A Juxtaposition of Passions

by Hap Rocketto

After my bride and two daughters my passions are shooting, and then, in no particular order, aviation and baseball. The America’s Cup used to be up there but since the grand days of the statuesque J Boats and thoroughbred 12 meter yachts have degenerated into soulless corporate financed multihull boats I fear my interest has waned. But, when my passions juxtapose there is always a bit more interest and excitement.

For example, the third game of the 1943 World Series on October 7th, interestingly enough 35 years to the day I was married. The two teams with the greatest number of World Series victories, the insufferable New York Yankees and the more tolerable Saint Louis Cardinals meet in the October Classic. During the third game, played at the old Yankee Stadium, The House the Ruth Built, a pair of B17 Flying Fortresses buzzed the game. ‘Thu Helen Highwater’, piloted by 2LT Jack Watson, flew so low that one of the sports scribes reported that Cardinal shortstop Marty “Slats” Marion, who had unusually long arms which had earned him the nickname “The Octopus,” might have fielded it. In fact photos of the incident show the lumbering four engine bomber barely clearing the flag staffs set high atop the Yankee Stadium outfield facade.

Sitting in the Plexiglas nose of Watson’s plane was the navigator, my uncle Harold J. Rocketto, for whom I am named. Fittingly the Cardinals won the game-the only one in a series they lost 4-1, a joyful event; I am sure, for my uncle who was an avid Brooklyn Dodger fan. It was not all that joyful when they landed in Presque Isle, Maine and were detained pending disciplinary action. It seemed that New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, a World War I bomber pilot who was seated in Yankee Stadium at the time, was hopping mad over the buzz job. The pilots were given letters of reprimand and fined $75 each, no small sum in 1943, and quickly sent on their way as the air war in Europe was consuming aircraft and crews at a prodigious rate and there were none to waste.

To tie things together the Cardinal’s manager was Hall of Famer Billy Southworth whose son, Billy, Junior, was a pilot serving with the 303rd Bomb Group at Molesworth, England, to which ‘Thu Helen Highwater’ and her crew were assigned when they arrived in England a few days later. LaGuardia was a member the Quiet Birdmen, a pilot’s organization, of which my brother and I are also a member.

My daughters, knowing of my varied interests, gave me a copy of Robert Gandt’s study of the age of the great flying boats, China Clipper, for my birthday. As I read the book I learned much and recognized many familiar prominent names in aviation, among them fellow Quiet Birdmen such as Igor Sikorsky, Charles Lindbergh, Juan Trippe, Glenn Curtiss, and legendary flying boat captain Edwin Musick.

Juan Terry Trippe was born into the privileged class and was a student at Yale as World War I began. Swept with patriotic fever he left school with Trubee Davison, and others,to form the First Yale Aviation Unit. Using private funds and a seaplane purchased by one of their fathers the boys learned how to fly in the waters off of Davison’s estate at Peacock Point, Long Island. Eventually they were accepted as a Naval Reserve unit, commissioned, and earned Navy Wings of Gold. One of their members, David Ingalls, saw combat in France and was the first Naval Aviator to become an ace.

Trippe was no stranger to the Navy. His great-great-grandfather was Lieutenant John Trippe, a naval officer who served in the Quasi-War with France and the First Barbary War and later died of illness on active service in 1810. A sloop built on the Niagara River in New York, originally named the Contractor, was purchased by the Navy in 1812 and renamed in his honor. She was then assigned to Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s Lake Erie Squadron in 1813.

When Perry defeated the British in the waters northwest of Put In Bay on September 10, 1813, Trippe was there. The American victory at the Battle of Lake Erie insured United States control of Lake Erie. 

Six of Lawrence’s ships are memorialized on street signs at Camp Perry. As you drive into the reservation, heading north on Niagara Road, looking off to the right you will note Ariel and Scorpion Roads parallel it. Up a head one can make out Lawrence Road, the southern boundary of the range complex which runs east west as does Somers Road. However, the first cross street upon entering Camp Perry is Trippe Road.

And here we have another juxtaposition of passions.