This art-deco image of a pilot, scarf flying over a vintage biplane, evokes for me an entire era, and one man helps capture that era. A while back I found a book in a used book store. It was about Richard Halliburton, written by his father, Wesley. I bought it and set it aside for reading on some day when I had both free time and the inclination. When I did read it I was hooked. I learned Richard Halliburton was a travel-adventure writer and wrote many books. I bought them all and read them all. I could go on but that would not compare to the life I read about. Instead, I provide a summary from my book.
Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten. He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald.
He was a maverick and couldn't see himself fitting into the America of his youth, although he was very much its product with his can-do attitude and things-will-get better belief. For all that, he was a round peg with nothing but square holes awaiting him as he reached adulthood. He could not see things the way most people saw them. His parents wanted him to play by the rules, to live an even tenor, and he scorned the rules, especially the phrase "even tenor." He said no to their even tenor and in doing so he turned his back on an America that held those values. Despite having little respect for rules, he became wildly successful because his life was wildly improbable as a travel-adventure writer. Because he dared, he became an icon of his era, more famous in his day than Amelia Earhart, with farmers' wives in Topeka, factory workers in Detroit, and newspaper boys in Cleveland buying his books.
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