The Adventures of Admiral Byrd (and His Son)

During its 1933-34 season, CBS Radio listeners were treated to one of the most remarkable broadcast programs of all time: The Adventures of Admiral Byrd, a weekly 15 minute dispatch by Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd the 4th (1888-1957) from his base camp at the bottom of the world in Antartica. On this, his second Antactic expedition, the nation’s youngest Admiral was actually stationed by himself, operating a meteorological observation station. The title of his 1938 autobiography Alone tells the tale. Anyway, sure, those televised transmissions from the moon from 1969 to 1973 may have exceeded the Byrd program in remoteness, but on the other hand they weren’t proper “shows” per se. In fact, they pre-empted the previously scheduled programming. By contrast, the Byrd show was on the schedule. American technology had progressed to such an extent that a person could make such a presentation from such a remote location with regularity. 90 years ago. I’d be just as thrilled if such a show were originating out of Antartica now!

This will be my second biographical article about Admiral Byrd. The first was written when I was in the fourth grade. We did a whole lap on Polar Exploration that year, and that’s when I was bitten by the bug (it’s one of the interests my wife and I share in common). It’s why there’s a post here on Shackleton, and a mention made of Peary, and some attention given to polar voyages made by airships. I’ve also done something on Scott of the Antarctic. Explorers also lectured in vaudeville from time to time, although by Byrd’s time, as we see, radio was already available. I also paid home to Byrd in my play Santa Claus Conquers the Martians!

I’d have been thrilled to know when I was a kid that Byrd was a distant relation of mine, although ultimately that thrill deserves certain qualifications (as you can imagine, Byrd was a pretty conservative dude). Byrds were among the first settlers of Virginia at the Jamestown settlement, and they had remained among the state’s important political families right down to the Admiral’s day. His brother Harry was a Dixiecrat Governor and Senator. Their father had served as Speaker of the Virginia House. He was literally descended from John Rolfe and Pocahontas. So there was something about Byrd leading this new phase of human exploration that captured the imaginations of many.

What the well dressed polar explorer wears when he’s going out on the town. “Time to put on my face!”

As I invariably do, I’ve buried the lede! Byrd’s most significant exploit was leading the first aerial expedition to reach the South Pole, in 1929. The event was filmed and released by Paramount as With Byrd at the South Pole (1930), which won the Oscar for Best Cinematography. Previously, Byrd had also claimed to have been the first to fly over the North Pole, in 1926. At the time, he was universally credited and lauded as a hero, although much reason to doubt that first achievement later emerged, so I guess we can also incorporate Byrd into the Great American Hoax Tradition! In between his exploits at the two poles, in 1927 Byrd also came frustratingly close to leading the first nonstop flight from the U.S. to France. Unfortunately, technical problems caused a delay, which allowed Charles Lindbergh to beat him.

Early in his military career, Byrd was stationed in my home state of Rhode Island, where he’d been assigned as an inspector and instructor of the State Naval Militia. He wasn’t happy about the post, having been sent there after an ankle injury took him out of active shipboard service. But it did allow him to develop his gifts for organization, planning, and logistics, all of which proved valuable to him on his expeditions. When World War One arrived, Byrd was reactivated and allowed to become an aviator (presumably because pilots get to sit down; sailors have to stand!) Byrd’s navigation skills contributed greatly to the success of the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic in 1919, although he was not one of the flight crew. He was given command of his first expedition in 1925.

Byrd’s numerous Antarctic expeditions resulted in the mapping of large swaths of the continent, the naming of many of its geologic features, and the establishment of a permanent U.S. base there. For his service he was awarded a Medal of Honor, a Navy Cross, and dozens of other similar decorations. He is the only person in history to have had three ticker tape parades in his honor in New York City.

The 1948 film of Operation Highjump, Byrd’s 46-47 expedition to map the continent The Secret Land, was narrated by Robert Montgomery,Robert Taylor, and Van Heflin. In 1956, not long before he died, he was a guest onPerson to Person with Edward R. Murrow.

Byrd’s son, also Richard Everlyn Byrd (1920-1988) was also a Navy man, and had in fact accompanied his father on Operation Highjump. Richard the Son attended Harvard and became a financial adviser, but he seems to have been very overwhelmed by the large shadow of his father. In 1948 (the same year The Secret Land came out) he married a Saltonstall, a family as important to Massachusetts as the Byrds were to Virginia. They had arrived in Boston with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630. There had been a Saltonstall at Harvard every generation since its founding in 1636.

But the son seemed to unravel after his father died. He moved back in with his mother Marie (form who Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica was named) at the family’s Beacon Hill mansion, abandoning his wife and kids. The wife divorced him and got custody of the children. Ostensibly Richard the Younger was in charge of the family foundation and the long term plan was to make the family mansion into a museum in honor of his father. Byrd the Elder had naturally collected interesting artifacts from all over the world, as world explorers will do. But Byrd the Younger was also a collector — the problem kind. He seems to have been an obsessive compulsive, and filled his house with junk. He is said to have owned as many as 500 vintage automobiles located in various spots around the country. He was unable to organize all this stuff. The collections were all sold off. There was to be no museum. Meanwhile, Byrd grew increasingly eccentric, distracted, erratic. The kind of guy who wore three pairs of pants at the same time. He was rather young when Alzheimer’s set in.

In September 1988 Byrd was put on a train in Boston so that could attend Centennial celebrations in honor of his father’s birth in Washington, D.C., held by the National Geographic Society. He never made it. He went missing for weeks. Then, about a month later, his body was found in an abandoned warehouse in Baltimore. The cause of death was dehydration and malnutrition. The poor man had probably gotten off the train at the wrong stop, wandered around, and quietly wasted away. The irony is mind-blowing. His father had navigated to the remotest, least charted spots on the globe. The son got lost on the most routine of train hops, in the middle of a major city. The father had also spent months alone in the harshest climate in the globe, but was well provisioned. Yet somehow it was the son who died for lack of food and drink, despite ample resources and the fact that he was probably a short walk from a grocery store. There’s something kind of O. Henry about it.

In 2010, a Baltimore theatre company produced a play of my wife’s in a repurposed warehouse not far from where Byrd was found. And the name of that play was…Antarctica.