Dan's Papers - November 23, 2007

The message I got here at Dan's Papers was that a 94-year-old man named Bill Schwenk of Southampton was going to attempt to fly a 1927 Pheasant bi-plane by taking off and landing on the grass field at the Talmage Farm on Sound Avenue in Riverhead on Saturday, November 17 at about noon. The plane was original, was owned by Bill Schwenk, was restored, but hadn't been flown in 76 years.

This was an intriguing thing for sure, and so on Saturday morning Chris and I drove up to the farm to watch the festivities. I have to tell you this was one of the most exciting things I have witnessed in years.

The events that had brought all this to the Talmage Farm all these years later are absolutely fascinating.

The plane itself was built from a design made at the Pheasant Aviation Company in Memphis, Missouri the same year that Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis bi-plane from Long Island to Paris.

It is just a coincidence that this happened at the same time. But circumstance would bring a connection between these two events many years later in this story.

In Missouri, the small factory made 50 Pheasant H-10 bi-planes from the plans brought to them by a local airplane designer. The plane was 23 feet long, made of wood and stretched cloth and metal, had two modified bicycle wheels under the place where the two wings met the fuselage, and just a round wooden peg for under the tail that would drag along behind. The engine was an eight-cylinder air-cooled affair built about ten years earlier for use in World War I. And in both of the two cockpits, one in front of the other, you could sit and manipulate the wing flaps or tail flaps by pushing a metal stick that stuck up from the floor either from front to back or from side to side. There were no brakes.

This airplane, through the late 1920s, was a barnstorming bi-plane during the early aviation era, and in 1930 came to be purchased by a wealthy New Yorker who had a home in Southampton and two teenage sons. He had the plane flown in as a gift to his sons. You could fly in and out from the lawns of estates or farm fields back then, and people did. Whoever this was, however, made a big mistake buying this aircraft for his sons. They tried flying it, but instead wrecked it, resulting in both of the wings breaking off. Though neither son was injured, the father, angry, had the plane brought to a junkyard in town, located on the property where Burger King is now, and told the junkyard owner to just take it. The following year, a man named Bill Schwenk bought all the pieces from the junk dealer for fifty dollars. He was 27 years old at the time and was about to open a liquor store in Southampton - his dad owned a dairy here - and he was not going to let a beautiful old wrecked airplane go to waste, even if the wings were twisted up like pretzels. He, like many young men here on Long Island, had become a flier. It was just three years earlier that Charles Lindbergh had single handedly flown his bi-plane the Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island's Roosevelt Field to Orly Airport in Paris, electrifying the nation.

And there was another connection with Charles Lindbergh's famous flight. The mechanic at Roosevelt Field was a young man named Carl Heniecke. Known as "Slim," it was he who had helped Lindbergh on his way. And in the months and years that passed, Heniecke became a famous flier himself and a collector of Lindbergh paraphernalia. Heniecke founded a little airport in Westhampton in the 1920s that he called Suffolk Airport and which eventually grew to be Gabreski Airport. And it was there he befriended Ed Schwenk. It was Heniecke that Schwenk had in mind when he had bought the Pheasant. Heniecke, he thought, would help him restore it.

Restoring this old plane was done sporadically, with the men working on it together for the next fifty years. In the 1950s, they hadn't even done much. They had fought in the war and been away. Then they couldn't find anyone who also had a Pheasant for the needed spare parts. And they had no idea what the twin wings, now lost, were supposed to look like. Finally, desperate, they got the idea that maybe somebody at the Pheasant Airplane Factory had a set of plans for the Pheasant. What they found was that Pheasant had long since gone out of business after its founder, Lee R. Briggs, was killed in a plane crash. But they were able to contact a woman who worked there at the time as a bookkeeper. She still lived in Missouri.

"Do you know who owns a Pheasant?" they asked. She did not, but she did know where there were still parts.

"Do you know where there might be a set of plans for one?"

Turned out she had kept the paperwork after the business closed. She was the bookkeeper, after all. And indeed she had all the papers, including the plans for the Pheasant, in a dresser drawer in her bedroom.

Within a week, they had the plans, and so they were now ready to proceed further by having the wings made. But time went by and they just never got around to it. They both had other old airplanes to fly around in. They raised families. Heniecke founded and ran the Triangle Tennis Club on Hampton Road in Southampton. And he also, in his later years, founded the Early Fliers Club of Long Island. He died in 1991. He is widely missed.

Schwenk, however, is now 94 years old. And it would be he who would fly this plane for the first time from a farm field on the North Fork last Saturday.

But this event, with Schwenk at the stick, really could not have happened without the help of two wealthy men who live in Westhampton Beach named Ed Katzen and Tim Dahlen. Beginning around 1995, they created a partnership to begin collecting early aircraft that have some connection with early Long Island aviation. One of their first purchases had been of the early aviation paraphernalia from the estate of Slim Heniecke. They kept what they bought in a hanger at the Bayport Aerodrome. Before they approached Bill Schwenk about the Pheasant and three other old airplanes he owns, they had four aircraft.

"I intend to fly the Pheasant," Schwenk said when asked about it. The pieces of it were now in a barn on the Talmage Farm in Riverhead on Sound Avenue.

"Okay," said Tim Dahlen. Dahlen is a dashing man in his forties who flies planes and rides motorcycles. "We'll finish the restoration. And you'll be the first to fly it."

And so here we were on a bitter cold and windy morning in November with about one hundred other people alongside one of the Talmage barns, out from which the Pheasant had just been wheeled.

What a pretty thing. It was all painted orange and black for the occasion. Dahlen gets in the back cockpit. Schwenk, with a little help, gets in the front cockpit.

It's a complicated business to start up the Pheasant. First, the magneto has to be disconnected and the eleven-foot-long wooden propeller on the front hand cranked around a total of sixteen times to get gas into all the cylinders. Next, the magneto is turned on and the spark plugs warm. And then comes the tricky part. Someone has to stand in front of the plane, and with great effort grasp the propeller and pull it down to get it underway. The engine coughs, emits a puff of black smoke, and dies. They try again. And this time, the engine coughs and sputters and then roars to life. The spectators cheer.

There's some talk about the wind coming up and how it's going to be pretty rough up there, but it's unanimous that they go ahead with this. And so they taxi down the long way, through the bright green grass to the most easterly end of the field, turn the plane so it is facing towards the wind to the west, and pull out the throttle. The engine sings. And the plane begins to move.

You know, if you have ever seen the famous black and white footage of the Spirit of St. Louis taking off from Roosevelt Field ninety years ago, it's not much different than this.

The plane bumps along, picks up speed, bumps still more and then, as the crowd of people, all friends and relatives of the Talmages, Schwenks, Dahlens and Katzens, scream and applaud and cheer, lifts off on shaky wings and begins to soar up and up into the sky for the first time in more than three quarters of a century.

Soon it is soaring magnificently through the clouds, high above, making wide turns and big loops as it flies over Riverhead, Northville, Wading River and the Tanger Outlet Mall. And it stays up there for fifteen minutes.

"Bill must be loving this," one of the spectators says.

It's not Paris, but when the plane glides in to bump peacefully and softly down onto to the grass and then over to the barn, the crowd surges forward to meet it. Schwenk has flown the Pheasant. He really has. Dahlen took it up and later took it back down, but it was Schwenk who took it through its turns and loops. The men climb down, pictures are taken, people talk excitedly and everyone shares in the joy of the moment.

"Pretty good. Worth the wait," said Schwenk.

Here at the end of this article is the picture I took of the tail on the back of the Pheasant, with the picture painted on it. It has been painted by J. Hendrickson it says, with a little signature in the corner. The year painted is 1991.

J. Hendrickson is the wife of Dick Hendrickson, the farmer in Bridgehampton who keeps track of the daily weather in the Hamptons for the National Weather Service.

Hendrickson has been doing this since 1928. He's a contemporary of Bill Schwenk and knows him well. He's about to celebrate 80 years on the job.