Three frostbitten Soviet airmen, one exhausted single-engine plane, and history's first nonstop flight over the North Pole — ending not in Oakland but on little Pearson Field. Boone tells how a not-yet-famous George Marshall answered with his family's breakfast table, and why two of the fliers returned decades later, with the Cold War still on, to dedicate this stone.
Now don't you walk on past this stone, friend — Boone Merrick here, and if we haven't crossed paths yet on this walk, well, you found me at a good spot, because this is one of my favorite tales on the whole post. And I'll tell you something up front: I mostly trade in tales, but this one is no tall tale at all. Every word of it is written down.
Picture it. June twentieth, nineteen thirty-seven, about eight twenty on a Sunday morning. Folks around Vancouver are pouring their coffee. And out of the morning sky comes a sound nobody here has ever heard — one big engine, running tired — and down onto Pearson Field settles a long-winged red airplane. And she's Russian.
She was a Tupolev A-N-T twenty-five, one engine, and the three men who climbed down out of her had just done a thing no human beings had ever done. Sixty-three hours and sixteen minutes in the air. Nonstop from Moscow, straight over the North Pole, more than five thousand two hundred miles through subzero cold, with ice creeping out along the wings the whole way. The world's first nonstop transpolar flight — and it ended right here, on this quiet little Army field.
Valery Chkalov was the pilot, Georgy Baidukov beside him, Alexander Belyakov working the charts. They were bound for Oakland, California, mind you. But the fuel was running low and the oil pressure was dropping, and they had a choice to make: Portland's Swan Island airport, mobbed with a Sunday crowd of spectators, or this quiet strip across the river. They chose quiet. Smart men.
Now here is the part I love best. The post commander was a brigadier general by the name of George C. Marshall — yes, that Marshall, though the world didn't know his name yet. He hurried over, gathered up those three frostbitten fliers, and took them to his own house on Officers Row — that big Queen Anne you may have passed already, or will yet — and while half the newspapermen in the Pacific Northwest came pounding up the walk, he sat those men down and gave them his family's breakfast. Think on that. Three strangers fell out of the sky from the far side of the world, and this town's answer was to ask if they'd eaten.
The ending carries both sorrow and grace, the way the good ones do. Chkalov never got to grow old — he died the very next year, nineteen thirty-eight, on a test flight back home. But Baidukov and Belyakov lived long. And in nineteen seventy-five — old men by then, with the Cold War still on — those two came back to Vancouver and dedicated this very stone. It stood across the field then, on the south side along the highway; the road crews moved it to this spot when they widened that road in the nineteen eighties. Same stone, saying the same thing: the first monument on American soil to honor a Soviet achievement, marking a morning when three half-frozen men dropped out of the sky, and the first thing anybody offered them was breakfast.
I'd say that's worth a stone, wouldn't you?