Viewing page 92 of 122

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[caption]]In the good ol' days of trans-Pacific travel Deac Lyman gets a lei and an upcoming buss for good luck, during a Hawaiian stopover on pioneer Clipper journey from mainland U.S., to the Philippines, 1936.
[[/caption]]

[[image No. 99 - black & white photograph of Deac Lyman and hula girl placing a lei around his neck]]

Lauren Dwight Lyman

"I think the story I enjoyed the most was the Kingsford-Smith flight. I rode with the flyers from New York City to San Francisco. There I was doing my interviews sitting on a hassock, behind the gas tanks," Deac Lyman recalled.

Kingsford-Smith and his Australian crew had left San Francisco in the Southern Cross, May, 1928, to complete the first TransPacific crossing to the continent down under, via Hawaii and the Fiji Islands. They continued around the world, their last lap, New York to the golden bay. Lyman, a New York Times reporter, was given the task of ghosting the Kingsford-Smith reports for newspaper syndication. The job was a plum, and he knew it. His job as an aviation journalist had begun the year before, in a roundabout way, when he was sent to Roosevelt Field, Long Island, to cover a flight duration record in early April. "The New York Times' regular Nassau County correspondent was ill, and I was assigned because I lived nearby--picked for geographical reasons rather than for competence."

Deac Lyman joined the Times in 1919, too broke to continue his education at Yale. He stayed until 1938, covering the great aviation events, and in 1936, won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting the Lindbergh's departure from the U.S. to England. From 1938 to 1959, he served on the corporate staff of United Aircraft Corp.

[[image - small drawing of a propeller]]

Lauren Dwight Lyman: born Easthampton, Mass., April 24, 1891.