A self-proclaimed “old stager” at the age of 31, Frank Simpson Jr. was unusual among the men who filled the ranks of naval aviation in 1916. Most of his contemporaries were younger and products of either the Naval Academy or Coast Guard Academy, but he had been a businessman, helping to run a family fruit company after studying civil engineering at the University of California at Berkley.1 Seeking a more adventurous life, he joined the California Naval Militia and received an ensign’s commission in 1915. In short order, he assumed command of the militia’s new Aviation Section and acquainted himself with Glenn L. Martin, a pioneer aircraft manufacturer. Martin had donated a pair of aircraft that Simpson and his fellow militiamen put to use in the skies over North Island during their active-duty period in the autumn of 1916/ Thus, he was an officer with a certain level of aviation experience when, wearing lieutenant’s stripes, he arrived at the Naval Aeronautical Station at Pensacola, Florida, in December 1916 to become a naval aviator.
Little did he know, however, how difficult an endeavor that would be. Having left college in 1906, he was far removed from his engineering studies, which made his initial classes in ground school, replete as they were with mathematics, simply miserable. “Talk about school days, they weren’t in it with the way they pile things on us,” a dejected Lieutenant Simpson wrote to his family on his third day in Florida. “I’ll tell you all that, while 1 want to learn, if I had known what they hand you out here, I’d never have been caught dead here.”1
In addition to academics, the dreaded physical examination, the bane of all aviators even to this day, confronted him almost immediately. For a man afflicted with a heart prone to skip a beat now and then, the day the doctor called was a nerve-racking experience:
When my turn came I was in such a mess that my heart was hitting about one in three, and my hands were so cold they were actually purple. They looked me over for an hour-and-a-half and among other things connected me up with a machine which registers in big red ink curves each heartbeat, breath [sic], blood pressure, etc. The paper record kept rolling out in front of me and 1 kept looking and waiting for a miss with my heart. Then they slapped a lump of ice on my bare back when I wasn’t looking and then shot a pistol off (unexpectedly) right behind my ear.4
His heart did not miss a beat.5
Lieutenant Simpson, perhaps more relaxed after having passed his physical, overcame his initial frustration and attacked his studies. Pensacola’s instructors imparted knowledge about “every screw, bolt, [and] principal [sic] of theory and construction” relating to airplanes and motors. Simpson’s classroom notebooks, filled as they are with penciled drawings and graphs, reveal that he absorbed it all. When grades were posted, the California militiaman’s high marks created quite a buzz among his fellow students.6
Academic achievement required many hours at his desk in the hotel room where he lived, but Simpson still found opportunities to celebrate his successes in Pensacola. There, the civilian populace and the Navy combined in an active social life, which included dinners and dances thrown at places such as the Osceola Club and the famed Hotel San Carlos. Lieutenant Simpson found his fellow officers to be splendid company on these social outings and was quick to point out that the Pensacola girls hadn’t “anything on them for foolishness.”7 Some of the latter was certainly attributed to drinking, which was very much a part of the off-duty activities of the officer corps. Yet the station commandant had ways of ensuring that things did not get out of hand. A standing order forbade fliers from imbibing except between noon Saturday and 0759 Sunday morning. Shortly after Simpson’s arrival, twelve particularly festive officers were ordered to live in bachelor quarters on board the station, a move intended to deter them from their excessive revelry downtown.8 For those who kept in line, partaking of the Pensacola hospitality proved enjoyable and, as Simpson discovered at one dance, occasionally beneficial to one’s career.
As the lieutenant recalled, “I decided it would be a good plan to establish a little social character, especially since the Commandant [and] his wife have a young lady, Miss Fletcher, stopping with them and the Commandant’s efficiency report will not be any the worse for a little attention shown Miss Fletcher. . . .” The day after the dance, Simpson had to appear before the commandant for reporting back to the station late, but it “wasn’t very serious because the Commandant ended by asking how 1 enjoyed the last night’s dance. Having paid particular attention to Miss Fletcher, I knew that he had noticed it.’"’
Social life aside, the central focus at Pensacola was flying, which set these naval officers apart from others of the day. Lieutenant Simpson relished his time in the cockpit and made steady progress flying the Curtiss N-9 seaplane. One morning, after completing an instruction flight with Captain Francis T. Evans (the Marine Corps’ fourth aviator), Simpson received orders to fly with the senior flight instructor, Lieutenant Earl W. Spencer Jr., a two-year veteran of flying (whose wife, Wallis Warfield Spencer, would one day create a stir in the British monarchy).10 Though “shaking in his boots,” Simpson performed so well that upon returning to the beach Lieutenant Spencer ordered all planes back to base. The time had arrived for Lieutenant Frank Simpson Jr.’s first “single hopping” trip, or solo. He recalled the experience for his parents:
Imagine then: The whole personell [sic] of the station on the sea-wall in front of the station, a sunny sky, blue expanse of water with just enough roughness to break the glare, sand as white as snow and, from my place in the sky, the speed boats [station crash boats] like bugs with long white tails. . . . For once I had things all my own way [and] was the one important thing in all that little world."
He passed with flying colors, thus clearing his first flighttraining hurdle.
Lieutenant Simpson’s flight instruction continued to keep him busy, but he could not help noticing signs that something was afoot around the aeronautical station. Writing to his parents in early February, he described a “harbor full of warships, destroyers, and submarines and intense activity at the yard with 30 new airplanes on the way.”12 The cause of the build-up surfaced on 6 April 1917, when Congress, in response to a request from President Woodrow Wilson, declared war on Germany. “Now the aviator, sailor, and soldier are the heroes of the hour,” Simpson wrote to his parents just days after the United States’ entry into the war.
Only a week after the declaration of war, the would-be aviator found himself at sea commanding a “small steam craft” in driving rain. He was tasked with patrolling the coastal waters off Pensacola for U-boats and identifying all vessels approaching the city’s bay, but his tenure as skipper was uneventful, with most of the excitement coming more from fishing than any contact with the enemy. With command of the boat rotating among station officers at four-day intervals, Simpson was soon back to flying. As it turned out, command of the small vessel would be the closest he ever got to going “over there.”13
As Pensacola prepared to receive an influx of wartime personnel, Lieutenant Simpson continued his flight training, nearing a series of tests designed to measure a student’s proficiency in everything from high-altitude flight to landings. He promised to wire his parents as soon as he had passed his tests, because “that’s supposed to be something pretty good, as there are only a very few Naval Aviators here or elsewhere.”14 By the end of May 1917, he was ready for the most difficult of his aviation tests, those requiring the trainee to climb to high altitude and spiral down to a landing within a prescribed distance of a boat.
On the first of these, as was often the case in these early days of naval aviation, flight training and flight testing proved one in the same. The altimeter in one of the station’s aircraft was not registering properly, so Simpson was ordered to carry a recording barograph while he flew the plane so that comparisons could be made between the two instruments upon his return. It took the better part of an hour for the lieutenant to nurse his aircraft to an altitude of 5,000 feet, at which point he checked the barograph against the altimeter. Then clumsiness got the best of him, and the barograph slipped out of his hands and bounced behind the seat beyond his reach. Undaunted, mainly because he did not want to repeat the test, he decided to remain aloft until his gas ran out, in hopes of achieving the test’s required altitude of 6,000 feet.
“Foggy [and] hazy— couldn’t see a thing,” he wrote of the flight. “Almost like flying with one’s eyes shut because nothing to look at to judge altitude of machine.” After two hours, he began to glide and spiral to a landing in Pensacola Bay. True to form, the malfunctioning altimeter had ceased registering at 5,900 feet, but upon inspection, the barograph revealed a whopping 7,500 feet!15
Given this experience, it seems Lieutenant Simpson would not have been unnerved by the mere 3,000-foot altitude test, which also required him to spiral down and land near a boat. Since many officers “busted” on this particular challenge, however, he was fearful. Playing upon his trepidation, Simpson’s fellow officers appointed a committee of three to evaluate his progress and, as he recounted to his family, the kangaroo court pronounced before the flight: “Old boy if you don’t make it we’re going to beat you up—so go to it.” With that send off, he climbed to 3,300 feet and after spiraling down over the buildings of the station nearly hit the boat.16 A short time later, his flying successes paid off. On 12 June 1917, Lieutenant Frank Simpson, Jr., received his designation as Naval Aviator Number 53.
Simpson was the first native-Californian and the first member of the naval militia to be designated a naval aviator.17 He would spend the remainder of his time in uniform passing on his hard-learned lessons at Pensacola to others, mainly reservists like himself. Returning to North Island, where he had first flown in an aircraft, he became the first officer-in-charge of the flight school at the newly formed Naval Air Station San Diego and later founded a school for mechanics there. He also served as executive officer of the Naval Air Station Key West.
Yet the completion of those first six months at Pensacola symbolized entry into what Simpson regarded as a unique calling in which man formed a special bond with the machines that lifted him into the air. That became apparent to him early in his training during a stroll near Pensacola’s seaplane hangars one evening shortly after completion of his training. Peering through their windows at aircraft sitting in silence, they appeared to him almost as living things, with thoughts all their own:
I could not but think that with closed eyes, hut not asleep, they were meditating upon the things they had seen and felt. Thinking of their days high in the sun with smooth blue water way beneath and cloudless skies above. Or perhaps they thought of the dark days with eddying air, days when they tossed about through dark clouds with the center of [a] squall booming over the horizon. ... It is not impossible that they meditated upon strange intangible things yet to come. Ominous things of the air that men, dull in such things, would not even know were they close at their elbows.18
1. Of the 52 men who received their wings before Simpson, 44 were graduates of one of these institutions. Reginald Wright Arthur, Contact! Careers of US. Naval Aviators Assigned Numbers 1 to 2000 (Washington: Naval Aviator Register, 1967), pp. 1-33. Justice B. Detwiler, Who’s Who in California: A Biographical Directory, 1928-1929 (San Francisco: Who’s Who Publishing Co., 1928), p. 554.
2. Bureau of Navigation Transcript of Naval Service of Frank Simpson, Jr., 9 May 1922; Naval Militia Cruises, 1916: Reports by Officers of the US. Navy (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1917), p. 146.
3. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 14 December 1916, Simpson Papers, Emil Buehler Naval Aviation Library, National Museum of Naval Aviation (Hereafter SP, NMNA).
4. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 14 December 1916 (SP, NMNA).
5. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 14 December 1916 (SP, NMNA).
6. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 26 December 1916 (SP, NMNA); A 28 January 1917 letter revealed that Simpson scored marks of 90, 98 1/4, 100, 99 1/4, 100, and 100 on his exams to date. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 28 January 1917 (SP, NMNA).
7. Frank Simpson, Jr., to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 28 December 1916 (SP, NMNA).
8. Frank Simpson, Jr., to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 7 January 1917 (SP, NMNA).
9. Frank Simpson, Jr., to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 20 February 1917 (SP, NMNA).
10. Arthur, Contact!, 15.
11. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 20 January 1917 (SP, NMNA).
12. Frank Simpson, Jr., to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 10 February 1917 (SP, NMNA).
13. Frank Simpson, Jr., to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 10 April 1917 and 13 April 1917 (SP, NMNA)
14. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 13 April 1917 and 25 May 1917 (SP, NMNA).
15. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 29 May 1917 (SP, NMNA).
16. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 31 May 1917 (SP, NMNA).
17. Arthur, Contact!
18. Frank Simpson, Jr. to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Simpson, 22 July 1917 (SP, NMNA).