[Aviation] Typed Manuscript "Between Two Breakfasts" About the September 21, 1928 National Air Race Class B Transcontinental Race

Los Angeles, California, 1928. Very Good. [Aviation] Typed Manuscript "Between Two Breakfasts" About the September 21, 1928 National Air Race Class B Transcontinental Race, May H. Robert, Los Angeles, California, 1928, 8.5 x 11 inches, 6 pp.

6 loose manuscript pages typed with numerous handwritten corrections and changes; rust mark from previous paperclip on top edge of first and last pages; slightly toned; overall very good condition.

Typed and corrected manuscript of "Between Two Breakfasts" by Los Angeles correspondent May H. Roberts, detailing the eventful and quite exhilarating experiences of nine aviators participating in the September 21, 1928, National Air Race Class B Transcontinental Race from Los Angeles to New York. Roberts was accompanying Captain Charles B. D. Collyer in his globe-circling plane The City of New York; she, to write about the event, and he to act as relief plane for the racers. Other aviators included Leo Terletsky, who disappeared in July 1938 while piloting the Hawaii Clipper during the Manila to Guam route for Pan Am; and multi-millionaire D. Roy Bradford, flying with pilot Raymond Merritt in a Ryan monoplane.

Roberts' manuscript starts out describing the meeting of herself and the nine aviators at 4:30 am in a hotel breakfast bar in Tucson, Arizona; she then provides a page-turning account of the perilous flights of several of the aviators after they lifted off from Tucson, headed to El Paso to continue the race. One way or another, most of them had to turn back and land in Tucson again. They all accidentally met up again, and Roberts recounts the aviators' stories of surviving a large storm, motor troubles, forced descents due to darkness and turbulence, and other harrowing conditions, writing that "tales of desperate escapes from almost certain death were told as nonchalantly as the discussion of a bridge game. Collyer laughed at his mishaps as a mail pilot and told yarns of forced descents in black nights when his plane grew too heavy with ice to stay in the air." It did feel a bit haunting to read that line, knowing that Collyer would die later that year at age 32, in a plane crash in Yavapai County, Arizona.

No copies found online; likely unpublished. A one-of-a-kind hand corrected manuscript of an interesting and serendipitous moment in aviation history.