Photo by Bill Hubbard, Tucson, Ariz.
Calbraith Rogers and his Vin-Fiz Flyer on the ground in Marfa on Oct. 28, 1911, photographed by
rancher W.W. Bogel.
A CENTURY OF AVIATION IN ALPINE
by Lonn Taylor
T he Air Age came to Alpine in the
early afternoon of Oct. 28, 1911,
when Calbraith Perry Rodgers
landed his Vin-Fiz Flyer just north of
the public school grounds and remained
on the ground for half an hour before
flying on to Marfa and Sierra Blanca.
The entire population of Alpine turned
out to see the aviator and his airplane,
which looked like a marriage between a
box kite and a bicycle, with four wings,
four wire wheels and two propellers
linked by chains and sprockets to a single
engine. It was the first airplane and
the first aviator anyone in Alpine had
ever seen.
The aviator was a big man, 6-feet-4,
who flew sitting on the lower wing
dressed in a business suit and tie,
hunched over the control levers with his
back against the gasoline tank and the
engine banging away beside him. His
only protection from the weather was a
leather motorcyclist’s vest pulled on over
his suit coat. On really cold flying days
he stuffed newspapers under the vest.
When he landed in Alpine, Rodgers
was nearing the end of the first
transcontinental flight ever across the
United States, a 49-day journey that he
made in hops of 50 to 100 miles from
Sheepshead Bay, New York to
Pasadena, Calif. He was in the air for
only 24 of those 49 days. The other 25
were spent repairing his plane, which
was wrecked 16 times on take-offs and
landings. Rodgers used spare parts carried
on a special train that followed him
across the country, paid for by his sponsor,
a grape-flavored soft drink called
Vin-Fiz. He navigated by flying along
the railroad tracks, which was what
brought him to Alpine. Rodgers later
told reporters that the stretch over the
Big Bend from Del Rio to El Paso was
the most difficult part of his entire trip,
because the country was broken up by
canyons and mountains that created
strange air currents and provided few
emergency landing places.
Although Alpine did not get a proper
airport until 1940, when Mayor Louis
Starns persuaded the city council to purchase
the old rodeo grounds north of
town and bulldoze four runways onto it,
the Alpine Chamber of Commerce has
decided that Cal Rodgers’ brief visit
marks the beginning of aviation in
Alpine and has organized a centennial
celebration of aviation history here this
month. On Oct. 15 there will be displays
of historic aircraft and other aviation
material at the airport all day and
an evening banquet at the Granada
Theatre.
Most of the aviation activities in the
Big Bend between Rodgers’ 1911 visit
and the construction of Starns Field in
Alpine in 1940 took place somewhere
besides Alpine. In the 1920s the U.S.
Army Air Corps patrolled the border
from flying fields at Marfa, Sanderson
and Johnson’s Ranch, now in Big Bend
National Park. Army and civilian planes
occasionally landed on Alpine’s rodeo
grounds, but it was the absence of
defined runways there that caused the
Army to put Alpine on a “flying blacklist”
in 1933. That action led to the civic
push that culminated in Mayor Starns’
building a proper flying field in 1940.
The decision to build that field coincided
with the arrival in Alpine of John
Othello Casparis, who became one of
the legendary figures of Big Bend aviation.
Casparis was born in Round
Mountain, Texas in 1899. He took flying
lessons at San Antonio’s Stinson
Field in the 1920s and got his pilot’s
license in 1927, while he was running a
tourist court and filling station on U.S.
80 near Kent. He claimed to have
racked up 40,000 flying hours during his
career, which ended shortly before his
death at the age of 85. Casparis came to
Alpine from Dallas in 1940 as a flight
instructor in Sul Ross’ newly created
Navy V-5 Aviation Training Program.
Years later an interviewer asked his
widow why he took the job. “We had a
starve-out grocery store in Oak Cliff,”
she said. “We couldn’t make a living.”
He helped lay out the runways at the
new airport and was soon installed as
unpaid manager there.
In December 1941, a local rancher,
Willis McCutcheon, asked Casparis if
he could take McCutcheon up in his
plane so that he could shoot the
Mexican golden eagles that were preying
on his lamb crop. Casparis had
never heard of hunting anything from
an airplane but he agreed to try, and
McCutcheon, shooting from the cockpit,
bagged nine eagles on the wing.
Other ranchers approached Casparis, as
well as game warden Ray Williams, who
in one month brought down 111 eagles
from Casparis’ plane.
Casparis soon went into the eaglehunting
business on his own. He
removed the windows from his Aeronica
Chief and bought a shotgun, and in
June 1942 he persuaded the ranchers to
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Cenizo
Fourth Quarter 2011