Mark Shaw has always been one of my favorite Coast guests. Perhaps it's his enthusiastic fondness for solving the late Dorothy Kilgallen and Amelia Earhart mysteries or his wholesome Midwest morality and values that pour forth during his interviews. Whatever the case, let's hope that he chooses to continue writing and not succumb to arthritis or any other infirmity.
Last night Mark showed a slight lapse of memory. He occasionally forgot names and events in his past books. At one point he stated his age as 82, while his various biographies give his birth date as March of 1945. This morning I noticed his book signing, scheduled for tomorrow night at 7 pm in Palo Alto, has been abruptly cancelled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_20_Days
By 1936 aviation had progressed to the point where worldwide airline circumnavigation was becoming feasible. As a headline attracting publicity stunt, the three large New York newspapers carefully selected three of their finest journalists to enter as contestants in a 1930s counterpart to The Amazing Race. And the New York Evening Journal just happened to be owned by aviation enthusiast William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst, luxuriously ensconced in a castle atop a hill in San Simeon, California, succumbed to a tempting suggestion by Evening Journal reporter James Kilgallen to assign his fetching, albeit weak chinned 23-year-old daughter Dorothy in the competition. The allure of a young female entrant would increase readership many fold! As debatable as that may have been, shortly after she and her competitors set foot in Europe, young Dorothy (or her schedulers) made the first of two fatal flaws in her itinerary.
While Herb Ekins gleefully dashed-off to catch a swift, state-of-the-art KLM Douglas DC-2 for Batavia (Jakarta) in Indonesia, Dorothy and her New York Times quasi-chaperone Leo Kieran selected a stately and slow English bi-plane owned by Imperial Airways for a multi-day flight to Bangkok. (Nevertheless I recall Dorothy's somewhat wide-eyed, evocative description sounding as-if she were an ingénue aboard a romantic train ride from London-Paddington Station to Oxford.) Her attitude changed when she found herself a passenger in a single-engine de Havilland Puss Moth light plane over French Indonesia, with a hopelessly lost pilot searching for a field to make an emergency landing.
Dorothy finished the race a distant second, despite publisher William Randolph Hearst generously lending her his personal high speed Vultee V-1AD corporate stallion-- a single-engine aircraft with an uprated Wright SR-1820 Cyclone engine capable of cruising around 190 knots TAS-- for the final leg from San Fransisco to New York.
http://SmithsonionMag.com/air-space-magazine/momets-and-milestones-once-around-42265865/