LA HISTORIA DEL RIO ABAJO - Art Goebel: A Home-Town Boy

La Historia del Rio Abajo is a regular column about Valencia County history written by members of the Valencia County Historical Society. The author of this month’s column is John Taylor, a retired engineer from Sandia National Laboratories and board member of the Valencia County Historical Society.

He is the author or co-author of thirty books on New Mexico history, including seven books on the history of the Rio Abajo all co-edited with Dr. Richard Melzer.

Opinions expressed in this and all columns of La Historia del Rio Abajo are the author’s only and not necessarily those of the Valencia County Historical Society or any other group or individual.

Almost every town in the United States has a home-town boy or girl — someone famous (or infamous) who was born or raised there and either stayed or moved on. In either case, he or she is looked upon as a representative of the town, and their successes are remembered and cherished.

Such is the case of Art Goebel and Belen, N.M. Art’s father, Arthur, and his brother, Oscar, came to the United States from Prussia in 1877. An older sister, Joanne, had married Carl Huning, one of the four Huning brothers of Valencia County mercantile fame, after Carl returned to Germany in 1862. She served as a conduit between the Hunings in the U.S. and the Goebels in Prussia and persuaded Arther and Oscar to cross the pond.

Arthur Goebel, together with Louis and Henry Huning, opened a mercantile store in Socorro. Goebel eventually bought out the Hunings but closed the store in Socorro and moved to Belen where he became a hay and grain merchant. Tiring of the mercantile world, he hired out as the foreman of the Baca Ranch, about 25 miles southeast of Belen.

On Oct. 1, 1890, in what may have been an arranged marriage, Arthur married a German girl, Emma Brockman, from Roswell. At first they lived on the ranch, but they soon moved to a house on Main Street in Belen on land purchased from Belen banker and real estate magnate, John Becker. It was there, on Oct. 19, 1895, that Arthur Cornelius “Art” Goebel Jr. was born.

At the tender age of 5, Arthur moved the family to a ranch in the Arkansas River Valley near Rocky Ford, Colo., where he grew cantaloupe and sugar beets. Young Art grew up hunting and fishing and devising various ways to ditch school. He soon became enamored with mechanical devices, starting with bicycles, but quickly moving up to motorcycles, all to satisfy what his friends characterized as a “need for speed.”

One evening in 1910, Arthur announced that he was taking Art to nearby Pueblo to ”see the “birdmen.” This would be the first time that the future aviator would see an airplane in action. A traveling stuntman, Otto Brodie, flew his Farnam biplane around a track, and Art was enthralled. This was something daring and adventurous and the young man was hooked.

Still yearning for speed, Art became involved in the newly popular sport of motorcycle racing. However, with pressure increasing on families with German surnames to prove their allegiance, he gave up his “need for speed,” enlisted in the Army, and was sent to France. His superiors quickly recognized his ability as a marksman and made him an instructor for the duration of the war.

After being discharged from the Army and spending a sojourn on property his parents had purchased in Peru, Art returned to Los Angeles, where he finally found a job in the aviation world, working as a mechanic at Midwest Aircraft. Not satisfied with fixing airplanes on the ground, he used some of his wages for flying lessons. Transferring to a torpedo plane plant run by Donald Douglass, he signed up for more flying lessons with motion picture stunt pilot Wally Timm at the Cecil B. DeMille Flying School.

By 1922, Art was a fully-qualified pilot and had purchased three Curtiss JN-4D planes, commonly known as Jennys, of his own. Painting his name on the bottom of the lower wing, he went to work as an aerial photographer.

Aerial photography soon gave way to stunt flying for both exhibitions and movie productions. These daredevil pilots showed off wing-walking, climbing rope ladders suspended below planes, flying upside down, changing planes in midair and several other stunts. Art joined two select groups of these pilot — the Squadron of Death and the Thirteen Black Cats.

Airplane races, called scrambles, were also becoming a popular form of public entertainment. Art and the other participants would fly laps around a course marked by pylons, trying to avoid hitting the ground and each other.

During one scramble, Art’s Jenny lost a wheel. Quick-thinking friends on the ground found a spare wheel in a nearby hanger, strapped to the back of a wing walker named Gladys Ingle, flew up under Art’s plane and held position while Gladys unstrapped the wheel and installed it on the empty hub, allowing Art to land safely.

In 1919, a New York City hotelier named Raymond Orteij offered a $25,000 prize to the first pilot who could fly between New York and Paris, France. In 1926, a stunt pilot and part-time airmail carrier named Charles Lindbergh decided to try for the prize, and on May 20, 1927, he took off from Roosevelt Field in New York in a specially modified Ryan NYP named the Spirit of St. Louis, heading east. Thirty-three hours and 30 minutes later, he landed in Paris’s Le Bourget field to claim the prize.

Lindbergh’s success and the subsequent adulation he received stimulated a Hawaiian pinaeapple tycoon named James Dole to offer $35,000 to the first civilian to fly from the West Coast to Hawaii. The winner of the Dole Prize would not be the first person to fly to the islands — that distinction went to two Army pilots, Lt. Lester Maitland and Lt. Albert Hegenberger, who made the flight in a three-engine Fokker C-2 named the Bird of Paradise in June 1927.

However, the Dole Race was strictly civilian and was carefully monitored. The rules for the competition included detailed inspections and certification for the aircraft and pilots and a requirement were that all the entrants were to leave from Oakland on Aug. 16, 1927, and race to Honolulu’s Wheeler Field.

Although the trans-Pacific flight was considerably shorter than Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic achievement, “Lucky Lindy,” as he came to be known, chose not to participate. He pointed out that it was potentially a much more hazardous flight.

He noted that if the Spirit of St. Louis had made a navigation error, he would still be able to land somewhere in Europe whereas the competitors in the Dole Race would simply fly off into a huge expanse of the Pacific until they ran out of fuel.

The Dole competition attracted a number of teams, but once the entry fee had been paid and the planes had passed the safety inspection, only eight actually showed up at Bay Farms Island in Oakland, Calif., on Aug. 16, 1927. Art and his navigator, Bill Davis, were flying the orange and blue Woolaroc, a Travel Air 5000 named for a ranch near Bartlesville, Okla., owned buy their principal sponsor, Frank Phillips, president of Phillips Petroleum. The ranch’s unusual name came from a description of its surroundings — “woods, lakes and rocks.” Phillips also provided a new high-octane gasoline mixture called Nu-Aviation for the plane.

As the morning of Aug. 16 progressed, three of the planes either crashed on takeoff or were unable to get airborne at all, leaving five teams on their way. At 12:36, Woolaroc started her roll down the runway and leveled off at 3,000 feet, heading for the Golden Gate. Art and Bill had installed a radio set that enabled them to “follow a radio beam” to Hawaii. They also used the radio set to communicate with picket ships along the route. In fact, early in the flight, Bill contacted the telegraph operation on one of the ships and had him send a message to his mother saying, “All’s Well.”

The two men in the Woolaroc had elected to fly above the clouds so that Bill could use the sun for navigation. They reached the top of the cloud deck, 6,000 feet at midnight on Aug. 16 and by sunrise on the 17th they were flying the radio beam about 1,500 miles west of San Francisco.

Feeling more comfortable about the situation, they ate some sandwiches and drank some cold coffee. They also happily noted that the trade winds were pushing them along at about 100 miles per hour.

About midmorning, Bill noticed the beam had suddenly dropped out. Examining the radio set, he found a broken vacuum tube in the receiver. He managed to jimmy-rig a fix and recovered the beam signal. Art had dropped down to 3,000 feet in clear skies, and Bill noted that during the time the beam was down, they had drifted off course to the northwest.

Art corrected his heading by 5 degrees to port, and shortly after noon, he sighted the island of Maui in the distance. Quickly plotting a course for Wheeler Field on Oahu, they completed their flight, touching down at 12:54 p.m. Honolulu time to the cheers of 30,000 people, including James Dole and territorial Gov. Wallace Farrington. They had completed the flight in 26 hours, 19 minutes and 33 seconds.

Although Art and Bill had won the race, three of the five teams had gone down somewhere between California and Hawaii. Despite extensive rescue and recovery efforts, they were never found, meaning that 10 pilots and navigators, all friends of the winners were lost. Their loss would haunt Art for the rest of his life.

The aviators’ return home by ship was met with parades, presentations and banquets across the country. The governor of Oklahoma even gave Art an honorary promotion to colonel in the Oklahoma National Guard.

Art and Bill met President Calvin Coolidge, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, who reprised his comment about the flight. Noting a nearby farmhouse, he said his feat was like picking up a rock, throwing it at the house and hitting it, whereas Art and Bill’s achievement was like picking up a rock, throwing it and hitting the keyhole in the front door.

During his “victory tour” around the country, and especially during his audience with the president, Art declared himself to be an “aviation promoter, advocating for more and better airports and a radio-beacon-based navigation system for national airways.”

The next major challenge for competitive aviators across the country was to set the record for the fastest non-stop transcontinental flight, an event that came to be known as the National Air Race. Art and his friend, Henry Tucker, started their attempt at Los Angeles’s Mines Field at 12:06 p.m. on Aug. 19, 1928, in a Lockheed Vega 5B named the Yankee Doodle.

Eighteen hours and 58 minutes later, they touched down at Curtiss Field in New York with the west-to-east record safe in hand. This flight was sponsored by the Richfield Oil Company, who touted the accomplishment as “a record unequaled by any other gasoline.”

In 1929, Goebel formed the Art Goebel Aviation Co., Inc. intending to provide lessons, mail transport, insurance and manufacturing services. He also embarked on an autobiography titled, “Art Goebel’s Own Story.” By this time, other daredevil pilots were emerging and eclipsing some of Art’s records.

Frank Hawks surpassed the transcontinental record, and several pilots attempted to break the world endurance record of 172 1/2 hours set by James Kelly and Reginald Robbins in May 1929. Encouraged by Art and other famous aviators, women were also joining the fray with the first annual Powder Puff Derby, a transcontinental race from Santa Monica, Calif., to Cleveland, Ohio, in August 1929 — Amelia Earhart finish third.

As the thrill of aviation continued to grip the nation, there were also other air races for pilots like Art — examples included Los Angeles to Cleveland and Mexico City to Kansas City — as well as fly-ins to air shows and other public events, and lots of speaking engagements to promote his sponsors and his school of aviation.

In 1933, Art took up a new endeavor — using smoke and sky writing to promote Frank Phillips and his oil company. In a five-day period in November 1934, he wrote “Phillips 66” 10 times in locations around Cincinnati, Ohio.

The clouds of war were looming in the late 1930s and once again, families with German surnames were anxious to prove their allegiance by serving their adopted country. Art, already an honorary colonel in the National Guard, was called to active duty on Jan. 12, 1942. Just prior to that on Dec. 29, 1941, the former confirmed bachelor married Ann Caudill.

During his wartime service, Art pined for Ann and worried about his mother, Emma, who was a self-declared Nazi sympathizer. Emma had moved to the family farm in Peru to avoid any awkwardness, but her Nazi beliefs seem to have no apparent impact on Art’s career or service.

During his three years in the Army Air Force, Art was assigned to Ferrying Command in Laos, Nigeria, to bombardier training in Midland, Texas, to Purchasing and Contracting at Fort Ord, Calif., and to a secret pilot evaluation tour in New Zealand.

In December 1947, Art’s first and only attempt at marriage ended when Ann accused him of violent outburst and narcissistic behavior. Despite his very favorable public persona, he had acquired a reputation as a drinker who could hold his liquor and as an inveterate womanizer and skirt chaser.

After the war, Art continued reserve service with the 452nd Heavy Bomb Group. He and Walter Beech also “borrowed” a C-54 transport plane and flew from Anchorage, Alaska, to the North Pole and back.

In 1956, Art began a world tour by flying from Honolulu to Japan and on to Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand (then Siam), India, Egypt, Greece and Italy. He continued the tour in 1960, this time to the USSR, Bosnia and Norway. Along the way were several speaking engagements and copious photographs, which he incorporated into his lectures and presentations.

On Sunday, Dec. 2, 1973, Art was having trouble breathing and a Los Angeles neighbor took him to the Veterans’ Administration’s Wadsworth Hospital in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the prognosis was grim, and he died on Monday morning at the age of 78. He is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Calif.

Although Art did not appear to have a special connection with Belen, the town of his birth and early childhood, that town certainly had an affection for their “home-town boy.” The local airport was named Goebel Field, a street still bears his name and prominent citizens like banker John Becker personally communicated with him on several occasions.

So, in the end, this is a tale of one or two shining moments that lived in peoples’ minds for a time but were soon overshadowed by even more spectacular feats. During Art’s lifetime, the country went from the Wright Brothers flying a few hundred feet at Kitty Hawk to men walking on the moon and trans-oceanic and trans-continental flight numbering thousands per day.

We always stand on the shoulders of giants, but too soon forget who they were and what they did.