End of the Adventure

A static hero is a public liability. Progress grows out of motion. .

--Richard E. Byrd

There was nothing static about Richard Evelyn Byrd. His family was one of the oldest of Virginia's James River plantation owners, and Dick and his brothers Harry and Tom were born with a name that rang with respectful familiarity throughout the Old Dominion. Yet Dick was different from the rest. At 15, brother Harry, older by 16 months, was already off and running, managing the family newspapers, building an apple empire, preparing for the political future that made him Virginia's governor and then a powerful U.S. Senator. But Richard took his own path--and it was a lonely one.

When he was twelve, he made his way around the world alone. Short and puny, he later won admittance to Annapolis, broke his leg twice in athletic accidents, broke it again later at sea. And even though these injuries brought his retirement (as a lieutenant) in 1916, he bounced determinedly back into active duty in World War I, wormed his way into the fledgling Navy flight school at Pensacola, became a red-hot champion of air travel in a day when every flight was an adventure.

Over the Pole. Ambitious, proud, Dick Byrd had dreams that stormed in his mind like ocean gales. They were visions of conquest and exploration, an almost mystical impellent that drove him time and again from one horizon to another. In 1925, with private financial backing, Byrd, by now an expert planner, sailed with a small task force to the Arctic, and with an enlisted Navy flyer named Floyd Bennett roared 1,360 miles over the white wastes to the North Pole in a three-engined Fokker, circled it at 60 m.p.h., then returned to his base. He was the world's hero.

Again, in 1927, he and Bennett tried to win the race in the transatlantic flight craze, crashed in an early test takeoff. (Bennett was seriously injured.) While their airplane America was being rebuilt, Lindbergh made his solo flight. Forty days later a still-determined Byrd, with Bernt Balchen, George Noville and Bert Acosta, made the flight, crash-landed off the coast of France.

Near the Stars. To Pioneer Byrd there still remained one unknown: in 1928 he headed for the Antarctic, became the first man to fly over both Poles. Then, for three decades, the South Pole drew Dick Byrd back, and each time he returned to a hero-worshiping nation with new glory. On his second trip he lived alone at Little America in bottomless cold and physical pain for about five months, purportedly to study the weather at an advance base, but just as much to find himself ("I wanted to sink roots into some replenishing philosophy"). In finding himself, he nearly died from the poisonous fumes of a leaky stove.

As he aged and grew in rank (to rear admiral), Dick Byrd turned frail and grey, but he maintained the quiet pride of the Byrds and the dramatic dignity of the true explorer. In November of 1955 he sailed for Little America for the last time. But the end of his adventure was near. A diseased heart weakened him, and he slowly gave way to that state he abhorred: being static. Slim and ramrod-straight, the brass sparkling on his uniform, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd spent his last months in his Boston home, near the huge globe whose southern end he always kept uppermost. He liked to think about the antarctic nights, and of how close the stars seemed to earth "in the most peaceful place I know."

Last week, at 68, he died peacefully.

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