Mercy sakes, how time
flies. It’s more than FORTY-ONE years since I
sold my first magazine article. The
April 1971 edition of Air Progress
included “Omens, Augurs, and Jinxes” which I had written for a magazine writing
class in college. Professor Roy Paul
Nelson pledged that anybody who made a sale got an automatic A for the class,
and I sorta recall that one other student aced the course.
Here’s some extracts from the
manuscript, originally written as “Confessions of a Superstitious Aviator.”
I remember distinctly how it
all started. I was watching the
afternoon movie on TV—one of those aviation films of the late ‘30s, possibly Tail Spin with Alice Faye. There was a scene at the Cleveland Air Races
where a girl pilot was smoking a cigarette near a plane being refueled. “Hey, you,” warned a mechanic, “don’t you
know you ain’t supposed to smoke around airplanes?”
“Nah,” came the laconic reply. “I’m not superstitious.”
It’s been years since I saw
that movie—well before I learned to fly—but the incident keeps coming back to
haunt me. You would think that in the
space age there would be no room for superstitions in as exact a science as aviation. But if you look for them, you’ll find more
than a few of the old jinxes, hexes, and omens still persist. There are some new ones, too. Even sky-diving, the space-age sport, is
affected. My pals who enjoy leaping out
of airplanes say that it’s bad luck to wish a jumper well before he makes an
exit.
Anybody with a passing
interest in aviation knows that, of all the superstitions connected with the
business, the oldest is that which predicts doom for the pilot who allows his
photo to be taken before takeoff. The
origins of the legend are somewhat nebulous, but the fact that it reportedly
happened to a pretty fair pilot named von Richthofen seems to bear considerable
weight.
“That’s ridiculous,” I
said. “Look at all the guys who had
dozens of pictures taken and nothing happened.
Look at Lindbergh. Look at the
astronauts. They’re on live TV, which
must be worse than a plain old Brownie.”
By now I was fascinated. Not that I believed any of that stuff, but my
curiosity was aroused. Since the photo
jinx had originated in World War I, I decided to check for other superstitions
of the era. I found plenty.
Good luck charms and
talismans of incredible variety seem to have found their way into cockpits on
both sides of the front. Some, however, were
more exposed to the elements. Take the
case of a pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille (note: Edwin C. Parsons, who penned
a hugely enjoyable memoir, The Great
Adventure.) He placed his fate in
the care of a stuffed black cat. The
creature was tied to one of the struts whenever the pilot went on patrol. One day the cat stopped or deflected a bullet
that otherwise might have struck its owner.
The 100-mph slipstream rapidly depleted the mascot’s stuffing, rendering
it limp and torn upon landing. But replacement stuffing and some quick
needlework had the black cat operational again.
Stuffed animals, however,
were not adopted only by Allied pilots.
At least one German ace with 30 victories (Ltn. Ulrich Neckl) posed
on his Fokker D.VII with a teddy bear that reputedly he carried into
combat. It would be difficult to imagine
a less Teutonic and less warlike mascot, but the ace was still around on
Armistice Day.
In the midst of war it seems
that true love, and its reasonable facsimiles, accounted for many of the items
aviators took aloft to protect themselves from occupational hazards. One French pilot refused to wear a regular
flying helmet, preferring a girlfriend’s silk stocking for headwear (Jean
Navarre, the enfant terrible of the
Verdun Front.) Scarves, rings, hankies, and even baby shoes
were at one time considered bulletproof.
Even riding crops were carried by ex-cavalrymen, but apparently nothing
was as widely sought after as a girlfriend’s garter. According to popular legend, mystical powers
were attributed to garters removed from the leg of a virgin during the dark of
the moon. In the best Joseph Heller
style, however, there was a catch. If
the girl didn’t remain true, the garter lost its protective powers and the
pilot was in danger until he found a more trustworthy female.
It struck me as odd during
all my research that rabbits’ feet were conspicuous by their absence. Apparently the mental processes of airmen do
not place much faith in such conventional talismans. But the charms and gimmicks devised were more
original than such ordinary means. The
biplane pilot’s trademark, the white silk scarf, for instance. Somebody told me that never, under any
condition, should you ever wash your scarf.
I had been flying more than three years when I heard that one, and since
my scarf had been washed a few times, I promptly dismissed the concept as
invalid. But one of the pilots I knew,
thinking of having some fun at his wife’s expense, turned pale when she pulled
his formerly feelthy scarf out of the washer.
He carried on for several minutes, bemoaning the curse by which he could
never again wear his favorite scarf. The
plot backfired though: his act was so good that his wife was completely
convinced. She wouldn’t let him near an
airplane for the rest of the week.
The last good-luck habit I
discovered was sticking a wad of chewing gum on the fuselage before clinging
in. As with the other superstitions,
this one seems to have no basis in recorded history, but was widely adopted
during World War II. The plot is not
difficult to imagine: The pilot is in a hurry to take off, forgets to put the
gum by the cabin door (“Use Your Checklist”), and fails to return. That one really grabbed me since I’m a big
Spencer Tracy fan, and he forgot the duty chewing gum in A Guy Named Joe.
So my course is set: on that
happy day when I might resume flying, I’ll have my teddy bear bedecked with
scarf, garter, and chewing gum added to the check list. And don’t you even think about taking my picture before takeoff….
