A Page from History: The air capital of America — continuing the saga of Dutch Flats

This is Part 2 of the story of Dutch Flats, which included a substantial portion of what is now the Midway District, all of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot and parts of Liberty Station and San Diego International Airport. Part 1 was published in December.

A Page from History: Arena y Fango — The battle for Dutch Flats

“What kind of man would live where there is no danger? I don’t believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished by not taking a chance at all.” — Charles Lindbergh

When we left our expedition into the soggy bogs of Dutch Flats last month, the 1920s had come roaring into San Diego, and the Marines had landed. The Point Loma Golf Club had flourished for a brief 13 years before missing the cut.

Taking flight

The second decade of the 20th century had seen San Diego become one of the world’s hotbeds for innovation and development in the nascent field of manned flight. Many aeronautical firsts occurred in the equable skies above this city. The first seaplane flight, the first aerial loop-the-loop, even the first night flight — considered an extremely dangerous and even foolhardy experiment — was successfully executed by Maj. T.C. Macauley in 1913.

Col. Jimmy Erickson had taken the first aerial photographs from a plane in 1911. Army Air Service Lts. Oakley Kelly and John Macready are credited with several firsts, including the first nonstop transcontinental flight, from New York to San Diego, in 1923. The first transcontinental flight of an airship, the Navy’s enormous USS Shenandoah, terminated, rather precariously, at North Island’s Rockwell Field the following year.  

You may have noticed that all of these air innovations were of the military variety. Commercial aviation, in particular air travel, which we take for granted these days, was not a thing at all a century ago. 

Claude Ryan was a young Army-trained pilot. He had learned to fly at March Field, Riverside, and Mather Field, Sacramento, during the First World War. Following his Army hitch, Ryan committed to making a career for himself as an aviator.

In the early 1920s, however, non-military opportunities for pilots were scarce. Air Mail pilot jobs — we will soon discuss the most famous Air Mail pilot of them all — were few and far between. In “The Rising Tide,” Richard Pourade comments that “commercial flying” at the time “was limited to barnstorming, sightseeing, instruction and smuggling.”

Ryan could see that San Diego was where flight-related opportunities might develop, and he made himself a fixture at Rockwell Field. He was soon able to purchase a war-surplus Army biplane for $400.

Ryan then persuaded Harbor Master Joe Brennan to let him take off and land right there on Harbor Drive in front of the county administration building. Of course, there was no Harbor Drive or county admin building or Embarcadero as we know it. It was just a muddy strip of then-plentiful San Diego tidelands.  

So Ryan was in business. Did the money come rolling in? No. It was tough going in what was basically a sightseeing operation in a town where tourism had yet to become an industry. 

In 1925, Ryan joined forces with San Diego entrepreneur B. Franklin Mahoney, who shared Ryan’s enthusiasm for the possibilities of commercial aviation and brought a few extra dollars to the partnership. The duo bought several more aged biplanes from the Army and moved their base of operations to Dutch Flats, right across Tide Street from the new Marine Corps Recruit Depot. 

The Dutch Flats airfield was already home to Martin Jensen’s School of Flying and Carl Oelze’s San Diego Airport and Flying School.  

Ryan’s planes were retrofitted to seat four to six passengers, and a daily air transportation service between San Diego and Los Angeles was established as Ryan Airlines Inc. So it was that Dutch Flats became home to the first regularly scheduled airline in the United States. Let that sink in. There should probably be a plaque about that somewhere over there, don’t you think?  

You couldn’t exactly book your flight online or download your boarding pass to your phone in those days, but to emphasize what a sea-change development that little airline was in the history of transportation in this country, I’ll buy you a burrito if you can guess what Ryan and Mahoney charged to fly to L.A. Give up? The fare for the 90-minute flight was $14.50 one way and $22.50 round trip.  

Rail transport remained the predominant mode of travel in 1920s America. The inland highway between San Diego and Los Angeles had yet to be completely paved at that time, and slightly over half of American households owned an automobile in 1925.

Most folks had some difficulty even imagining air travel. Writing in San Diego Business magazine, early Ryan Airlines passenger J.H.N. Adams compared the experience to a magic carpet ride: 

“Those who saw the superb film classic ‘The Thief of Bagdad’ (1924) will recall with a pleasurable thrill the brilliant spectacle of the thief and princess soaring through the air on the flying carpet. It is with a similar feeling that I recount a recent experience.

“Fifteen minutes after leaving San Diego, we were over picturesque Del Mar and passing swiftly over Cardiff, Encinitas, Carlsbad, Oceanside, Las Flores, San Onofre. … We soon saw the quaint old mission at San Juan Capistrano in less than one hour since our takeoff. Ninety miles an hour — and yet no sensation of hurtling through the air. 

“At 4 o’clock I had been in San Diego. At 5:30 I was seated in a friend’s automobile and was being whisked a few blocks away to his home in Los Angeles. … If you would emulate Douglas Fairbanks, phone Main 4688.”

The ‘Lone Eagle’

While you might think Ryan would have been happy with the success of his little commercial airline, the truth was that he remained unsatisfied. He thought he could design and/or build a safer, faster, more efficient airplane.

Ryan sold his share of Ryan Airlines to Mahoney, though he remained as general manager. His new focus was on a single-wing design, which became known as the Ryan M-1. The first M-1 was built in a hangar at Dutch Flats, also referred to by that time as Ryan Air Field.

Since the biplane had been the basis of standard airplane design until that point, the M-1 and following single-wing designs were referenced as monoplanes for a number of years.

The M-1 proved to be fast and sturdy. It was first tested at Dutch Flats in February 1926. The M-1 flew from Vancouver, Wash., to Los Angeles in less than 10 hours — extremely rapid transit at the time. Orders for the M-1 began to roll in. Pacific Air Transport, which would one day become United Airlines, ordered seven.

Six years earlier, on the East Coast, New York hotelier Raymond Orteig had offered a prize of $25,000 to the first Allied aviator to cross the Atlantic from New York to Paris, or the other way around. Almost a half-million in 2026 dollars were waiting for the right individual or team to make the successful transit.

Through 1926 the prize had not been won, though the quest had claimed the lives of at least four aviators and banged up several others. 

In spring 1927, several very prominent teams, American and French, including one featuring famous Navy aviator and explorer Cmdr. Richard Byrd, were preparing to attempt the transatlantic crossing. News of the Ryan M-1’s sturdy reliability, speed and long-range potential reached a relatively unknown barnstorming Army Air Service turned Air Mail pilot, Charles Lindbergh. 

Long on confidence, Lindbergh felt he could secure the Orteig Prize. Operating between St. Louis and Chicago for the U.S. Post Office Department, Lindbergh had secured the financial support of a group of St. Louis bankers but had not found a plane to his liking.  

A special edition of San Diego Magazine in September 1927 reported that “Lindbergh visited Ryan’s San Diego plant and inspected the first (M-2) Brougham, ‘The Gold Bug,’ then under construction. On Feb. 27, he contracted with Ryan to build him a modified version for the flight. Lindbergh took a room in San Diego and watched over construction of the $10,000 aircraft.”

That was $10,580, to be specific, and what became known as the “Spirit of St. Louis” was the prototype Gold Bug modified and optimized. Ryan and Mahoney’s team took over a vacant former cannery — at least one wall of which remains on the grounds of the Solar Turbines plant — and completed the build within Lindbergh’s 60-day timeline.

San Diego Magazine declared that “nothing would assure San Diego’s place in aviation history more than the construction of the Spirit of St. Louis.”

The plane’s fuselage and extra-long wing section were trucked separately from the cannery to Dutch Flats, where the aircraft was finally assembled and fine-tuned. On April 28, as you may have read here last month, the Spirit was first flight-tested. 

“With Lindbergh at the controls,” according to Pourade, “the plane took to the air after a run of only 165 feet, and though some stability had been sacrificed for range and load capacity, the first flight was considered highly successful.”

In the following week, several more test flights around the county convinced pilot and crew of the worthiness of the little plane. In fact, it performed significantly better than projections, with an estimated range well in excess of 4,000 miles (the Great Circle route from N.Y. to Paris was pegged at 3,610 miles). The team calculated that Paris would be reached in just over 40 hours of flight time. 

 Narratives of Lindbergh’s sojourn typically repeat that the pilot departed from Rockwell Field, headed for St. Louis. But you and I know that in actuality, the Spirit of St. Louis left from Dutch Flats the morning of May 10, 1927, and merely fueled up on North Island before crossing the country to St. Louis and then on to New York. 

Just after breakfast on May 20, Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis took off from Roosevelt Field in New York.  Thirty-three hours and 29 minutes later, the plane circled the Eiffel Tower and landed at Le Bourget Field, Paris.  The lanky, reserved, obscure pilot, just 25 years old, had become a legitimate folk hero, the “Lone Eagle.”

It is hard to describe the magnitude of celebrity that enveloped Charles Lindbergh following his aerial jaunt to Paris. He became the recipient of many honors, including the French Legion of Honor, the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor and a Distinguished Flying Cross. The Army Air Service bumped him up to colonel, and of course, he picked up the $25,000 check from Mr. Orteig. 

A crowd estimated at over 4 million people greeted Lindbergh upon his return to New York City in June. The pilot then embarked on a 22,000-mile tour of the 48 states, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Foundation for Aeronautical Research. 

His return to San Diego on Sept. 21, 1927, marked “one of the greatest days in San Diego history.” Writing in the Journal of San Diego History in 1994, Gerald Shepherd described the return of the Spirit of St. Louis to the place of its origin: “Always grateful to the builders of his plane, [Lindbergh] twice circled the Ryan plant near the waterfront while flying on his side and then made the short hop to North Island, where he was saluted by a battery of guns.  Next he headed back and made eight circles over the City Stadium [later known as Balboa Stadium] to greet an assembled throng there. Buzzing over the center of the field at only 100 feet while dipping his wings, he then returned to land at Ryan Field [Dutch Flats] at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon.”  

The throng at Dutch Flats was held back by a contingent of some 650 Marines from across the street. Businesses were closed and schools were let out. San Diego police estimated that 48,000 automobiles jammed city streets as a crowd of over 60,000 people — the largest in the city’s history — jammed the parade route from Dutch Flats to City Stadium.

Quoted later in San Diego Magazine, Helen Van Dusen remarked, “Lindbergh had left San Diego in May probably known to only 50 people here and had returned a world hero.” 

At the Lindbergh rally, Chamber of Commerce Aviation Committee chairman J.B. Lyman emphasized San Diego’s need to build a much larger, centrally located airport, a refrain echoed by Col. Lindbergh in his own brief remarks.

The future airport was just an idea, not even on the drawing board, yet it already had a name: Lindbergh Field.

Navy Housing

Lindbergh Field was dedicated slightly less than a year later, on Aug. 16, 1928.

For a decade, Dutch Flats had been San Diego’s only air terminal. The field had been home to Mahoney Aircraft Co., Ryan School of Aeronautics, Dick Williams Flying Service and Maddux Airlines. The comings and goings of the many planes at the little field bugged the Marine Corps brass and rattled the hens at the chicken ranch that was once right about where Cold War-era bowlers would one day rattle the pins at Frontier Lanes.

The opening of Lindbergh Field did not spell the end of the runway for Dutch Flats though. Ryan moved his operation to Lindbergh Field along Pacific Highway in 1932. In 1934, W. Arnett Speer opened his flying school, Speer Flying Service, which operated at Dutch Flats until 1940. The field was shown as Speer Airport on some maps.  

So what happened to that busy and historic little airfield? World War II happened. In 1940, the Navy acquired the property from the city for the Independence Housing project, known colloquially as Navy Housing. 

Navy families and aircraft industry and defense workers all needed somewhere to live, and the rest is history. OK, more history.  

So now you know what became of Dutch Flats. But how about that groovy Dutch Flats plaque at the old post office? In fact, there were at least two Dutch Flats plaques, and their current whereabouts are unknown. But we are so attached to our history here in San Diego that “they” certainly wouldn’t have just demolished those markers along with the rest of that post office, would they? So it seems. 

If you know differently, you are encouraged to come forward. But according to the folks at the San Diego Air & Space Museum, the Dutch Flats plaques remain missing and unaccounted for.

Postscript: Doing a quick search for Dutch Flats online a few months ago, one of the first results I saw was something called “William Kettner, San Diego’s Dynamic Congressman.” Sounded familiar. It was an article in the Journal of San Diego History (summer 1979) by my mom, Lucy. I had found her copy of Kettner’s book, “Why It Was Done, and How,” in a box over a decade ago.

It wouldn’t be overstating the obvious if I told you Lucille was a big fan of “Brother Bill” and his wife, Marian. This one’s for you, Mom.

Eric DuVall is president of the Ocean Beach Historical Society. Membership in OBHS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is $25 annually. Visit obhistory.org.