Flight of fancy

SPRINGFIELD — A copy of a two-page spread from the inside of a book hangs on a wall in Vic Leonard’s bedroom.

It shows head shots of 24 men, 18 of them flight crew members of an airplane that’s one of the biggest and most famous ever built.

“And I’m the only one left in that picture,” Leonard says, referring to the 18 crew members.

There’s a good chance the 95-year-old Leonard is the only one still alive of all 24 (the other six are listed as “Management and Engineering”), all associated with what was officially known as the Hughes H-4 Hercules, but better known by the name its critics gave it, the “Spruce Goose.”

The men’s photos are included in the 1982 book “Howard Hughes and the Flying Boat,” by Charles Barton. Leonard’s copy has signatures next to the black-and-white faces of several of the men, gathered the year the book was released, at a 35th reunion in Los Angeles of the plane’s one and only flight.

“I made some of the best friends of my life,” Leonard recalls of his on-again, off-again years with the Hughes Aircraft Co., from 1942 to 1953. “Just kind of a camaraderie that was just kind of a good feeling.”

Those days included that one epic day, Nov. 2, 1947, when with eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes at the controls, the plane flew for a mile at about 70 feet above Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor.

Leonard was a 27-year-old hydraulic mechanic for the plane that’s been in McMinnville since 1993 and housed at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum there since 2001. It was moved in pieces up the West Coast after the nonprofit organization that runs the museum convinced previous owner, Aero Club of Southern California, that it was the best of three possible locations.

In July, it was announced that the historic and humongous plane, originally conceived to deliver cargo and troops over the heads of U-boats during World War II, would remain in McMinnville permanently.

Details of the agreement were not disclosed. A dispute with the Aero Club centered on the original purchase terms, which in addition to the $500,000 price tag owed also included a percentage of the museum’s earnings from displaying the Spruce Goose, according to the Associated Press.

Leonard has visited the Spruce Goose — which was made mostly of Wisconsin prime birch because metals were scarce during the war — several times at the museum.

In 2005, he and flight engineer Don Smith and engine mechanic John Glenn (no, not the astronaut) visited together, then the flight crew’s last three living members. But Smith and Glenn have died, Leonard says.

“Howard Hughes hated the name ‘Spruce Goose,’ Leonard says, sitting in his immaculate mobile home just north of Marcola Road, which he shared with second wife Anita, before she died in 2011. “The press gave it that name, and it stuck.”

‘Flying lumberyard”

The plane cost $25 million to build, $18 million of it U.S. government money, the rest out of the pockets of Hughes, a filmmaker, world-record-setting aviator, airline owner and all-around business tycoon who was one of the world’s wealthiest people in his day.

The plane was plagued by difficulties and doubters. Engineers said it would be impossible to build what one U.S. senator called a “flying lumberyard,” a massive seaplane that weighed 400,000 pounds and was 219 feet long with a wingspan, 320 feet, longer than a football field.

The Aero Club took ownership of the plane in 1980, four years after Hughes died at age 70 in 1976. Jack Real, Hughes’ former right-hand man and a member of the Aero Club’s board of directors, became chairman of the board of Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, from 1995 to 2001, after the plane’s move to McMinnville.

The Spruce Goose had sat under a dome, next to the Queen Mary in Long Beach, from 1982 to 1990, before the Aero Club began looking for a new home for the historic plane.

It was in Long Beach that Leonard and others watched history happen that Sunday, Nov. 2, 1947.

“We’re flyin’!”

Leonard was on the ground. The two other hydraulic mechanics were among the about 30 people aboard the plane — most of the flight crew plus reporters.

It was supposed to be just be a couple of taxi tests on the water, but Hughes did what many thought impossible.

The war was over, the plane not having been completed in time, and a Senate committee led by Maine Republican Owen Brewster was breathing down Hughes’ neck, saying he’d wasted government money on the Spruce Goose and other plane contracts that never came to fruition.

Leonard recalls the famous broadcast by KLAC reporter James McNamara, who was on board: “And he’s callin’ out the speed: ‘50, 60, 70, 80, 90 — we’re flyin!’

“And he flew for about a mile,” Leonard says. “Everything was quiet, and you couldn’t hear anything at all. And then he set it back down. And he almost lost all of the hydraulic power.”

“Do you know who I am?”

Hughes actually got the flying boat up to about 80 mph before it lifted into the air, according to McNamara’s broadcast, in which the excited radio reporter can be heard saying: “It’s 50 … it’s 50 over a choppy sea … it’s 55 … it’s 55 full throttle. It’s 60 … it’s 65. It’s 70 … it’s 75 and … I believe we are airborne. We are airborne, ladies and gentlemen! I don’t believe that Howard Hughes meant this to be …

“We were really up in the air. And I don’t know whether … Howard, did you expect that?” says McNamara, who was standing with his hand on Hughes’ seat during the brief flight.

“Certainly,” Hughes says. “I thought I’d make a surprise.”

“You were surprised?” McNamara says.

“No, I said, ‘I thought I’d make a surprise.’”

“Well, it certainly surprised the people up here,” McNamara says.

Leonard was surprised, too.

“He just wanted to prove that he could build this airplane out of wood,” recalls Leonard, who moved to Springfield in the late 1980s from Southern California, after growing up in Utah.

“And that strong wind came up, and I thought it was going to hit the tail and they would go into the rocks.”

Leonard didn’t have a lot of one-on-one interaction with Hughes, just a memorable encounter over implementation of a new fire extinguisher system at company headquarters.

“Do you know who I am?” Hughes said when he unexpectedly walked in and became concerned over a bolt Leonard was trying to thread.

“Yes, sir,” Leonard said. “You’re Howard Hughes.”

Leonard has seen “The Aviator,” the 2004 Oscar-nominated film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, and thought the depiction of Hughes as an obsessive-compulsive weirdo, walking around naked in seclusion, was exaggerated.

“I had so much respect for him that I hated to see that display in that ‘Aviator,’ ” Leonard says. “I got a copy of that movie. I hate that movie.

“I admired the man. He was a visionary-type guy. He hired the best.”