If I had grown up in Montana or Iowa or Texas, or anyplace else, for that matter, I don't know what I would have been. But I wouldn't have worked in an office and I wouldn't have done the same thing day in and day out, I'm sure of that. It would probably have been something creative, but I don't have any idea what.
The fact that I grew up in Los Angeles in a period when drag racing was also getting out of the toddling stage meant only one thing--I was going to be a race driver. I would build fantastically fast race cars in my backyard and collect trophies and giant sums of money and fame and make my family very proud of me. Racing was young, and so was I. This book is about how we both grew up.
My ninth birthday was a monumental occasion, for which I had impatiently waited. I got my first bicycle and, with it, the obsession for speed that has remained with me ever since. I gleefully wheeled the bike down the front porch steps that morning and out onto the sidewalk in search of the neighborhood kids--not to show off the gleaming chrome or white sidewall tires, but to show them how fast it would go. I hadn't even been on it, but I was convinced it would outrun any bike on the block. Three thousand skinned knees and 500 ripped shirts later I proved my point.
Kids used to see me coming and say, "Oh, no, here comes that Breedlove nut. All he ever wants to do is race."
When there was nobody left who would race with the "Blue Streak" (that's the name I had given my trusty racer), I had to find another form of competition: I turned to model airplanes and a neighborhood group of daring young men called the "Sky Kings." It was 1946 and the war was over, but it had left me with a tremendous interest in airplanes. That didn't completely stop the bike racing, though. I raced the Blue Streak to the club meetings--although now against imaginary opponents. I might add, however, that these ghostly competitors were usually world champion bike racers, and the crowd roared when the charming young American blew off the cream of the Continent.
The goal of the Sky Kings was to promote the design and building of airplanes--the gasoline-engined, U-control type--that showed originality, endurance, and outstanding flying characteristics. My goal, of course, was to fly faster than anybody else. With a goal different from the group's, of course, I had problems with the Sky Kings from the start.
I started with airplane kits, but when I had stacked a few of them up, I realized that I could compete a lot more cheaply if I started making my own planes.
The kits were really unsatisfactory for what I had in mind. I had already started to get interested in design and aerodynamics and could see many ways to improve the streamlining of the planes. However, as far as my parents were concerned, the thing had started to get out of hand. They had bought the kits, but they balked at the prospect of any additional expense. They knew, from hearing the other kids talk, that designing planes took lots of supplies and that it was pretty much a trial-and-error affair--mostly error.
It didn't take me long to get the message. The money would have to come from another source. Thus was born the Breedlove Airplane and Hedge Trimming Company.
I hopped on ol' Blue Streak and canvassed the block--the houses with hedges, that is. "I've got experience in trimming hedges," I would tell the owners, "and I think I could work you in on Wednesday morning. It would certainly improve the appearance of this beautiful place."They couldn't resist the big, soulful eyes and the cap and baggy knickers (I had seen the costume in a Jackie Cooper movie and it worked for him; so I dug deep in my closet and came up with a duplicate).
The hedge trimming gave me the money I needed, but I'm not sure that it produced quite the results my customers had in mind. When I wasn't sitting behind some hedge trying to work out an airplane design problem, I was cutting a hedge to resemble a series of wing sections. I had some explaining to do at times and didn't get too much repeat business. I had to expand into other neighborhoods.
The design business began to flourish in a corner of the tool shed in the backyard, and I bought all of the necessary supplies to start working on my own creations. I talked with some of the fellows at the club and learned that it would be a lot easier if I made aluminum templates for the wing ribs. This way I could then just hold the templates down on the balsa wood and cut around them. It was practically an assembly line project.
The fuselages of my new planes were four slabs of balsa with a long, streamlined profile. I accomplished this by glueing blocks of balsa around the engine opening and fairing them in to the smooth lines of the long, pointed propeller spinner. I could really streamline the body this way and was able to eliminate the canopy and all the other unnecessary stuff that increased air drag. I also had the only retractable landing gear of any of the club members. Well, actually it didn't retract--it fell out after take-off, but it was designed to do this and it did help to reduce the drag.
By the time I had six airplanes of my own design--Craig's Comet I through Craig's Comet VI--I was rapidly losing interest in the other end of the business, the hedge trimming. Yet simple economics told me that I would either have to cut expenses on the flying end or pick up the tempo on the working end.
I chose the former and began to perfect my flying technique: in other words, I worked on how to cut out the crashes. I practiced at slower speeds until I had all of the maneuvers down pat. Then it was back to flat out. I rigged the propeller so that it would come sideways on the compression, and I could bring it in on the belly without breaking the prop, since I didn't have any landing gear at that point. I also stopped adding planes to the model air force and started perfecting the design and trying to eliminate the problems on the existing ones. This cut the cost considerably.
My parents had been pretty patient with me, considering the fact that I bad forsaken everything but the airplane caper and now spent all my nonschool hours in what I called the airplane shop, even though it was just the tool shed. I was living with my mother and stepfather and had a fairly happy home life--that is, I would have had a happy home life if I had ever come out of the shed in the back to take a look at it.
My stepfather owned a nursery a few miles from home and spent all day and most evenings with the business. It seemed that there was always some plant or other just coming into season and he was rushing around at the nursery pouring water on things and digging and whatever else it is you do at nurseries. I had never taken much interest in it because there wasn't anything fast about horticulture, and if there wasn't speed involved, well, I just wasn't interested. My mother had been a dancer in motion pictures when she was young, and she had had fast, fancy cars; so she understood my interest in speed a little better than my stepdad. If it hadn't been for her, I probably wouldn't have gotten to do any of the things I did. Before she had remarried, I was about all she had, and I guess she never did get over pampering me. I was always glad I had her in my corner, though.
My parents did feel, however, that I should have some interest other than airplanes, and they enrolled me in a private art class. Normally this would have interested me because I did well in art in school, but the class was held on Saturdays, the day the Sky Kings took part in the city-wide flying competition. I had won two trophies for stunt flying and one for design, so Saturday was about the most important day of the week to me. "Besides," I told myself, "who wants to sit around with a lot of girls and old ladies copying pictures out of magazines of horses and landscapes and things like that?"
So I would ditch art school and go fly planes. Some friends of my parents were supposed to pick me up on the corner of Sepulveda and Venice boulevards, and I would get there early, wait 20 minutes, and then go join the Sky Kings--after slipping in the back of the airplane factory and extracting the original Wheel-Dropping, Propeller-Saving Hedge-trimmer Special. When I got home, I would say, "You know, I waited 20 minutes for those people, and they never did show up; so I went to fly airplanes." After a few weeks my folks finally got the message. I dropped out of art school.
It was at about age 12 that my interest began to wane in the airplane caper. I had the fastest planes in the club, but there still wasn't a competition category for speed. There wasn't even one for originality in wheel-dropping or propeller conservation or any of the interesting things. Just figure eights and loops and all that stuff. I might as well be trimming hedges, I thought.
It was at this point that a significant thing happened in school. I was a good student and, despite my strong outside interest, managed to make pretty good grades. Fortunately the studies came easily, for I certainly didn't spend too much time studying at home--that time had been reserved for the planes. I guess I could have been an honor student if I had just applied myself, but I didn't even pay too much attention in class. If the subject didn't,particularly interest me, I would spend my time drawing airplanes or automobiles with streamlined bodies. I've never been able to concentrate on things that don't completely fascinate me.
They used to show films at the Sky Kings meetings about how air foils work and about a lot of other aerodynamic design features, and I tried to apply these principles in my classroom doodlings. One day when the teacher started down my aisle, I covered my notebook drawings and quickly turned to a page in my social sciences textbook. There it was--a photograph of John Cobb's land speed record car! The caption said that Cobb, an Englishman, had set the record of 394 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats. "Wow," I thought, "imagine--394 miles an hour."
"Craig," the teacher, who was now at my side, said, "we're not on that page."
"I know, Miss Johnson," I said. I also knew, in a flash, that I had found my goal in life: the world land speed record!
I went home that night and told my mother that I had decided on my life's career. She didn't say, "Yes, Craig, that's nice," or, "Okay, son, now go wash up," or anything like that. I think she somehow realized that this was not just a 12-year-old kid coming home and saying, "Mommy, I'm going to be a policeman." She knew deep inside that I meant it.
