Remember Arthur Goebel Jr., contemporary of the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh, stunt pilot extraordinaire? Like many, I had never even heard of Goebel until a series of seemingly unrelated events first brought this pioneering pilot to my attention four decades ago. Since then, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the challenges and perils of Golden Age fliers.

One evening in 1965, as I was grading historical essays at home, the telephone rang. After answering it, my wife yelled: ‘You’d better come quick. There’s an angry man on the phone demanding to speak to you.’ When I identified myself, a gruff voice said, ‘You published a picture of my father’s store, and I want to talk to you about it.’ Arthur Goebel Jr. told me that he was staying at a local motel and wanted to see me posthaste. Thus began an unusual friendship.

It happened that one of the many old photographs I had included in a Socorro County, N.M., Historical Society publication showed a Fourth of July parade on the Socorro plaza in 1884. In the background was a building with a sign advertising the Goebel Mercantile Company, Arthur Goebel Proprietor. The rest of that evening I spent with Art, talking about that photo and many others I had collected, as well as his father’s contribution to the history of old Socorro and Belen, N.M.

In the years following that first conversation, Goebel stopped by to visit me on several occasions while traveling from Los Angeles to Llano, Texas, where he owned a small ranch. I learned that he had been born on October 19, 1895, and had spent his early youth in New Mexico. His father, a German immigrant, had tried his luck in several mining camps in Colorado before moving to Socorro and opening a store in 1880. He later moved his family to Belen, where Arthur Jr. was born, then back to Colorado and finally to Los Angeles.

It was some time before I learned anything about his flying career. One day he casually mentioned that in 1927 he had won the Dole Race from Oakland to Honolulu. He also divulged that he had worked as a barnstormer. But I sensed that his memories of those early days in the air were less than happy. In 1968 he finally gave me some photos documenting his flying escapades. They included several that depicted the Dole Race, as well as others that related to the early days of aviation in Hollywood.

It was in Southern California that Art Goebel Jr. became involved in flying. Having served with the Allied ground forces during World War I, where he got an occasional glimpse of American pilots dueling with German fliers in the skies over Europe, he returned to Los Angeles after the November 11, 1918, armistice, determined to take flying lessons. He became a familiar figure at local airports — Rogers Field, on Wilshire Boulevard, and Glove Field — joining the throng of other young men and women eager to get into the new field of aviation.

The planes that were available for those brand-new aviators to fly were pretty primitive, and at first there were limited job opportunities for those bold enough to risk their necks in the early flying contraptions. A few lucky fliers managed to land paying positions with the U.S. Postal Service in its fledgling airmail program. Most, however, eked out a living barnstorming around the country. They routinely played one-night stands, also participating in races that offered money prizes, giving flying lessons, selling members of their audiences rides — if their planes had room for more than one person in the cockpit — and doing a variety of stunts at what they called ‘air meets.’

Aside from working for the Postal Service, Goebel tried most of those jobs. He was tall and good-looking, the picture-perfect swashbuckling pilot, so he fit in well in Hollywood, where he found a variety of stunting jobs. But he was also on the lookout for other opportunities to put his newly developed flying skills to the test in something other than stunt flying. Early in 1920, a threatened war between Chile and Peru attracted his attention. Goebel flew to South America, hoping to become a soldier of fortune. Disappointed when a conflict failed to develop, he took a job in Lima and also taught flying. He remained there for 14 months before returning to Los Angeles in 1921.

Goebel quickly earned a sterling reputation as a movie pilot. By 1924, he was known as the ace of Pacific Coast stunt fliers, especially celebrated for his prowess in flying upside-down. He did seemingly every trick that could be done with an airplane at the time. He carried wing-walkers such as Gladys Ingle and Ivan Unger, who wowed crowds with thrilling plane changes. He also performed hair-raising tricks such as diving under Pasadena’s Colorado Street Bridge while women were standing on the top wing of his biplane. As one reporter put it, Goebel was ‘known to every director and actor for his breathtaking stunts before a camera.’ His jaunty pilot’s garb might well have served as the pattern for the costumes worn by movie fliers of his day.

Goebel may also have been a member, perhaps even a founding member, of an unusual organization known as the 13 Black Cats (sources disagree on his involvement). This was a group of pilots who specialized in stunt flying, parachute jumping, wing-walking and other aerial acrobatics in the early days of Hollywood aviation. The group apparently never numbered more than 13 members, and it included women as well as men. In addition to appearing in films, the Black Cats would perform their crazy stunts for anyone — for a price. For example, at one point they reportedly charged $500 for an upside-down plane change (the stuntman would transfer from a plane flying upside down to one flying right side up), $200 for an automobile to plane change, $1,200 to crash an aircraft into a tree or house, and $1,500 to blow up an aircraft they were piloting, then parachute to the ground.

There were plenty of flying contests for ambitious stuntmen and women to participate in during the 1920s and ’30s. For example, at the Elks’ annual air meet at La Brea, Calif., in April 1936, Goebel was the hero of the day. He finished first in a ‘Jenny’ Scramble, first in an upside-down flying event and second in the day’s final race over a measured course.

In 1924 and ‘26, Goebel returned to South America and barnstormed across much of the continent. He also taught flying and did stunts for the crowds of curious locals who showed up to watch his daredevil antics. Later in life, he would return to South America and travel extensively. Some of the photos he passed on to me show scenes from those trips.

By the summer of 1927, Goebel was ready for a new challenge when he heard about an air race from Oakland, Calif., to Hickam Field in Honolulu, then being organized by James J. Dole of the Dole Pineapple Company. The contest — inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s successful transatlantic flight in May of that year — was scheduled for August, with first-place prize money set at $25,000. This was just what Goebel was looking for. The race offered him a chance to do something noteworthy and at the same time make a substantial amount of money. He apparently had no doubt that he would win.

Up to that time, there had been only two Pacific crossing flights, both of which had been sponsored by the military. In September 1925, a U.S. Naval Aircraft Factory PN-9 flying boat piloted by Commander John P. Rodgers made it to within 55 miles of the Hawaiian Islands (a world record for seaplanes) before experiencing engine trouble. In June 1927, U.S. Army Air Corps Lieutenants Lester J. Maitland and Albert F. Hegenberger flew all the way to Honolulu in the Fokker Trimotor Bird of Paradise.

Now that civilian pilots were lining up to try for a Pacific crossing, the American press jumped on the story. For weeks before the projected takeoff date, the newspapers covered every possible aspect of the contest, touting it as the greatest sporting event of the century.

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