Q: What did it mean for Byrd to be the first to fly to the pole?
LR: Byrd had to be first in anything he did. I think he felt always that it
wasn't worth doing unless he was the first person to do it. He was the first
boy from Winchester and probably from Virginia ever to go to the Philippines
and go around the world at the age of 12. He had to be first at things.
Again, you don't do what everybody else has done, even what one other person
has done. You do the single gesture that nothing, that no one else has done
before, flying to the North Pole, flying to the South Pole, flying with a much
larger airplane and three or four other people to Paris instead of just doing
it on your own. The sort of thing that would make a distinctive mark in the
world that he would be remembered by. No one will ever take away from Dick
Byrd the fact that he was the first person ever to fly to the South Pole along
with three other companions. But he was the one who made that trip, he was the
one who set himself up and defined the trip as something that he alone had
done. And this meant everything in the world to him. It was what he was.
Q: What were the pressures on Byrd to make it to the Pole? Wasn't he in
debt?
LR: Well, flying to the North Pole was a real make or break problem for Dick
Byrd, because, first of all he had made a big deal about this. He had gotten a
great deal of money, he had generated a large amount, necessarily generated a
large amount of publicity in order to get the money. This was also a time, and
you want to remember this was a time of real spread eagle nationalism in a lot
of the country. The Americans were going up against the Scandinavians. And
the Arctic had always been a Scandinavian preserve. And the polar regions had.
Scandinavian and British, those were the people who had really done a lot of
work in the Arctic region, Peary and Cook were kind of interlopers in that
sense. So again it was the United States against the world and so on. And
Dick Byrd had exploited this attitude. At the same time he knew very little,
nobody knew anything, no one was an expert in polar flying, in heavier than air
machines. For example, at Spitsbergen he had some very serious problems with
overload of the plane, with trying to get it off the ground. They cracked up
once, they busted a ski. There was serious question for a moment as to whether
or not they had actually busted up the airframe to the point where it was
unflyable. So here's a guy who's facing a real crisis, he's several thousand
dollars, more than several thousand dollars in debt. He's got radio contracts,
the press is on him, to be the great, polar hero. And he's up there in
Spitsbergen with what may be a busted airplane and frankly not a great deal of
understanding of what the requirements and demands and risks of polar flying
were. He knew them generally but he didn't know them specifically until he
began the operation itself and found out how difficult it was.
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