"China Clipper Calling Alameda . . . China Clipper Calling Alameda . . ."

CLXIV

Ed Musick was the most reluctant hero in America. When he returned home from the inbound leg of that first transpacific flight he was amazed to discover that not only was his telephone ringing off the hook at all hours, but that he had a dining room table piled high with offers to do everything from act in movies to endorse mouthwash. He was nonplussed. How did all these people get his telephone number? It took several days of dealing with star-struck Bell System employees to change and unlist his number. All inquiries regarding Captain Musick, Pan American belatedly announced, would be handled through the good offices of the company. 

Ed Musick

Ed Musick's cinematic alter-ego Hap Stuart (Humphrey Bogart)

Since Ed and Cleo never considered moving, the mail kept coming, stacks of it every day, even after Pan Am’s announcement. Ed opened a couple of envelopes and cringed. The money they were offering was, well, obscene, and only someone without any dignity would do half the nonsense they clamored for him to do.  

Pan American was quick to license the China Clipper to toy and game manufacturers, recording studios and movie studios. A bewildering array of China Clipper-inspired merchandise soon flooded the market, some of it for children and some of it for adults

This wind-up Clipper could be used for perilous voyages in a pool or bathtub

A typewriter ribbon came in this China Clipper-decorated box

After that, Ed didn’t open any more mail. He just watched it pile into stacks on the corner of his desk, then across the top, and then finally into a carton next to his desk. Two. Three. Four.

China Clipper collectibles, circa 1936

Finally, he asked pretty blonde Cleo what he should do with the piles of mail. “Do whatever you want with it, Ed,” she answered honestly. So he took it all to the incinerator. And did the same the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, and every day until the flood began to slow to a trickle.

Pat O’Brien as Dave Logan in China Clipper

Juan Trippe

What was the big deal, after all? He was only doing his job.  Flying. 

The John Hancock Insurance Company advertised its 1937 products under the title “From Covered Wagon To China Clipper.” Chevrolet extolled the virtues of box-girder steel construction in its cars by emphasizing that the same technique was used in building the redoubtable China Clipper

The rest of the world didn’t see it that way. What some historians have labelled the “Clipper Craze” began in 1936. Suddenly, references to the China Clipper seemed to be everywhere. More than a passing fad, the “Clipper Craze” left a permanent imprint on American popular culture, vestiges of which still exist today.  

 

A slew of bars and restaurants opened throughout the United States in the 1930s and 1940s bearing the moniker “China Clipper.” Some remain open to this day. Not all of them were aeronautical in theme; some were just nautical and others mixed the metaphor. Some had no theme at all. But the owners thrived on name recognition

Every fair-sized American city soon sported a “China Clipper” of its own

With the distance of a lifetime, a World War, a Cold War, and the modern age of dual anxiety and matching technology, there seems something very quaint about the drama surrounding the first flight of the China Clipper.

The comfortable interior of the China Clipper Inn, Ouray, Colorado

After all, what had really happened? A new plane flew for the first time. Hardly the stuff of headlines today.

 

The China Clipper Lounge at Kai-Tak Airport in Hong Kong today

But in 1935, even with the New Deal, the American economy was sluggish (it would not fully recover until the U.S. rearmed in the months following Pearl Harbor). Few people had much money, any color in their daily lives, or a surfeit of hope. In the rural South and West conditions remained especially dire.

Strombecker released the first scale model kit of the China Clipper. The original prewar kit was made of wood. The 1955 reissue was made of plastic. Both kits are considered extraordinary finds today

Little pilots could hone their skills with this cockpit playset. Flying boat toys remained in production for a surprisingly long time; this blogger remembers having a plastic China Clipper in the early 1960s

In the face of a harsh reality, people fed themselves on dreams --- radio shows like The Shadow ("Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? . . . The Shadow knows!") were immensely popular, and characters like The Phantom, Jack Armstrong, Tom Swift, and Doc Savage ("The Man of Bronze") marched across the pages of books and magazines, or appeared on radio, having high-tech adventures in exotic places not found on any map.

The Shadow (aka Lamont Cranston) fought evil aboard the China Clipper; so did Ace Drummond

Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy was a character invented in 1933 to promote Wheaties breakfast cereal. He became so popular that his adventures were translated from radio to film to print. Here, he is fighting the mysterious Golden Dragon, having arrived in the Orient via the China Clipper. Jack Armstrong’s adventures eventually made it to television in a modernized version. The animated 1964 series Jonny Quest was originally conceived as the Jack Armstrong Show. Part of Jonny Quest’s closing credits are unfinished fragments of  Jack Armstrong Show sequences

Jonny Quest, his scientist father Dr. Benton Quest, their bodyguard Roger "Race" Bannon, his adopted Indian brother Hadji, and their dog Bandit, fought evildoers on behalf of the U.S. agency Intelligence One, traveling aboard The Dragonfly all around the world

Weekly film serials, cheaply made but engrossing, like Ace Drummond (created by Eddie Rickenbacker), The Fighting Devil Dogs (with a costumed supervillain, “The Lightning” who clearly inspired the creation of Darth Vader), and The Perils of Nyoka flickered across the minds of Saturday matinee-goers. Newly-introduced comic book characters named Batman and Superman caught at the public’s starved imagination. Adventure meant escape and escapism was adventure. Nowhere was Adventure more available than aboard the globetrotting China Clipper. So, the liftoff of the first M-130 was made into a cultural event. 

Superman's truly secret identity:  Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, two Jewish boys from Skokie, Illinois, invented Superman as a way of sublimating their anger at the anti-Semitism they experienced almost daily. Their hero had super powers “far beyond those of mortal men” but spent much of his time masquerading as a bookish four-eyed nobody with the quintessentially Middle American name of Clark Kent

In New York City Bob Kane and Bill Finger suffered the same kind of anti-Jewish opprobrium suffered by Siegel and Shuster in Chicago, but their orphaned urban billionaire Bruce Wayne, aka “The Bat-Man” introduced in 1939, was darker and more merciless than the already popular and unfailingly good Superman

 

Evil incarnate: The Lightning (1938) and his cinematic offspring Darth Vader (1976)

 

Pan American Airways itself first geared up the China Clipper bandwagon when it arranged for a Warner Bros. subsidiary, First National Pictures, to create a very romanticized film about the founding of Pan Am. Named China Clipper, and rushed out in 1936, the film stars Humphrey Bogart as the taciturn Clipper pilot Hap Stuart (Bogart somewhat resembled Ed Musick), and Pat O’Brien (who looked slightly like Juan Trippe) as the driven, brilliant, but coldhearted Dave Logan, founder of Trans-Ocean Airways, who sacrifices everything to create his dream of a transpacific airline. Although the character of Logan is truly nasty, many critics consider this O’Brien’s best role. 

For his part, Juan Trippe embraced the movie wholeheartedly, and in his typically self-centered fashion either ignored O’Brien’s ugly fictional characterization or simply didn’t see anything of himself in it. Others did. When Hap Stuart (Bogart) groused that “I was just thinking how swell it would have been if [Logan] had said thanks,” most of Pan American’s employees snickered quietly, but Trippe missed the very pointed and appropriate barb.

Although the movie is worth only a minor footnote in cinematic history (mostly as the chief source of moving picture film footage of the China Clippers) it played to packed houses and was enthusiastically reviewed when it was released, the New York Times even excusing its “pardonable enthusiasm” for Pan American’s innovations. The film is rounded out by footage of Midway, Wake and Guam.

China Clipper (painted by Tracy Dennison)

China Clipper was followed by a low-budget knock-off (one might say a low-budget knock-off of a low-budget knock-off) named Bombay Clipper. Made without Pan Am’s cooperation it used newsreel footage of the China Clippers; however, it was the first major motion picture to wed the China Clippers and espionage (who has the Maharajah’s jewels, and how can we recover them?).

The China Clipper movies inspired a China Clipper song, written by Norma Morton and Ethel Powell, and the song inspired a dance step, first debuted on November 17, 1941.* No “fad” had ever lasted so long.

Although the original version is rare, the Skatalites, a Caribbean Ska band, recorded a version of China Clipper (without lyrics) as well.  In the 1960s, the Monkees recorded Zilch, the tagline of which is taken from the Bogart movie of 1936, “China Clipper calling Alameda.”

 

The China Clipper even found its way into one of the greatest films in history, Casablanca, wherein a bemused Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart again!) was needled by an amoral Captain Renault (Claude Rains):

RENAULT: The plane to Lisbon. You would like to be on it?

RICK: Why? What's in Lisbon?

RENAULT:  The clipper to America. I have often speculated on why you don't return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with a senator's wife? I like to think you killed a man. It's the romantic in me.

RICK:  It was a combination of all three.

The Short Mk. III Solent used in Raiders of the Lost Ark

By 1942, the clippers symbolized not only adventure but freedom and security in a war-torn world. 

 

Indiana Jones leaving San Francisco. The overlay scene contains several errors. For one, the Golden Gate Bridge was still under construction in 1936 and the M-130 had sponsons, not pontoons

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones aboard the China Clipper. The costumers called this airborne ensemble “China Clipper Grey”

More recently, Raiders of The Lost Ark, the inaugural film of the Indiana Jones franchise, collectively a paean to the Saturday matinee serials of the China Clipper era, featured Indiana Jones traveling via clipper from San Francisco to Manila in 1936. The plane featured in the film was not the M-130 (of which none exist today) but a Short Mark III Solent in Pan American livery (Pan Am never used the British Short flying boats).

While Indiana Jones was flying a faux Clipper, The Phantom was flying a fictitious one. There was never any Orient Clipper; nor were passengers boarded through the crew companionway

The Phantom, a mysterious superhero, first appeared in print in 1936. He often traveled around the world on the China Clipper in his identity as millionaire James Wells

The China Clipper remains part of American lore. In 2011, Jamie Dodson, a former CIA agent began writing Young Adult fiction involving Nick Grant. The Nick Grant Adventures --- Flying Boats and Spies, China Clipper, and Mission: Shanghai --- all concern good old-fashioned espionage tales taking place along Pan American Airways’ transpacific routes.

Of course, the fundamental idea behind the development of the China Clipper was to benefit Pan American Airways, but by the same token the number of people who would --- who could afford to --- fly on the China Clipper and her sisters was necessarily small. Yet, the marketing of the China Clipper appealed to a mass --- and massive --- audience. Very few of them would ever really get to board a Pan Am clipper, or visit Wake, or lose themselves in the throngs of Hong Kong, but it was a time when dreams were utterly democratic.

That most Americans never would live that way seemed beyond the point, and even blasphemous to say. Americans who were fascinated by the China Clipper became likewise fascinated by the remote places it flew, and so the China Clippers served to erode a longstanding populist pattern of American isolationism and disinterest in the world beyond the Western Hemisphere, readying the United States for its role as the leading superpower of the world.