One Summer: America, 1927

he had had enough of Europe (and probably Levine) and would sail home with the Byrd team on the SS Leviathan in a few days. Levine had promised Chamberlin $25,000 for his part in their adventure, but in the end paid him much less than half that.
    A week after landing in French waters, the Byrd party travelled back to Normandy, to Le Touquet, where they had dinner with the Prince of Wales, then proceeded on to Cherbourg to board their ship home. Their sailing was given a giant three-deck headline and 5,000 words of coverage in the New York Times , as if it was in itself an act of heroism.
    Then things went eerily quiet aviationwise. With Byrd and his team at sea, Lindbergh locked away on Long Island writing We , and Levine talking mostly nonsense, there was nothing aeronautical left to write about. On 12 July, for the first time in six weeks, no aviation story led the front page of the Times . At the bottom of page one, however, was a small story so curious as to be worth mentioning.
    The previous day in Canada, according to an Associated Press report, a plane doing aerial survey work for the Canadian government had taken off from an airfield near Lake Manitoba. The plane carried a pilot, photographer and surveyor. The weather was good. Several witnesses reported that the plane climbed to about 2,000 feet in a normal manner, but then, as it emerged from a cloudbank and as onlookers watched in bewildered horror, the three occupants left the plane one after another and plunged to their deaths. What caused them to jump or fall is a question to which no plausible answer could ever be supplied.
    The main news by mid-July was of a new and more brutal heatwave that was settling over much of the nation. In New York on 13 July, the temperature rose to 91 degrees at four in the afternoon, and broke 100 degrees elsewhere. By Saturday 16 July, the number of deaths in the city attributed to the heat was twenty-three andthroughout the east it was at least sixty. In New York City, half a dozen of the victims drowned while trying to cool off. One lucky survivor was an eight-year-old boy named Leo Brzozowsky who was found floating in an inner tube five miles out in lower New York Bay. He had been in the water for at least five hours and was roughly halfway between Staten Island and Keansburg, New Jersey, when he was rescued by a passing motorboat. The boy was fully dressed – he was even wearing shoes – and was unable to explain why he had gone into the water fully clothed or how he had got so far from shore. Doctors said he was exhausted but would make a full recovery.
    On 16 July, a torrential afternoon downpour cooled things off but brought chaos, too. Lightning knocked out power in several neighbourhoods and killed a couple sheltering beneath a tree on Staten Island and a policeman on a street corner in Brooklyn. Trains to and from Coney Island were stalled by flooded tracks and short-circuited electrical systems just as several hundred thousand people were trying to get home from the beaches. The rain caused much flash flooding. In Brooklyn, a 27-year-old man managed the unusual feat of drowning in his basement when six feet of water flooded in.
    The worst heat-related disaster of the summer was not on the east coast, but on Lake Michigan at Chicago when some seventy-five people, mostly women and children, crowded on to a commercial pleasure launch for a trip on the lake in the hope of catching a breeze. As the boat cruised just offshore, a squall blew up. The passengers merrily raced to the sheltered side of the craft to escape the driving rain, but this unbalanced the boat and it capsized. Twenty-seven people drowned. Among those who rushed to the rescue was Johnny Weissmuller, not yet famous as Hollywood’s Tarzan but celebrated for having won three gold medals in swimming at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Weissmuller happened to be on the beach at the time of the capsizing and reportedly recovered a number of bodies, both living and dead.
     
    The Leviathan arrived in New York in rain and fog on 18 July. Byrd and his crew, accompanied by Clarence Chamberlin, were transferred to the mayoral yacht, the Macom , where they were surprised to find waiting for them, rather secretly, Charles Lindbergh. Byrd was clearly touched that Lindbergh had come to greet them, but also no doubt relieved that Lindbergh declined to join them for the afternoon on the grounds that this was their day and he didn’t wish to be a distraction.