By Henry Kisor
Author of Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4500 Feet

I had just passed the check ride for the private pilot certificate and was looking for something exciting to do with it when I first heard about Cal Rodgers and his transcontinental saga in the Wright Model EX called Vin Fiz. Hey, that's something I could do, I thought--buy a plane and fly across the country the way he did, in short hops and long visits. Maybe I'd even be able to write a book from the experience.

Then I discovered that Rodgers, like me, suffered from a severe hearing loss. The first man to fly across the United States was deaf? That put an interesting spin on things. How come I had never heard of him? I decided to find out as much as I could about him.

I started with Cal Rodgers and the Vin Fiz, a biography by Eileen Lebow published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1989. It expertly summarized his life, but much about it was missing, especially about his personality as well as his hearing loss. Like so many early aviation heroes he had died young, before biographers had been able to plumb his mind. He had left behind no letters that might have revealed his innermost thoughts.

Exactly what was the extent of Cal's hearing loss? Was he truly deaf, or just a bit hard of hearing? One newspaper story from 1911 said he was completely deaf in one ear and 50 percent deaf in the other-a crude and primitive measurement, probably a reporter's wild guess.

But Lebow turned up interesting clues about Cal's hearing loss from scarlet fever at age six. His speech was slow, laborious and hard to understand. He did poorly in school and was indifferent to church, though his family was devoutly Presbyterian. Just like his father, his mother said; she apparently never recognized young Cal's problems with communication. In her voluminous correspondence she never wrote a word about his hearing loss. Perhaps that was because the 1890s and early 1900s were a time when physical handicaps were rarely mentioned in polite society. It is likely that his mother did not want to admit that her son was deaf-something that still happens in many families today when a child is born deaf or suffers a severe hearing loss from illness.

Many of the contemporary press accounts Lebow quoted were highly contradictory. So were those I turned up at the Air and Space Museum as well as newspaper libraries across the country.

Reporters who wrote for William Randolph Hearst-the press magnate who offered the $50,000 prize for the first pilot to make it across America-were notorious for inventing facts and anecdotes to make their subjects as interesting as possible in order to sell more newspapers. The Hearst syndicate reporters who traveled across the United States aboard the Vin Fiz's chase train portrayed Cal as a merry, highly sociable fellow, full of bonhomie and witty remarks, quick to slap backs and josh children. They would "quote" Cal as brightly as they could: "Two hundred and four miles nearer Chicago tonight," Cal was supposed to have written in the daily Hearst dispatch under his byline, "and it might have been another fifty if the last gasp of the hoodoo had not blighted me today." That is clearly the hand of a newspaper hack.

These tales were the ones most later writers chose to pass on in their magazine articles and books, most likely because they were more colorful than the accounts written by the scrupulous journalists of the time.

These other newspaper stories paint a completely different picture of Rodgers. They often said Cal's speech was hard to understand, that he often did not acknowledge what people said to him, and that he tended to be taciturn and withdrawn--behavior that is common even today among people who cannot communicate easily because of their hearing loss. (Been there, done that.) It is striking how often these reporters described Cal as aloof and unresponsive, without connecting that idiosyncrasy with his deafness. We can't blame them. At that time nobody knew much about deafness.

And yet despite his obvious disability this man persevered, despite dozens of crashes and a host of injuries--some of them grim--to become the first pilot to fly from coast to coast. Maybe, I thought, retracing his route would enable me to discover new insights about Cal Rodgers. (For details see www.avweb.com/articles/profiles/hkisor.)

Afterward I had to admit that I had turned up no new facts. All I could offer was informed speculation based on my own experience dealing with more than half a century of deafness (I lost my hearing at age three, from meningitis).

The most important question: Did Rodgers' deafness affect his flight? I think it did.

Some people say being deaf must have made it easier for him to sit for hours and hours next to a yammering, unmuffled four-cylinder gasoline engine on the wing of the Wright. That may have been so, but pilots who could hear quite well also made long cross-country trips sitting two feet behind noisy motors, and nobody thought that was remarkable. Maybe their hearing made it easier for them to judge the health of their primitive engines. Let's call it an even tradeoff.

Early during Cal's trip, Indians on the Seneca reservation at Red House, N.Y., offered to take down two barbed wire fences to give Vin Fiz a bit of breathing room on takeoff. Cal refused the offer, and naturally flew Vin Fiz right into one of the fences, shredding the airplane so badly it needed an extensive two-day repair job.

Was Cal's refusal of a simple favor impetuousness--or did he simply fail to hear the offer? It could have been either, and I have come to think that in several similar instances where he apparently showed poor judgment he simply did not hear the advice offered him. Deaf people who read lips, as Cal presumably did, often have to guess at what is said to them. When they're in a hurry they sometimes don't stop to find out what someone really said. (Been there, done that too.)

Some people think that because Cal crashed so many times on his way West, because he got into so many jams owing to apparent lapses in judgment, that he must not have been a very good pilot. I don't think that's true. It's often forgotten that when he started the transcontinental trip, he probably had fewer than 25 hours in the air. He was an exceedingly green airman.

When I started my own trip across the country in a Cessna 150 I was a very low-time pilot, too, with only 270 hours in my logbook. I made plenty of greenhorn mistakes. I ran into low cloud because I was overeager and didn't study weather forecasts carefully. I was barely able to take off from a busy combined commercial airport and Marine air station during a hot day on one set of magnetos instead of two. But I learned from these blunders.

Cal, too, had to learn from experience the hidden perils of flying all the way across the country in changeable weather, through mountains and across deserts. Nobody else had done it before.

But he learned-and he grew. When, just past Imperial Junction, California, the Wright EX's engine blew its No. 1 cylinder, shooting shards of metal into Cal's arm, he expertly put the airplane into a powerless six-mile glide back to Imperial Junction and landed safely despite his injury. The incident testified to Cal's coolness under fire. He at last had become an imperturbable veteran pilot.

I think Cal took great pride in his family's history of service to its country. Oliver Hazard Perry, a great-grandfather, was the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. Oliver's brother Matthew Calbraith Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and opened Japan to American trade. Another great-grandfather, John Rodgers, commanded the USS Constellation early in the country's history. Cal's own father and namesake, Calbraith Perry Rodgers, was a U.S. Cavalry captain who won distinction in the Indian Wars.

Cal most likely wanted to contribute to this illustrious record, but he could not get into the U.S. Naval Academy because of his hearing loss. In fact, he never worked a day in his life--for years he was a member of the idle rich, racing automobiles and crewing on yachts. Maybe he wanted to make his mark on the world, but he was frustrated every step of the way by his deafness--until early 1911, when he persuaded the Wright Brothers to take him on as a student at their flight school in Dayton.

Maybe this frustration helps explain why, when the time limit for the Hearst prize ran out halfway through the trip, this proud and often misunderstood man doggedly kept on despite his accidents and injuries. Deafness be damned, come what may he was going to stamp his name on history.

Finishing that flight, I am convinced, was Cal's way of declaring: "Here I am: I am a man."

This is why he is a hero and a role model for me and the 80-odd other members of the the International Deaf Pilots Association (see www.deafpilots.com to find out about us and what we do).

In fact, Cal Rodgers ought to be a hero and a role model for anyone.

Henry Kisor in the cockpit of Gin Fizz. Taken by Bob Locher.

Early in the trip, Gin Fizz flies past the World Trade Center and up the Hudson River.

Tying down the Gin Fizz at Cable after arrival. Photo by Bob Locher.