As a child, she looked to the skies and listened for the sounds of planes.
At 89, Alice Eakle Marks has indelible memories that take her back to girlhood. Her parents operated an emergency airfield 40 miles west of Chicago, near Waterman, Ill. McGirr Field, a grass airstrip, was often a safety stop for heroes of early aviation, pilots who carried the mail.
“You could hear them way off,” Marks said Tuesday. “It was almost like a song, getting louder and louder.”
At home in Edmonds, where she lives with her daughter and son-in-law Heather Marks and Cliff Sanderlin, Alice Marks talked of life along the Transcontinental Air Mail route.
There were brushes with fame. She remembers meeting Amelia Earhart, whose 1937 disappearance became a mystery for the ages. Her father, Paul Eakle, knew Ira Biffle, credited with teaching Charles Lindbergh to fly.
On Saturday, at the North Cascades Fly-In in Concrete, Marks got the chance to revisit history and take a ride she first wished for more than 80 years ago. With another passenger, she took a short flight in a Boeing 40C biplane that was once used to deliver mail.
Addison Pemberton, of Spokane, was at the event with his restored Boeing 40C biplane, a treasure that has the distinction of being the oldest Boeing aircraft still flying.
There are several Boeing 40C biplanes in museums, but Pemberton said his is the only one still flying.
Although she can recall sitting in a Boeing 40’s tiny, wood-paneled passenger compartment as a child, she never before got the chance to fly in one. “That was the U.S. mail. We didn’t go up in the mail planes,” she said.
A 2008 article in Spokane’s Spokesman-Review newspaper told how the biplane crashed in Southern Oregon on Oct. 2, 1928, the year it was manufactured by Boeing in Seattle. Not only a mail carrier, it was also the first commercial airliner. One passenger died in the Oregon crash, but the pilot survived.
The wreckage was found in 1993 on federal forest land. Pemberton, 56, said Tuesday that he and others spent 18,000 hours restoring the biplane.
In 2008, he flew it to New York, following the original Transcontinental Air Mail route from San Francisco and giving talks in 15 places that were former mail stops. Last year, Pemberton spoke about his cross-country trip at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. He introduced Alice Marks during his talk. And on May 8 of this year, he made history again. On a trip in the Boeing 40 biplane west of Mount Rainier, he was photographed in flight next to Boeing’s 787.
Marks and Sanderlin have co-written a book, “And There He Came With One Wing High: Life on an Emergency Air Mail Field 1924-1942,” due to be published in September. The book is illustrated with Marks’ drawings and photos — including one of young Alice climbing a pole to clean bugs and other debris from the cups of a vintage anemometer.
She recalled weather reports being relayed by telephone, and her father’s signals to fliers on whether to land or keep flying. “One flare on the ground meant caution, two flares meant to land now,” she said.
She remembered those daring and dashing early fliers, whose motto was “the mail must go through.” With the book and a website focused on what she calls the “Air Mail Trail,” Marks hopes to increase awareness of a system that lasted many years longer than the storied Pony Express.
“Eighty years later, she got to have this experience. She was very emotional,” said Pemberton. He added that of the 18 rides he gave Saturday, four passengers were 90 or older.
“It was a thrill,” Marks said.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Learn more
For more about Addison Pemberton’s restored Boeing 40C, the oldest Boeing aircraft still flying, go to www. pembertonandsons.com.
Read about Alice Marks’ memories of the Transcontinental Air Mail Route at www.airmailtrail.org.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
