth. In truth he was hooked to the ladder by a shoulder strap hidden beneath his turtleneck sweater.
As a finale to an afternoon`s entertainment Emmes would bail out of the biplane and parachute to earth.
The fun ended abruptly on the 4th of July, 1926, in Menominee where the two hometown daredevils had returned to show off.
”We finished the first two parts of our act,” Sporrer said. ”When we got ready to do the parachute, the wind changed. When Arlie made the jump over Green Bay instead of drifting toward shore, the wind carried him over the bay into deep water. When he was 25 or 30 feet above the water, he cut loose of the chute so he wouldn`t get tangled in it. He hit the water and started swimming toward shore.
”I circled him and saw him swimming and swimming and swimming. He didn`t look like he was in any trouble, but he must have gotten some cramps or hurt himself when he hit the water. We never found out. He drowned.”
Horrified, then depressed, Sporrer gave up barnstorming, but he refused to give up on aviation.
”I didn`t fly for about 30 days,” he said. ”Then I got to thinking. I just had this stuff in my blood. It was like I was in love. Dying never entered my mind.”
Nevertheless, death was part and parcel of the lives of early pilots, as much as it was for the macho-men astronauts Wolfe chronicled in ”The Right Stuff.” Too often engines would quit in midflight. With only rudimentary instrumentation, something as minor as a low-lying cloud could be deadly.
For Sporrer, however, flying has always been a high, figuratively as well as literally. ”You`d get up there and you`d think the whole world was beneath you,” he said. ”In a sense there was a little egotism.”
There was plenty of self-sufficiency, perhaps more than exists in the age of high technology. After he quit barnstorming, Sporrer flew air mail for Dickinson, who had won a government contract to deliver packages and letters between Chicago and Minneapolis. The pilots flew by sight; and, when that failed, by instinct. If there was cloud cover, the flyers calculated the distance and direction between stops and, knowing their plane`s speed, figured out how long they should be airborne before reaching their destination. At the appointed time the pilots looked for a break in the clouds. If none existed, they would double back and descend through the first opening they found.
Like barnstormers, mail pilots formed an elite fraternity of risk-takers. Charles Lindbergh, who worked for a competitor of Dickinson`s, flew the Chicago-to-St. Louis route at the same time Sporrer made his runs to and from Minneapolis.
”On three occasions Lindbergh jumped out of his aeroplanes with his parachute and let them crash,” Sporrer said. ”After the third time, he was fired.”
You couldn`t really blame Lindbergh, Sporrer hastened to add. He just ran out of gas before he found a break in the clouds.
When Dickinson and several other private businessmen ”threw in the sponge” on the unprofitable mail routes, ”the Army flew the mail for about 30 days,” Sporrer said. ”In those 30 days I think there were 26 pilots killed in crashes.”
Sporrer never served in the military. What moved him was flight, not fight. In 1927 he became one of America`s first corporate pilots. Working for Charles Horton, chairman of the board of Chicago Bridge and Iron Co., and later for F.B. Evans, an investment banker, Sporrer rubbed shoulders with the captains of industry, met a few celebrities, including actor Wallace Beery, and even honored an old benefactor`s last request.
In 1935, Sporrer helped scatter Charles Dickinson`s ashes over Grant Park.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the government asked Evans to surrender his twin-engine Cessna for use against the Axis.
”I was out of a job because they had taken my plane,” Sporrer said.
”So I called some friends in Florida. The week after Pearl Harbor I went to Miami and joined Pan American Airlines. They had a contract to ferry bombers to Russia, where the Soviets would use them to fight the Nazis.”
In 1944, Sporrer rejoined Evans and flew as a corporate pilot until 1966. Though retired, he is licensed to fly and occasionally takes the controls of his son`s private plane for a spin in the clouds. Michael Sporrer, 45, studied aviation in college, learned to fly in the Air Force and for the last 18 years has worked as a pilot with TWA. He isn`t exactly a chip off the old block, but there was a certain inevitability to his calling. His father saw to that:
”I took him up for his first flight when he was 10 days old.”
