One Summer: America, 1927

remains of it now.
    Byrd followed the Atlantic flight with two long expeditions to Antarctica – one of them generously, and a bit surprisingly, sponsored by Jacob Ruppert of the Yankees – and on the first of them flew (indisputably) over the South Pole. Byrd was promoted to rear admiral and spent the rest of his life comfortably basking in the role of hero. He died in 1957 at the age of sixty-eight.
    Bernt Balchen , the unsung hero of the America adventure, accompanied Byrd on his South Pole flight. He went on to become a colonel in the US Air Force and had a distinguished career, though, as was noted earlier, he fell foul of the Byrd family because of suggestions in his autobiography that Byrd had not reached the North Pole in 1926 as claimed. Balchen died in 1973. George Noville accompanied Byrd on his second expedition. Noville Peninsula and Mount Noville, Antarctica, are both named afterhim. Noville died in 1963 in California. Little beyond that is known. Bert Acosta , the fourth member of the 1927 America crew, did not fare so well. He became a hopeless alcoholic and spent several spells in jail for vagrancy and for failing to maintain alimony payments. Seized with a burst of idealism during the 1930s, he pulled himself together enough to go to Spain and fly combat missions for the anti-fascist republicans, but after the war he returned to the United States and slipped back into dissolute habits. He died, more or less destitute, in 1954.
    Also moving relentlessly downhill was the strange and enigmatic Charles A. Levine . In October 1927, after almost five months away, Levine came home. He was given a parade up Fifth Avenue, but almost no one turned up. At a luncheon at the Hotel Astor, Mayor Jimmy Walker made a direct reference to the poor treatment Levine had been given.
    It subsequently became clear why Levine had lingered in Europe. The Justice Department was after him for up to $500,000 in unpaid taxes. This turned out to be the first in a lifetime of troubles for Levine. In 1931, police issued a warrant for him on charges of grand larceny after he failed to appear for questioning over irregularities concerning a $25,000 bank loan. Soon afterwards he was arrested in Austria and charged with planning to counterfeit money and casino gambling chips. Those charges were later dropped. In 1932 Levine received a suspended sentence for violating the Workmen’s Compensation Law, and in 1933 he was charged with attempting to pass counterfeit money in New Jersey, though that charge too was later dropped. In 1937 he was convicted of smuggling two thousand pounds of tungsten powder into the United States from Canada, and served eighteen months in Lewisburg Penitentiary. In 1942, he was sentenced to 150 days in jail for helping to smuggle an illegal alien into the United States from Mexico. The fellow was a Jewish refugee, so it would seem to have been a reasonably humanitarian act, but the court, for whatever reason, did not see it so.
    After that, Levine dropped from sight. In 1971, when American Heritage ran an article about the flight of the Columbia , Levine was listed as missing and of unknown whereabouts. In fact, he was living in impoverished obscurity. He died in Washington, DC, in 1991, aged ninety-four.
    Levine’s flying companion, Clarence Chamberlin , lived almost half a century after the summer of 1927 but without doing anything of particular note. He worked as an aviation consultant and for a time managed the new Floyd Bennett Field (named after the luckless airman) in Brooklyn, New York’s first public airport, opened in 1930. He died in Connecticut in 1976 just before his eighty-third birthday.
     
    Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig finished off the autumn of 1927 with a barnstorming tour. Barnstorming – putting together a touring team of big-leaguers to play exhibition games – was highly lucrative. In a tour of twenty-one games, Ruth and Gehrig both made sums equal to their annual salaries as players.
    Barnstorming matches tended to be good-natured but chaotic. Fans frequently ran on to the field to chase down grounders that reached the outfield, and an outfielder might very well find himself competing with a clutch of eager spectators to catch a fly ball. Thirteen of the twenty-one games in 1927 had to be abandoned early because the crowds were out of control. In Sioux City, Iowa, 2,000 fans rushed on to the field at one point, and Lou Gehrig was credited with saving the life of a man who was being