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© Tim Peeler, 2021
The only time NC State’s Wolfpack has ever traveled to Starkville, Mississippi, for a football game, it missed all the excitement in its hometown, all in favor of a miserable train trip with a jubilant outcome.
Not long before the players of first-year coach John “Clipper” Smith boarded a train for an 800-mile overnight train to face the Mississippi A&M Maroons (as Mississippi State was then known), the most unusual device to ever hover over Raleigh airspace landed at the old Curtiss-Wright Airfield on Tryon Road.
And it was piloted by – gasp – a woman.
Not just any woman, of course. The odd-looking Beech-Nut autogiro was flown by the world’s most famous female aviator, Amelia Earhart, on a literal barnstorming tour to promote the hybrid airplane-helicopter that was often called a “flying windmill.” It was the first stop on a 13-city demonstration tour of the Southeast, sponsored by a Northeastern chewing gum company.
It was as if, on that November weekend 90 years ago, that the future was chasing the past on the last train out of town.
Over the next three weeks, Earhart not only landed in Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Fayetteville, Pinehurst, Spartanburg, Greenville (S.C.), Charleston, Savannah and Atlanta, she did low-altitude flyovers of towns like Statesville, Salisbury and Concord en route to rudimentary municipal landing strips across three states.
Earhart flew from New York to Richmond to Raleigh on Thursday, Nov. 5, 1931, just in time to appear at a morning meeting of the city’s Women’s Club and then a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored charity luncheon at the downtown Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel.
The football team never got to meet the famed flyer because after
class, they went over to Riddick Stadium, walked through a handful of
muscle-loosening drills, and then boarded a 9 p.m. train to Starkville, which, as Technician reported cryptically, was "full of unpleasant surprises."
The next day, as the 26 players on the travel roster crawled out of their Pullman car, Earhart was offered red-carpet treatment in Raleigh. That night, she arrived on NC State’s campus for a 20-minute lecture on the future of aviation to the school’s student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at the old YMCA Building located across the street from Pullen Park.
Earhart was already familiar with the state of North Carolina before coming to Raleigh. Three years earlier, a few months after she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean as a passenger, she had attended the 25th anniversary celebrating the first flight at Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks. Her mode of transportation for final 70 miles of that trip? A motorcoach bus, a sea-sickening ferry and a horse-drawn wagon shared with 20 other dignitaries, including Wilbur Wright.
During a lively question-and-answer session with students on State’s campus, Earhart told an eerily foreboding story about her transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to Southampton, United Kingdom, made so by the retroactive knowledge that Earhart was lost at sea just six years later flying over the Pacific Ocean. Neither she, nor wreckage of her aircraft, was ever found.
“Well, there is little to say as to the feeling of being afraid of the water. We were not able to see the ocean because we were flying between two blankets of fog. However, we did catch a few views of the vast expanse of water whenever there were breaks in the fog blanket. The plane was equipped with pontoons so that in case of a forced landing we would not be in quite the same condition as if we were without them. As we approached the shore of the British Isles, we were on the look-out for landmarks to get our bearings. Once, having sighted land, we continued, but turned back to the coast since we were without the proper gear for a terra firma landing. Also, our gasoline supply was running low. We sighted a small village, which we thought was on the coast of Ireland, but later discovered that we were in Wales, a section of western Britain.
“We taxied up to the little inlet and tied the plane to a small buoy and had high hopes of getting to shore at once. A group of workmen on a railroad car glanced at us but continued their work. Gordon, our mechanic, lowered himself to one of the pontoons where he tried to attract the attention of someone on the shore to bring a boat out to us so we could get ashore. Efforts were useless. Took a towel and started waving it out one of the windows, hoping that the shoremen would see our white distress signal. One man toss off his coat and started to swim to us but the distance was too great. Later in the day as the people stopped their work, some of them gathered along the beach. Finally, seven hours after tying to the buoy, we did reach our destination – land. The people were very friendly. Their sole ambition, after they discovered who we were, was to touch us. After flying the North Atlantic and going through the mauling the citizens gave us, we were more than just tired – we were sore. After refueling our ship, we continued on our flight to Southampton.”
Technician, Nov. 6, 1931
Earhart went on to describe to the State College engineers and students how the Beech-Nut autogiro, brainchild of Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva in 1918, worked: using four rotating blades, the craft was lifted off the ground and flew thanks to a front-mounted propeller that forced air over the stubby wings on the side. Earhart was flying the first commercially available version and the first one ever to fly into Raleigh.
The next day, as the football team dragged itself to Mississippi A&M’s football field, Earhart did three free-to-the-public airshows at Raleigh’s air field. She did a private interview with UNC’s Daily Tar Heel – after spitting her sponsor-provided chewing gum into a trashcan.
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| Katharine Stinson talking to women engineering students. |
“I want to be a pilot, too,” the precocious teen said.
“Don’t become a pilot,” Earhart told her, “become an engineer.”
And that’s what Katharine Stinson did. She not only became the first woman to earn an engineering degree at NC State College, she was also the first female engineer hired at what is now the Federal Aviation Administration and a founder and future president of the Society of Women Engineers.
“I told her I was going to be a pilot, and she said that was nice, but I should be able to do something other than just fly a plane,” Stinson said in a Feb. 16, 1988, interview in the Raleigh News and Observer. “She said I should study engineering.”
Meanwhile in Starkville, the Wolfpack football team was looking for its second win in as many seasons against Mississippi A&M. The Wolfpack won 14-0 the year before at Raleigh’s Riddick Field.
The two Southern Conference opponents had also been scheduled to play each other in Raleigh in 1929, just a few weeks after the stock market collapse at the end of an inglorious season. The game was canceled due to lack of relevance.
Two seasons later, however, the Wolfpack was led by future College Football Hall of Famer John “Clipper” Smith, one of a string of former Notre Dame players or Knute Rockne acolytes hired to bring the Fighting Irish system to NC State. It had not been a great debut, but it had opened the season with a win over Davidson and on Halloween day it had stayed close against heavily favored rival North Carolina.
For the first two quarters, the game was scoreless, played in front of a moribund crowd of a few thousand, far fewer than saw Earhart in Raleigh. In the third quarter, NC State end Milo Stroupe blocked a Mississippi State punt at the 14-yard-line. Teammate Bob Gleason picked it up and crossed the goal line for the only score of the game.
Since a Wolfpack dropkick failed to secure an extra point, the game was in doubt until the final second, especially when Mississippi A&M’s injured starting quarterback was replaced by a passer that led the offense into NC State territory on several occasions in the fourth quarter.
As the game drew to a close, Mississippi advanced all the way to the 1-yard-line before the State defense stopped it on fourth down as time expired.
After it was over, the two dozen battered and bruised Wolfpack players loaded back on the train for another overnight train trip to Raleigh. Some 18 hours later, stiff and tired, they returned to campus just as Earhart flew away to greet some 25,000 spectators at an airshow in Greensboro.
Oh, how much easier it would have been to fly.
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