The magnificent white bird, its wings spread wide, eases its body into Government Cut, spraying giant plumes of water that soften Miami`s skyline behind a shimmering curtain. With swanlike grace, it bobs softly in the surf as it turns, home at last, and heads toward shore.
Inside this giant mechanical bird, tourists fresh from their Bimini vacation exchange the requisite ”oooohs” and ”aaaahs” that are as much a part of the splashdown as the wet windows.
Another Chalk`s seaplane has landed.
Now 73 years old, Chalk`s is as linked to Florida history as Henry Flagler`s railroad and competes for the title of the world`s oldest airline still in operation. Taking flight when Woodrow Wilson ran the country, it was an infant during the Golden Age of Aviation and middle aged by the time the Space Age was launched.
Today, as airlines fold their wings and seaplanes become an endangered species, Chalk`s is still flying high.
These funny-looking seaplanes-17-passenger Grumman Mallards-were named for the man who designed them in the 1940s and the duck whose movements they skillfully mimic. Part fish, part fowl, they float and fly. Funny looking, yes, but durable. Over the years, Chalk`s flying boats kept working while the business changed hands and almost sank during the 1980s.
Now infused with new management and money rooted in Rockford, Ill., the little airline-still using its refurbished planes from the `40s-is flying farther and more frequently than ever.
When the journey is over, the planes still waddle up a concrete ramp to roost by a small blue and white terminal on Watson Island in Miami, the spot where Arthur Burns Chalk-the man known as Pappy-started it all in 1919.
”I guess the other pilots took to calling him Pappy because he was the oldest one around,” says Dean Franklin, who signed on with Pappy in 1935 and became the chief pilot. ”Me, I called him Burns.”
Franklin, a thick-set man with a shock of gray hair whose only concession to his 81 years is a hearing aid, today runs an airline-repair-and-parts business from a building near Miami International Airport, where the roar of engines punctuates his every sentence.
”How did I learn to fly?” he asks, repeating the question lost in the scream of a jet. ”I just got in a plane and flew it.”
Simple, plain-spoken; a lot like Pappy Chalk, who died in 1977. But not before he built an airline-and practically out of thin air at that.
Easy-going and gentle-natured, Pappy, with eyes as blue as the ocean and hair as white as a sandy beach, took to the air like a bird, while his wife, Lillie Mae, served as reservation clerk, secretary, dispatcher, office manager and bookkeeper.
”She was a real Tugboat Annie, and she ran the place,” Franklin recalls. ”You could be the president of the United States, but if she didn`t like you, you wouldn`t be getting on that plane.”
For more than 30 years Franklin and Pappy worked side by side, propelled by simple economics as much as love of flying. ”You had to eat every day,”
Franklin says, ”and you had to fly to eat.”
In the beginning, when Pappy still worked solo, Prohibition fueled the company, as a dollar-conscious Pappy served the bad guys and the good. He made money taking rumrunners to Bimini to check on their hooch. Then he made more money transporting the revenuers chasing after them.
As time went on, Pappy expanded his destinations and became a flying taxi service for the moneyed set on the millionaire Bahamian colony of Cat Cay. And when pampered anglers longed to troll the Bahamas but preferred skipping the rough sailing to get there, Pappy flew them.
People looking for a flying adventure or hoping to escape the public eye called Chalk`s, whose passenger manifest is a Who`s Who of the famous and infamous, including Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, Al Capone and Ernest Hemingway.
”I remember flying Hemingway to Bimini,” Franklin says. ”He was quite the fisherman, and fishing`s all I remember him ever talking about-how he was going to Bimini hoping to catch a big marlin or maybe some tuna.”
Among the other famous fliers was one Gerardo Machado, a Cuban president who, with revolutionaries storming the gates of his residence, needed a quick exit out of Havana. Accustomed to helping people on the run, Chalk`s was the answer. According to the story, Pappy whisked Machado off the island, a hail of bullets in their wake.
The tales tied to Chalk`s are legion, and maybe the stuff of legend at times, yet they`re scarcely more sensational than Pappy`s own.
His saga starts in 1911, with Pappy working as a garage mechanic in Paducah, Ky., when a barn-storming pilot needed a piston repaired. Pappy fixed it, and was paid for his trouble in flying lessons.
On the surface, it was no more than a chance meeting of two thrill-seeking men who skimmed the sky over the murky Ohio River doing 60 miles per hour with wings and a two-cylinder engine. Except that the barn-storming pilot was Tony Janus, who started the world`s first scheduled air service in 1914 between Tampa and St. Petersburg.
As if to do his teacher one better, Pappy Chalk created Miami`s first international flying service in 1919-eight years before Pan American got its start flying mail to Cuba from Key West.
Pappy called his small, ambitious enterprise the Red Arrow Flying Service and flew his Stinson seaplane from the old Royal Palm Hotel docks at the mouth of the Miami River to Bimini.
Office under an umbrella
A name change to Chalk`s Flying Service followed his move to a landfill named Watson Island at the foot of the MacArthur Causeway, where Pappy stuck a beach umbrella in the ground, set up a portable table for his office and talked on a phone mounted on a nearby utility pole.
A few years later, he operated out of a coral hut built from stones he`d picked up on the shore. It was a simpler time, and Pappy was a simple businessman.
He started his business the same year KLM Royal Dutch Airlines began, and both claim to be the oldest international airline operating today.
During a half-century of flying, when everything else around him was rapidly changing, Pappy never altered course, never changed his business approach. No matter that local startups like Pan Am and Eastern grew into great winged giants or that other small airlines like his eventually sold out or signed on with bigger companies.
Pappy kept his airline small, his prices competitive and his books in the black.
”Pappy was what you`d call frugal,” Franklin says. ”He was from the old school and didn`t want to spend the money that he worked so hard to make.”
Throughout his life, Pappy liked to brag that Chalk`s owned its seven planes outright and always made money, while claiming a safety record any airline would envy: no deaths, no serious accidents and no untoward incidents in all those decades of flying.
Except, of course, for the hijacking in March 1972.
Drama on the runway
”There was one plane cranked up to go to Bimini,” Franklin recalls,
”and these two guys came out of nowhere, got on the plane and told the pilot, `We`re going to Havana.` The pilot was a man by the name of Jim Cothron, and Jim just shut the engine off and said, `No, we`re not.` The hijackers looked at each other and one of them said, `What are we gonna do?`
and the other one said, `Shoot him.` ”
Once, twice, three times they shot Cothron, in each leg and his left arm, and then they threw him off the plane. In the distance, a mechanic named Douglas MacKenzie heard the commotion, grabbed a .25 caliber revolver from his car and headed toward the plane. MacKenzie, now 67 and still working for Franklin as he has for 25 years, remembers thinking clearly amid the chaos.
”My plan was to get under the plane and shoot out the right tire,” he says. ”If I could do that, they wouldn`t be going anywhere.”
Instead, a hijacker fired through the window as MacKenzie approached the plane, hitting him in the right leg. Then the hijacker pointed the gun through the shattered window and fired again. The bullet ripped through MacKenzie`s shoulder before coming out his back. Another shot rang out, piercing the plane`s roof.
With Cothron and MacKenzie lying bleeding on the concrete, the co-pilot didn`t hesitate. With five passengers and two hijackers, he flew the plane to Havana. One day later, once cash had exchanged hands, the plane and its passengers were returned to Miami. In due time MacKenzie and Cothron recovered from their wounds, patched up the aircraft, and it was business as usual again.
For Pappy Chalk, business as usual meant flying as long as he could, postponing his retirement until he was nearly 75, shortly after his wife died in 1964. Once grounded, Pappy turned his attention to other winged creatures, feeding the pigeons that awaited his daily handout outside Chalk`s terminal.
”We always knew when he was coming, because the minute he turned off the road the birds would fly out to meet him,” says Jean Munroe, an employee for 21 years. ”He came every day except holidays and Sundays with birdseed for the pigeons and soup and sandwiches for the rest of us.”
Then one day at his Miami home, an insistent Pappy climbed a tree he thought needed trimming, lost his balance, and for one brief moment was airborne again. He died of injuries from that fall at age 88.
Expanded routes
Today the business end of Chalk`s International Airlines takes place miles from the shores of Watson Island in an office at the Ft. Lauderdale Jet Center, a pale, peach-colored corporate edifice as different from the small, humble terminal on Watson Island as jumbo jets are from seaplanes.
Despite the formal surroundings, Chalk`s owner, Seth Atwood, comes across as a casual executive, arriving at work tieless, a small airplane pin fixed to his Polo shirt.
Working at his side, his wife, Connie, concentrates on the airline`s past, filing yellowed press clippings and restoring old photos, while her husband focuses on the company`s future.
In the last two years, Atwood has expanded Chalk`s routes to include Nassau, Paradise Island, Key West, and Ft. Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. Sightseeing flights around Miami and Key West are also offered. Flights leave from Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and splash down at Watson Island to pick up passengers before taking off for the final destination.
Atwood bought the company from Resorts International through a family business called United Capital Corp. for an undisclosed price in January 1991. It had been nearly grounded by Resorts International, which had bought it in 1974 from Dean Franklin.
Under Resorts International, the gaming firm owned by California entrepreneur and former TV star Merv Griffin, business had dwindled to a single Bimini route. Chalk`s needed business savvy and cash to keep it airborne. The Atwood family supplied both.
The Atwood family business goes back to Seth Atwood`s grandfather, an industrialist from Rockford, Ill., who was doing his own kind of pioneering about the same time Pappy Chalk was learning to fly.
In 1909 he started Atwood Vacuum Machines, making industrial equipment for large buildings. His son joined the business, which later made automotive supplies before diversifying again into banking, yachts and resort development.
Before buying Chalk`s, the company`s single foray into the aviation business occurred in 1979. United Capital Corp. was one of the 12 original investors in a new airline called Midway, successful for years before it went out of business in 1991.
An accidental discovery
Atwood wasn`t hunting for an airline when he discovered Chalk`s. He was working for a California client looking for evacuation routes in case of an earthquake. At the same time Atwood was searching for solutions, Chalk`s was for sale. Atwood found out about it and realized it had the answer to his problem: seaplanes.
Eventually United Capital bought Chalk`s, and the business brought the Atwoods to south Florida, familiar terrain for the family, who, when Atwood was growing up, had routinely vacationed in the Bahamas and sunned on Ft. Lauderdale beach.
Somewhere in the family archives is a home movie, Seth Atwood recalls, taken in the 1950s when he was a child. The occasion: a flight on the Goodyear blimp, then moored on Watson Island. Captured in the footage of that long-ago movie is one magnificent white bird, its wings spread wide and its nose pointed skyward. Yes, another Chalk`s seaplane taking flight.
