More than any other single individual, a summer resident of Bolton Landing on Lake George was responsible for opening Asia to international air traffic. That man – Harold McMillan Bixby — was among the first Americans to imagine that routine, transpolar air travel from New York to Asia was possible.
In recognition of that achievement and other contributions to commercial aviation, the SFO Museum at the San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco has mounted a two-year long exhibition titled “Unlocking an Archival Treasure: the Harold Bixby Collection.”
Comprising photographs, letters and documents, the exhibition is based on Bixby family archives acquired by the museum in 2019.
“Since acquiring the collection of 600 personal letters and documents and 500 photographs, the SFO Museum staff have been working to research, preserve and catalog its rare and unique items,” the SFO Museum stated in a press release.
According to the museum, “Harold McMillan Bixby (1890-1965) had an incredible career that encompassed remarkable milestones in air travel from Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in 1927, to Pan American Airways’ transpacific air service in the 1930s.”
Harold Bixby was one of seven children of W.K. Bixby, the St. Louis businessman who built a summer home at Bolton Landing’s Mohican Point in 1902. His mother, Lillian Tuttle, was born at the farmhouse built by her grandfather in the Town of Bolton, on Federal Hill Road.
“Harold Bixby was known for avoiding the limelight,” said his grandson Ben Barrett, who wrote a biography of Bixby titled The Spirit Behind the Spirit of
St. Louis. “Although I was too young to have known him well before he died, everyone I’ve spoken to says he was known for his modesty and self-effacing manner.”
But as Barrett’s biography and the exhibition at the SFO Museum make clear, Harold Bixby was worthy of the limelight.
For historians of aviation, Bixby’s role in the global expansion of commercial air travel is perhaps his most noteworthy achievement. But he is probably best known for
underwriting Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic flight and for giving the world’s most famous airplane its name.
As Charles Lindbergh himself said, “Bixby was one of two men who took the financial arrangements for the ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ project off my shoulders at a time when it was of vital importance for me to concentrate on the construction of the plane and plans for the flight to Paris.”
In a 1969 letter to a historian, Lindbergh wrote, “Harold Bixby was one of the great men I have known, in ability and in character… He foresaw a future in aviation and took an active part in its development.”
Harold Bixby had a long-standing interest in aviation, starting, at the very latest, during the First World War, and preoccupying him throughout the 1920s, when he became a balloonist and one of the first men in the nation to keep a private plane for business travel – the forerunner of today’s corporate jet.
So it is not surprising that when he learned of Lindbergh’s ambition to make a solo flight across the Atlantic, he offered his support. As president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce and vice president of the State National Bank of St Louis, he was perfectly positioned to do so.
According to Ben Barrett, Bixby was motivated by more than a love of aviation. “He hoped make St Louis the nation’s aviation hub. It didn’t work out that way. Chicago assumed that role,” he says.
Bixby’s support for Lindbergh did not end when the Spirit of St. Louis landed in France. It included creating and then mailing two million postcards to people across the globe who had sent Lindbergh congratulatory notes, collecting and creating an exhibition of all the medals bestowed upon him and accompanying him on what was, to all intents and purposes, the national celebrity circuit.
As Reeve Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh’s daughter, notes, “After my father’s flight to Paris in 1927, the two men became close, lifetime friends. Their first letters address each other as ‘Mr. Bixby’ and ‘Mr. Lindbergh.’ Soon, ‘Bix’ and ‘Slim’ are engaging in a thoughtful, deeply informative and frequently humorous exchange that would last for decades.”
When Harold Bixby’s daughter Elizabeth was married, the Lindberghs hosted a reception for the newly-weds at their home on Long Island, said Bixby’s grandson, Bolton resident Ted Caldwell, adding that Bixby and Lindbergh lunched regularly in New York City and that their families socialized in Florida.
According to Caldwell, what Harold Bixby thought of Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi pronouncements, antisemitism and isolationism in the 1930s and early 40s is unknown.
“After my grandfather died, most of the Lindbergh correspondence was donated to either the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress,” said Caldwell.
Caldwell said he felt certain, though, that his grandfather “would never have approved of Lindbergh’s romantic dalliances in Germany and probably would have said so.”
(In 2003, it emerged that Lindbergh had fathered seven illegitimate children with three different women, whom he met in Germany in the decades after World War II.)
Bixby’s professional career in aviation began in 1932, when Lindbergh introduced him to Juan Trippe, the president of Pan American airways, who immediately dispatched him to China to secure rights for trans-Pacific air service.
“The Chinese were suspicious of westerners who wanted to do business there. Harold Bixby dispelled much of that by moving my grandmother, my mother and my aunts to Shanghai in 1934,” said Ben Barrett.
A few years later, in 1938, the family fled China, steps ahead of the invading Japanese.
“Envision gathering all family members and running for the docks, after a 50 calibre machine gun bullet lands on the floor of the living room. My mother recounted holding the still-warm bullet as they fled. At the dock, 350 people were crammed into a tender and motored out to the SS Jefferson, whose captain initially refused to allow them to board. Then, in the middle of a typhoon, they were taken aboard in what has been said to be the most dangerous transfer at sea ever witnessed,” Barrett writes in his biography of his grandfather.
Needless to say, the remainder of Bixby’s career as a Pan Am executive, based in New York and living in the leafy suburb of Bronxville in Westchester County, were less physically and emotionally challenging.
Summers were spent in Bolton Landing, where some of his grandchildren now live and where many more reunite every year, at Mohican Point and at Topside, the farm Harold and Debby Bixby purchased at the top of Mohican Hill.
By the early 1950s, Harold and Debby Bixby were spending winters in Captiva, Florida, where Harold became a prominent conservationist. He died in 1965 at the age of 75.
On December 9, 2023, roughly twenty descendants of W. K. Bixby and their spouses attended a reception for and a panel discussion of “Unlocking an Archival Treasure: The Harold Bixby Collection” in San Francisco.
According to curator Sam Scott, the Bixby Collection is of historical interest for the perspective it provides on the development of commercial aviation and US-Sino relations in the 1930s.
It also provides visitors with a behind the scenes look at how archival collections are preserved, the museum stated.
Illustrations from above: Aviation pioneer Harold Bixby; and Bixby in China.
A version of this article first appeared on the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.