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Children’s magazines tapped the magic of the clipper. Even after Franklin K. Mathiews, chief librarian for the Boy Scouts of America had complained about Stratemeyer’s outlandish stories involving Scouts in his Boy Scout Series of books, Boy’s Life ran the multi-part story, “Typhoon Gold.” If Mathiews wanted stories concerned more with what scouting “really was in the Eagle Patrol of Ottumwa, Iowa,” as Russel Nye put it (79), he didn’t get it here. Three young men in a forty-five foot ketch plan to sail from the West Coast to the Philippines to rescue sunken gold from pirates. Steven Coleman’s father had died trying to transport gold from his mine to stave off creditors. Now his son would set matters straight. The trials of this trip would be Steve’s rite of passage to manhood. It’s already apparent that the money motive existed in this story as in the books discussed earlier. When the boys, in need of supplies, overshot Wake and discovered their radio batteries were dead, the “Queen of the Skies” China Clipper appeared, waggled its wings, and showed them the way. The clipper rescue motif occurred in nearly all the narrative tales involving it. This matched Pan Am President Juan Trippe’s belief that clipper could save the world if they were permitted to fly worldwide. Countries usually went to war when people did not know each other. Clippers bred familiarity. No one need be isolated.
The October, 1936, issue of Boy’s Life, which contained the first installment of “Typhoon Gold,” also contained in the “Movies of the Month” section a review by Mathiews of Warner Brothers’ “China Clipper.” He did like this presentation of the clipper because the film depicted a “recent magnificent achievement” and “does not resort to the usual banal villainies or harrowing hokum…” (24). In short, the film avoided being a “Typhoon Gold.”
Though Mathiews saw the film as being moral and infomationally uplifting for Scouts, he omitted any mention of Humphrey Bogart in the role of the real Capt. Musick. Instead, Mathiews praised Pat O’Brien, who played Juan Trippe, the head of Pan Am and obvious captain of industry and free enterprise. Apparently, Bogart’s tough guy roles were not appropriate for young minds. Regardless of what he thought of Bogart, the China Clipper’s importance and popularity was underscored by a full color painting of the clipper inside the back cover of the January, 1936, issue. In the same issue, “Air Lanes Around the World!” by Captain Burr Leyson touted the Pan Am clipper story to Scouts as well as Pan Am could have done on its own. The clippers were to modernize and “regain” for us “the romance and glory of the days when the famous American sailing ‘Clippers’ carried our commerce to the far corners of the earth” (41). The implication was that we had some catching up to do, a familiar theme in the pre-war period. No wonder the clipper was seen as being so important. It was an aeronautical second coming. The clipper held the ticket to the nation’s rite of passage.
From this perspective, the clipper conformed to characteristics of the American monomythic hero described by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence. The clipper was an “outsider” hero willing to wander the oceans as a “savior” figure to “restore” the world to some former Edenic harmony. The clipper had to step in due to the failure of normal institutions to meet new challenges. Closer to home, institutions had also failed. With the collapse of the stock market and the slipping of U.S. prestige abroad, clippers could do what various U.S. administrations had failed to do.
During World War II, advertisers used the clipper in Boy’s Life to promote various products and services. For example, one full-column called “Boy Scouts in Aviation” was really an ad for Parks Air College. It not only pictured two clippers but also related how a Junior Assistant Scout Master from Massachusetts applied what he had learned about leadership in scouting to leadership in aviation. With his Parks education, in lesss than three years he became assistant airport manager at the Pan Am transatlantic clipper base in Shediac, New Brunswick (40).
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