That night, after feasting on hot soup and caribou steak, the men had their first good sleep in two weeks. Hassell said a little prayer before dozing off: Thank you, God, for this day and for hearing the prayers I sent you each night from the glacier and the mountains, when I thought we were alone and forgotten there.

Hassell, Cramer and Etes had to abandon hope of recovering The Greater Rockford at that point in order to join the Hobbs expedition as it prepared to depart for home on September 3. All hands helped load the expedition’s tons of equipment–radios, generators, meteorological instruments, typewriters, files, supplies and rations–onto the sloop Nakuak, which the Greenland government had provided for Hobbs’ use. Nakuak, whose name means Sinking Rock, was to take the party south along the coast to Godthaab, Greenland’s capital, with a stop at Sukkertoppen.

Halfway to Sukkertoppen, the men, snug in their sleeping bags in the hold, suddenly awoke to a great grinding, crunching noise. Nakuak had hit a reef at six knots and was sinking fast. The captain headed for shore and managed to wedge the boat between two boulders. Then he sent a crewman, an expert at handling a kayak, through the rising winds and waves to Kangaamiut for help. Meanwhile, everyone aboard Nakuak quickly unloaded the tons of scientific equipment from the foundering vessel onto the beach.

By the time the rescue vessel, Nipisak, arrived three days later, Nakuak had sunk. Not long after they began the 120-mile sea voyage to Godthaab, Nipisak’s engine threatened to quit, and it took the crew four hours to repair it. The captain took to the open sea at night, and it seemed to Hassell that he employed the most haphazard navigation. Hassell worried all night that the ship was doomed, and he was astounded when they actually entered Godthaab Harbor just before dawn.

Hassell and Cramer were the toast of Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They made their way aboard various ships to New York, where Mayor Jimmy Walker welcomed them with a ticker-tape parade. In Washington, D.C., they met President Calvin Coolidge and President-elect Herbert Hoover. On their return to Rockford they were royally welcomed and entertained by the community.

When all the shouting died down, however, Hassell was left with many debts from the flight. During the Great Depression he worked for several aircraft companies. Eventually, he became director of aircraft sales and engineering for Rockford Screw Products, a firm that supplied fasteners to airplane manufacturers.

When the United States entered World War II, Hassell was called into the U.S. Army Air Forces, serving as commander of bases in Labrador and Greenland, where he was gratified to see the fleets of military planes en route to Europe following the Great Circle Route. At that time he finally paid the last of his debts.

One day in 1944, an excited Army reconnaissance pilot burst into Hassell’s office at Goose Bay Air Base. I’ve got to use your darkroom, he said. We’ve just taken a picture of something unbelievable on the Greenland icecap. It’s an old airplane, lying upside down!

So would you be if you’d been out there for 16 years, Hassell replied. That’s my old airplane, 5408, The Greater Rockford.

Newsman Bob Considine witnessed the incident. I’d like a copy of that picture, Fish, he told Hassell. Hell, no! roared Hassell. Do you think I want my friends to think I landed her on her back? Considine wrote a story on the discovery, and Ernest Gann, who flew cargo ships through Goose Bay during World War II, mentioned it in one of his aviation novels, Island in the Sky.

In 1947, Fish went to Keflavik, Iceland, as a civilian, hired by American Airlines to upgrade the former Meeks Air Base to accommodate the Douglas C-54s participating in the Berlin Airlift. When Fish was in his late 50s, Colonel Bernt Balchen, the well-known Arctic aviator, requested that he oversee the construction of the huge air base at Thule, Greenland.

After he returned from Thule in March 1954, Hassell was diagnosed with prostate cancer and told he had only two years to live. I was viewing life most dismally, Hassell later recalled, when G.C. Finlayson of the Foundation Company of Canada called me to say his company had the contract to build the eastern sector of the DEW line, the Distant Early Warning radar fence, across the far north, and he wanted me to join him. Hassell eagerly joined the DEW line construction project, and he was there in 1957 when it was turned over to the civilian operator, Federal Electric of Canada. Then he drove home to Rockford.

Hassel was 74 in 1967 when Robert Carlin, an airline pilot and a famous aviation artist, came to visit him. Carlin wanted to talk to Fish about painting a picture of The Greater Rockford. Whatever became of the old Stinson? he asked.

Hassell’s daughter, Mary Hassell Lyons, laughed as she recalled the scene. ‘Oh, it’s still up there on the icecap,’ Pop said, and Bob jumped right out of his chair. ‘Let’s bring the plane back,’ Bob insisted. ‘It’s been tried before, but the plans never worked,’ said Pop. ‘The Air Force won’t do it because they don’t want it said that they are spending taxpayers’ money on somebody’s personal plane.’

But Carlin was determined to go ahead with the project. He plunged into the rescue effort, and with the help of many people, notably King Frederik IX of Denmark, The Greater Rockford was lifted off the icecap by a Greenlandair Sikorsky helicopter on September 11, 1968. Among those present were Hassell’s son Vic and Cramer’s brother Bill. Growing up, my sons John, Vic and Pete lived with this dream of mine, to someday get that plane off the ice! Hassell remembered.

In June 1969 the plane came back to The Greater Rockford Airport aboard an ancient Curtiss C-46, to be met by Fish Hassell, Elmer Etes, Fred Machesney, Bill Cramer and perhaps a few others who had seen her take off 41 years earlier. But before landing at Greater Rockford, pilot Tex Cauble touched down on the grass runway of Machesney Airport in tribute, then poured the coal to the C-46 and zoomed back into the sky.

The Greater Rockford was put on display in the Colonial Village Shopping Mall and was written up in Flying and other magazines. Some of the recovery costs were recouped by sales of prints of Carlin’s painting of the plane and by sales of a memorial booklet compiled and written by Thomas Reay of the Rockford newspapers. After that, the old Stinson spent some lonely years sitting in a hangar at Machesney Airport. But when word got out that the airport was slated to be turned into a shopping center, Hassell sent The Greater Rockford to the SST Aviation Museum in Kissimmee, Fla.

As for Fish Hassell, he outlived his doctors’ prediction by 20 years. He celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with his wife, Rosalie, in 1973 and died at 81 on September 12, 1974. At his burial he was given full military rites, and a missing man formation was flown overhead by his friends. He died believing his beloved old Stinson was in good hands.

But then reports reached Rockford that the SST Museum had not even started the promised restoration of the plane and was, in fact, on the verge of bankruptcy. Rockford businessman Dean Olson III, along with his father and brother, Rob McCarthy and Mary Hassell Lyons, organized yet another rescue and brought the plane back home again in 1978.

The plane was restored over the next 10 years. It was a tortuous process. No one had any blueprints to follow. Rob McCarthy searched through the files of the Federal Aviation Authority until he found the blueprints for the Stinson Detroiter. The prints could not be copied by machine, so he painstakingly copied them all by hand, using a light table.

The aviation department of Rock Valley College pitched in to help, restoring the 44 wing ribs that had been lost to the arctic winds. Each rib took 25 man-hours to complete. They also restored the engine and applied fabric to the wings. But in order to have the plane ready in time for its dedication at the Rockford Museum Center on June 26, 1988, a private contractor, Aerocraft, Inc. of Naperville, Ill., was engaged to finish the restoration.

Since then, The Greater Rockford has had a permanent home, thanks to Hassell’s friends Harold J. Carlson and his late wife, Gerda, who donated the Colonel Bert R.J. Hassell Aviation Wing of the Rockford Museum Center expressly for its display. The Rockford community and aviation buffs everywhere owe thanks to Mary Hassell Lyons, who has been the moving force behind every effort to preserve this plane that symbolizes her father’s adventurous spirit. In 1997 Colonel Bert Fish Hassell was inducted into the Military Aviation Hall of Fame of Illinois.

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This article was written by Gail S. Ravitts and originally published in the September 2000 issue of Aviation History. For more great articles subscribe to Aviation History magazine today!

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