The museum has a permanent exhibit I call Small Town, Big World: Locals Who Made History.

As the name implies, it explores the efforts of local residents who went on to achieve great things in the world — Chris Taylor won Olympics bronze, Captain Kincheloe set the altitude record and would have been one of the first astronauts, Leigh Wade was a pilot on the first Around-the-World Flight and Webb Miller covered the globe for the United Press.

Leigh Wade’s story is probably the least known of the group, but his story is quite intriguing.

Long before Captain Kincheloe flew to the edges of outer space, Leigh Wade of Cassopolis became an early aviation pioneer who set the altitude record and in 1924 piloted one of four planes on a trip around the globe.

Leigh Wade grew up on Diamond Lake and graduated from Cassopolis High School. He first enlisted in the Armed Forces and served along the Mexican border during the dispute with Pancho Villa in 1915. After that adventure, he became one of the first volunteers for the Aviation Branch of the Signal Corps. Stationed in France at the end of World War I, Wade primarily tested pilots on new aircraft.

Stationed at McCook Field in Ohio after the war, he set an altitude record of 25,341 feet in 1921, which cemented his status as a premier flyer in the country.

In 1924, several countries sponsored aviators trying to pilot the first Around-the-World-Flight. Despite objections from President Calvin Coolidge, who thought it a waste of resources, the United States Army moved forward with a plan to send four Douglas bi-planes west from Seattle around the globe. First Lieutenant Leigh Wade, a 27 year-old test pilot, was selected to pilot one of the planes — he was the youngest pilot by almost a decade.

According to an article Wade penned for Reader’s Digest in 1975, the Douglas aircraft were “fitted with cranky V-12 watercooled 400 horsepower Liberty engines, they cruised at about 90 m.p.h. We had few maps and no radios, and weather information was sparse and unreliable. We carried no parachutes or life rafts — they were too heavy.”

In other words, this was a dangerous mission. Each plane had a pilot and a mechanic flying in the open cockpit two-seater Douglas planes. Wade selected Sergeant Henry Ogden as his mechanic for the journey and they set about training for the mission.

The trek across the globe would require water, desert and other tricky landings. Because of the size of the planes and the technology of the time, the planes would need provisions regularly, so Mobil Oil Company planted fuel, spare plane parts and provisions every 400 miles along the route.

According to Wade, “Airplanes were complete strangers almost everywhere we went. Mobil…used everything from fishing boats to camels for delivery. Refueling took hours. Five gallon tins had to be lifted up by hand from the ground or from bobbing boats. The State Department arranged clearances for us to fly over or land in 22 countries.”

Each of the Douglas planes were named for large American cities — the Boston, Chicago, New Orleans and Seattle. Wade was at the helm of the Boston when they took off from Lake Washington near Seattle on April 6, 1924. At the same time this group started the trip, aviators from Italy, England and several other countries also started their journeys to win the race to be the first to fly around the world — all the other teams flew east.

The flyers encountered problems from the start and newspapers followed their progress every day, including the Dowagiac Daily News. Would they complete the journey? If so, would they be the first to make it around the globe? Find out more details in my column next month. It was quite an adventure!

 

Steve Arseneau is the director of the Dowagiac Area History Museum. He resides in Niles with his wife, Christina, and children, Theodore and Eleanor.