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10A • COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • NOVEMBER 14, 2018 Off beat Oregon: Central Oregon’s pioneer aviators By Finn J.D. John For The Seninel P art of the problem with owning and operating the only fl ight school in town in the 1920s and 1930s was, every time one of your students slapped together some home-built piece of kit, you’d be expected to help get it in the air. At least, that seems to have been how it worked for Ted Barber, owner of Bend Flying Service and Central Oregon’s fi rst commercial aviator. “I was never one to back away from adventure in an airplane,” Barber wrote in his autobiography, “Th e Barn- storming Mustanger.” “I al- ways fi gured airplanes were made to fl y, and I was made to fl y them.” Th is was a nice general principle, but it’s easy to see how applying it too generous- ly could shorten a fellow’s life a bit. Luckily for Ted, building a home-built in the inter-war years was not easy to do. Th e problem wasn’t with engi- neering — there were plenty of good workable plans for home-built airplanes, and lots of people could and did put them together in barns and sheds. Th e problem was with pow- er. It was hard to fi nd an en- gine lightweight enough to get off the ground with an air- plane attached to it. Especially in the thin air of the Central Oregon high desert, 3,500 feet above sea level. Every now and then, though, someone would come up with something; and Ted would have to choose be- tween telling the student “no” and helping him fl y the thing. And by “helping him fl y it,” I mean “go fi rst.” Th is came close to cook- ing Ted Barber’s goose one day in the early 1930s when the Stevens brothers called him over to check out their homebuilt: a super-light parasol-wing monoplane with a super-heavy Ford Model T engine bolted to the front. Th e brothers hoped that the lightness of the airframe would make up for the fact that the fl athead fl ivver mill weighed close to 500 pounds, while putting out less than 20 horsepower. Ted walked around the airplane, inspecting it careful- ly. Other than that cast-iron hunk of dead weight hanging off the front fi rewall, it was a beautifully done piece of equipment, and he told them so. Th en, foolishly, he told them he’d fl y it for them. Or maybe not so foolishly. Because here’s the thing — Model T motors were every- where. Th ey were probably the easiest and cheapest kind of power plant you could fi nd in the 1930s. If the Stevens brothers had really done what they’d set out to do — created a new airplane design that could ac- tually be powered in fl ight by a Model T engine — it could actually make them some money. Nobody had been able to do that before, and what Ted was looking at now seems to have convinced him that maybe, just maybe, they had. Ted climbed in and started the motor up. Th e familiar putt-putt of a Model T greet- ed his ears. He taxied to the edge of the fi eld and paused, letting the motor warm up. Th en he opened the throttle wide, and the little homebuilt started gathering speed down the fi eld. About halfway down, Ted pulled back on the stick. Th e little plane lift ed off , hung a second, and dropped back onto the fi eld. He tried again. Same result Th e engine was literally about two horsepower short of what it would take to fl y the plane. But Ted liked what little he had seen of the plane’s han- dling. He taxied back over to where the Stevens boys were waiting, looking crestfallen, beside the fi eld. “Let’s wait until we get a lit- tle wind, boys,” he said. “We’ll give ‘er a try again.” S everal days later, with a gentle steady breeze blow- ing along the airfi eld, the three of them returned to Knotts Field for a second run. Th is time, it worked. Ted pulled back on the stick, and the little fl athead-four motor roared valiantly, and the tiny plane lift ed off and went into a very, very slow climb as it neared the end of the fi eld. Th e Stevens boys cheered as they watched it rise to about 300 feet … and then they stopped cheering as it leveled off and started slowly sinking. Meanwhile, in the cockpit, Ted was nervously scanning the ground in front of him. Th e Model T engine was mak- ing just barely enough power to keep the plane in the air, at full throttle. He hoped it wouldn’t quit from the strain. He didn’t have enough power to try any turns; he’d have to go straight ahead and hope for the best. Scan- ning his memory of the local geography, he remembered that there was a fi eld a cou- ple miles ahead — but it was strewn with lava rocks. He’d for sure hit one, and break the plane. But fi ve miles beyond that was a big open fi eld. Could he make it? He glanced over his shoul- der to see how much ground he’d covered since leaving the airfi eld — and that’s when he really became nervous. Because hanging in the air behind the little airplane was a great billowy contrail of steam. He was two miles into a seven-mile fl ight and the en- gine was already overheating. Would it make it? Would he make it if it didn’t? Ted focused on the task. Th e little airplane droned on, its engine getting hotter and hotter. Sooner or later it would seize up …. Th en the fi eld was in front of him, and he was touching down, and bouncing to a stop. Th e steam poured out and surrounded him like a fog bank as he climbed grateful- ly down from the plane. He probably felt like kissing the ground. As a side note, it’s inter- esting to speculate on what the Stevens plane could have done on an airfi eld in the Wil- lamette Valley. It’s pretty like- ly that if he’d been taking off from, say, the Eugene airport — elevation 374 feet, more than 3,000 feet lower than Bend — he would have been able to do a lot more with the little plane. W ith another homebuilt that Ted was supposed to try out, he was saved from having to risk his neck by the builder’s impatience. Eddie Campbell of Prineville had, in 1930, got hold of the plans for a homebuilt design called “Th e Storms Flying Flivver,” a tiny high-wing monoplane powered by a Ford Model A engine. Th e Model A engine was roughly the same size and weight as the Model T, but made twice as much power. And Eddie worked at a Ford dealership’s repair facility, so he had access to the equip- ment necessary to soup it up a bit. Ted was out of town for a week when Eddie fi nished his project, and not expected back for another four days. Eddie, already a fairly experi- enced glider pilot, grew impa- tient. Plus, it was his plane; he wanted to be the fi rst to fl y it. So, he pulled it out and fi red it up and pointed it down the fi eld. It would not take off . He tried it several times; at the proper speed, it simply would not leave the ground. Eddie looked it over, scratched his head, and decid- ed the problem was that it was “nose heavy.” Getting his tools out, he took the wing loose and moved it a little bit for- ward. Th en he climbed back in to try again. Th is time, the plane came off the ground, all right. It went straight into a steep climb, completely ignoring Eddie’s attempts to control it; stood on its tail, trying to hang from the prop, about 100 feet in the air; then stalled and pitched forward and slammed down into the ground, nose fi rst, ending up in a tangled heap. Eddie’s friends gaped at the wreckage. Nothing moved in it. “Eddie’s killed!” they shout- ed in horror, then raced to the scene. T hey found Eddie slumped motionless amid the wreckage. Fearful of a fi re breaking out, they each seized one of his shoulders and start- ed trying to drag him out. “Hey, you guys!” Eddie sud- denly called out. “Take it easy, will you? … My feet are stuck right through the fi rewall. You’ve got to get a saw and cut me out.” Th ey did so, then hustled him to the doctor’s to get checked out. His skull was cracked, and he later learned that one of his leg bones also had been cracked; but overall, he came out of the experience not much worse for wear. Th e same couldn’t be said of the Storms Flying Flivver, though. [Sources: Barber, Ted. Th e Barnstorming Mustan- ger. Bend: Barber Industries, 1987; Anderson, Jim. “Pio- neer Pilots of the Sagebrush Country,” Little Known Tales from Oregon History, Vol. 1 (Geoff Hill, ed.). Bend: Sun Publishing, 1988] Finn J.D. John teaches at Ore- gon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. For details, see http:// fi nnjohn.com. Contact him at fi nn2@offb eatoregon.com. 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