The Pulitzer Trophy and National Air Races at Wilbur Wright Field

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

In October 1924, Wilbur Wright Field, a military installation northeast of Dayton, Ohio and today part of Area B of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, hosted the Pulitzer Air Race. The Pulitzer race was one of ten different races contested as part of the three-day National Air Race, or “Dayton International Air Races”. While there were several prominent 1910s-1920s racing competitions, including that for the Gordon Bennett Trophy, a 1909-1920 series of races interrupted by the war, and the Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider, a 1913-1931 series contested amongst seaplanes and flying boats, the race held outside Dayton in 1924 was part of a competition organized by the Aero Club of America. In 1922 the Aero Club of America became became the National Aeronautic Association and was recognized by the Fédération aéronautique internationale as its representative in the United States.

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

The goals of the Pulitzer family in establishing the race series were to increase the visibility of their newspaper and encourage new aeronautical developments. Under the ACA/NAA’s auspices, Ralph, Herbert, and Joseph Pulitzer, jr., heirs to the publishing business of Joseph Pulitzer, sr., sponsored the award of a trophy and a cash prize to the winner of a closed-circuit race for speed. The race for the Pulitzer trophy – the fastest elapsed time for four laps around a fifty-kilometer course – was the headline race of the multiple races contested as part of the National Air Races between 1920 and 1925. Over the course of those years, aviators flying for the U.S. Army Air Service won it four times, in 1920, 1922, 1924, and 1925, while pilots flying for the U.S. Navy won it in 1921 and 1923. The Pulitzer competition ended after the 1925 race on Long Island; increasing organizational costs and decreasing numbers of entrants caused the NAA to end the race series. The trophy is now in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The National Air Races continued to be held under NAA auspices, mostly in Cleveland and then in Reno, with varying degrees of success, for much of the next century. While currently on hiatus, organizers of the modern version have identified Roswell, New Mexico, as the site for a planned 2025 event.

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

Then, as now, the racing of airplanes was an incredibly dangerous activity. In the 1920s it was an activity open only to young white men, most of whom were serving in or veterans of a North American or western European military air corps. These men flew before crowds estimated by event organizers and newspaper writers to be, at least at the beginning of the decade, in the hundreds of thousands. Women and people of color were spectators, not flyers, at Wright Field as at the other Pulitzer and National Air races, though individuals such as Bessie Coleman flew before the public in other contexts; the first organized race in which female aviators competed took place in 1929. Pilots attempted to keep public attention on a field no longer as novel as it had been before the Great War, when exhibition aviators sponsored by such firms as the Wright Company or the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company appeared at fairs and other events across North America. Moreover, boosters of air racing hoped that their events would spur government investment that would keep the industry afloat while accelerating technological improvements, especially military aviation, in light of massive cuts to military research and development and procurement in the wake of the end of the Great War and a surfeit of surplus military airplanes available for private purchase at prices lower than those of new machinery.

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

Fred F. Marshall (1891-1975), the Dayton-based editor of The Slipstream Monthly, exemplified that sort of boosterism. Marshall, a Cedarville native, had a background in engineering and in journalism, and first produced the Slipstream as the house publication of the engineering division at McCook Field. He left government employment and took the journal with him when the Army Air Corps ceased supporting it in 1923. Marshall used the October 1924 issue to promote both aviation and Dayton itself, writing of the city that “No more delightful spot can be found on the face of the earth.” Dayton, he claimed, had more flying fields nearby than any other city in the United States, and McCook Field made it “the center of aviation.” The races, he claimed, were “the event of the century” and would keep the city of the Wrights in the forefront of aviators everywhere.

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

While NAA officials understood that the technological improvements in airplanes engendered by air races would first benefit military aviation, militaries themselves, whether in Europe or North America, did not directly organize competitions. Instead, private aviation organizations, generally of national scope, like the NAA provided race structure, setting locations, competition categories, and rules. Because these organizations in turn reported to the Fédération aéronautique internationale (FAI), the Paris-based world governing body for aviation competitions, air racers competed on courses measured in kilometers and tried to break speed records officially recorded in kilometers per hour and altitude records set in meters. The competitors in Dayton flew multiple laps around a hexagonal course fifty kilometers in length for two hundred kilometers, generally to the north and northeast of Wilbur Wright Field (the course avoided the skies above urban Dayton), with turning points marked by pylons or observation balloons. Fifty-kilometer courses were standard at most races, though triangular, and not hexagonal, courses were the more common layout.

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

While the 1923 races at what became St. Louis Lambert International Airport in Missouri were, in the words of Pulitzer race historian Michael Gough, the “largest-ever air meet in terms of attendance [140,000 people, including Orville Wright] and [the] most successful” to date in the United States, 1924 proved different.[1] The NAA awarded the 1924 event to the Dayton area soon after Frederick B. Patterson, Oakwood resident, NCR president and the son of John H. Patterson, who had died in 1922, became the aeronautical group’s president. The NAA wanted prominent European aviators such as France’s Joseph Sadi-Lecointe to participate, and Patterson travelled to Europe to make personal appeals, but he was unable to convince aviators from overseas to participate. Moreover, the U.S. army and navy declined to spend money on developing new airplanes for the races (the navy declined to have its pilots participate at all, investing what resources it had in the Schneider competition). Nevertheless, organizers expected 250,000 spectators to come over the course of the event and made arrangements for special rail fares for visitors and for accommodations that ranged from tent camping to rooms in Dayton’s nicest hotels. However, estimated attendance over the three days of races only perhaps reached 50,000. Orville and Katharine Wright were in attendance. One highlight for those who attended aside from the races was the Wrights’ 1903 airplane. Its appearance was its last public exhibition before Orville sent it to England, where it went on exhibit at the Science Museum in London in 1928. Army Lt. John Macready also demonstrated some of the changes in airplane technology over the previous decade when he flew a 1910 Wright Company model B in front of the temporary grandstand on October 3.

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[1] Gough, 134.

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

Nine different competitions took place over the three days of the event, the Pulitzer Trophy race being the final and most prominent. A variety of local organizations, from the Central Labor Union of Dayton and NCR to the Engineers and Bicycle clubs of Dayton also sponsored trophy races for different types of airplanes or engines, some for civilian pilots, some for military; race winners also received varying financial prizes in liberty bonds, the “savings bond” of the day. All were speed contests of various sorts; there were no events that focused on acrobatics or altitude. Those spectators who did venture to the event saw Walter Lees win the NCR Trophy race, for instance, in a Hartzell VC-1, or perhaps J.M. Johnson take the Dayton Daily News Light Airplane cup in his Driggs-Johnson DJ-1 monoplane, in the races that led up to the finale.

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

That final race for the Pulitzer Trophy proved tragic. Four army officers intended to compete for the trophy, flying at the same time (depending on the particulars of a race, pilots either raced the clock or each other). They took off and flew to gain altitude from which to dive to cross the race’s start line at race speed (nearly 350 km/h or 215 mph). Army captain Burt Skeel, one of the competitors, took his Curtiss R-6 several thousand feet above the ground to begin his dive. Midway through it, his airplane collapsed and plummeted to the ground, creating a deep crater and killing him instantly. The three other competitors continued on with the race, which army Lt. Harry Mills won. Skeel was 30 and was survived by his wife Gertrude and two young children. His death in the last race of the event led to the cancellation of the planned awards ceremony at Dayton’s Memorial Hall. It also contributed to the end of the use of wooden frames for military aircraft as the wooden frame of Skeel’s airplane was unable to withstand the gravitational force exerted upon it during its final dive. Air Service officials subsequently named a road on Patterson Field for the captain.

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

The Pulitzer Trophy remained in competition for one more year; the NAA included it in the 1925 National Air Race on Long Island, but increasing costs and declining interest in aviation racing made that year the final year for which it was competed. Meanwhile, post-mortem evaluations of the 1924 event in Dayton varied. The national press, from large newspapers to local weeklies reprinting pieces from the wire services, quickly moved on to other issues, though an editorial in the New York Times noted that “it was certainly proved in this year’s Dayton races that the art of flying has been mastered,” and that “the time seems not distant when the flying machine will” rival the automobile. Locally, the Dayton Daily News editorialized that the “scientific world, the engineers, and those who are closely allied with the automobile industry will look at the enterprise from the standpoint of study of improvements” but that it “is too early for this group to make a report on the scientific aspects of the races.” James Cox’s editorial writers noted, though, the lack of “popular appeal” of the event. Being a spectator at an airplane race was not easy. “[A] long course with the ships absent from view much of the time causes restlessness and reduces attention and paid attendance.” “If the public is to be more keenly interested in aviation it must of necessity be given more to watch.”

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

A more boosterish take on spectators was obvious in Marshall’s Slipstream. He refused to consider the event a failure in its limited appeal to paying customers. Instead, he blamed the people of Dayton – a population somewhat inured to aviation and airplanes with McCook Field in their midst – for not flocking to the events at Wilbur Wright Field. Still, the headline of his article in the November 24 issue of the journal, titled “The Dayton Air Meet: Was it a Failure and Why?,” implied through its last word that the meet actually was a failure. Even though Marshall wrote that “the general consensus. . . of Government officials, foreign visitors, Army and navy heads, and thousands of others directly connected with aviation or the automotive industry” was that the races were “an exceptional success,” he thought that races as mass events were things of the past and would need “a goodly assortment of country fair side shows” to attract sizeable numbers of spectators. Indeed, competition for the Pulitzer Trophy ended after races on Long Island in 1925, while the National Air Races stagnated before being revived by a Californian automobile dealer in 1929. Airplane racing never approached the popularity of automobile or bicycle racing.

Image courtesy of the United States Air Force.

To later scholars, the 1924 races at Dayton and the Pulitzer Trophy races generally represent one way that aviation promoters, civilian and military, tried to engender development of faster, more maneuverable, more affordable propeller-driven aircraft (even post-Second World War airplane racing did not incorporate jet technology when it became commonplace in commercial and military airplanes). Gough notes that the Pulitzer races helped U.S. airplane companies market their products overseas in a decade that followed one dominated by European, and particularly French, builders. But the races at Wilbur Wright Field also demonstrated that aerial exhibitions were declining in popularity among the general public as the 1920s went on, and that hosting an air race was a way for organizers to lose money, whether or not they considered their event to be a technological success. The 1924 races were not profitable, with a $75,000 funding shortfall, and without the inclusion of new model airplanes did not see increased speeds from pilots or the unveiling of new technologies. And with the activities conducted at what evolved into Wright-Patterson, they receded in public memory. Today, there are few memories on the landscape besides the base’s Skeel Avenue to the races of October of 1924.

Sources for further information:
“The Air Races.” Dayton Daily News, 6 October 1924, p. 6
Aircraft Year Book 1925. New York, N.Y.: Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America, 1925. Pages 189-192 specifically address the Dayton races.
Clouse, Michael. “More Than a Road: The Story Behind Wright-Patt's Skeel Avenue.” https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3056048/more-than-a-road-the-story-behind-wright-patts-skeel-avenue/. Accessed 28 May 2024.
“The Dayton Airplane Show.” New York Times, 6 October 1924, p. 18.
Gough, Michael. The Pulitzer Air Races: American Aviation and Speed Supremacy, 1920-1925. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2013.
Gwynn-Jones, Terry. Farther and Faster: Aviation’s Adventuring Years, 1909-1939. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Ortensie, Ray, “Wilbur Wright Field and the 1924 International Air Races,” https://media.defense.gov/2020/Aug/06/2002472287/-1/-1/1/FLASHBACK_1924%20INTERNATIONAL%20AIR%20RACES.PDF, accessed 24 June 2024.The Slipstream Monthly. Vol. 5, no. 10 (October 1924). This particular issue of this journal was published as a souvenir program prior to the actual event and reflects the boosterism of race promoters. The November 1924 issue (vol. 5, no. 11) contains Marshall’s postmortem on the event.

For a view of the trophy itself visit the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum page: Pulitzer Trophy.

Edward Roach June 2024