1930 Airmail Plane Crash: A Tragic Flight of an Amusing Cover

As most postal historians will know, the first regularly scheduled, official air mail flight in the United States took place May 15, 1918, on a route between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York.

But did you know that day also marked the beginning of collectible “interrupted” or “crash” mail from official U.S. air mail flights? Indeed, U.S. Army Lieutenant George Boyle – the first pilot who took off that day from Washington, D.C. with more than 6,600 letters bound for Philadelphia and places beyond – got lost, ran low on fuel and ended up crashing about 25 miles from the nation’s capital. Boyle was unhurt – other than his pride, I’m sure – and the mail was recovered and dispatched the following day.

Despite that inauspicious start, air mail would become hugely successful, thanks in large measure to the daring of the Army and civilian pilots who flew it. It took nerves of steel to be an air mail pilot in the early days. It was one of the most dangerous professions in the 1920s. Pilots flew mail in planes with open cockpits and without parachutes, weather reports, wing de-icers, or radio guides. No wonder the life expectancy of early air mail pilots was as short as 900 flying hours.

When air mail planes crashed, the U.S. Post Office Department (USPOD) placed a priority on salvaging the mail so that it could continue its journey. Officials expressed concern about injuries suffered by pilots and mourned those who died, but it was the mail that mattered the most. Thus, a legacy of those daredevil days of air mail is a plethora of crash and wreck mail to collect and study with fascinating and often sobering tales. The cover shown in Figure 1 is a case in point.

Figure 1 – Cover Postmarked Los Angeles, January 10, 1930, and sent “Air mail, Special Delivery” to Toledo, Ohio. After the air mail plane crashed, cover was backstamped June 28, 1930, and returned to sender. Source: Author’s collection.

Its journey started January 10, 1930, in Los Angeles. Who sent it is not clear, but my guess is that the sender was a male given the recipient was a “Miss Woof-Woof Jones” who had several designations – “H.D. J.M.S. S.P. P.M.” – none of which was likely of the professional variety like “C.P.A.” or “J.D.” I only wish I knew what they stood for!

Based on the address, “Miss Woof-Woof Jones” was 18-year-old Grace E. Jones of Toledo, Ohio (Figure 2). At the time, she lived with her parents and worked as a telephone company operator, a job that has gone the way of buggy whip makers and air mail. 

Figure 2 – Grace E. Jones, Libby High School Yearbook, 1929, Toledo, Ohio. Source: Ancestry.com

The sender lived in an apartment called “The Fra” located at 1130 S. Hope Street. When it opened in 1909, the Los Angeles Herald described it as “one of the most luxuriously appointed houses in the city.” Today the location is a parking lot, so while luxurious in the early 1900s, it clearly was not worth preserving as an historic landmark. Los Angeles city directories from the era list “The Fra” but don’t provide information on the apartment’s tenants.

The sender likely worked for – or perhaps pilfered an envelope from – Bullock’s, a one-stop department store headquartered in Los Angeles from 1907 through 1995 when it was merged into Macy’s (Figure 3). The return address is scratched out, but using a tool called “Postmark Reveal,” you can make out not only “Bullock’s” but the address “Broadway, Hill and Seventh.”

Figure 3 – Drawing of Bullock’s Department Store on a Post Card Circa 1930. Source: Author’s collection.

The sender paid a handsome 15-cents to send this letter. That not only covered the air mail rate at the time (5-cents for the first ounce) but also the special delivery surcharge of 10-cents. Whatever the sender had to say to “Miss Woof-Woof Jones,” it must have been mighty important.

The weather in southern California had been mild the first part of January 1930, but by the time this cover entered the mail stream, temperatures had dropped into the upper 40s with heavy rain. The weather was similarly unpleasant in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, the two stops this cover would have to make on its way to Toledo. In fact, Las Vegas experienced a rare snowstorm, much to the delight of school children in “Sin City” (Figure 4). 

Figure 4 – Kindergarten Class in Las Vegas Snow, January 10, 1930. Source: UNLV University Libraries.

It was into that stormy weather that Western Air Express air mail pilot Maurice Graham (Figure 5) took off from Los Angeles just before 7:00 p.m. on January 10 in his Boeing Model 95 (Figure 6) with tail number “NC-420E” to fly 691 pounds of mail and negotiable securities along what was known as “Contract Air Mail Route (CAM) 4.”

Figure 5 – Maurice Graham, as pictured on a monument in his honor in Springdale, Utah.

Figure 6 – Boeing Model 95. Boeing built 25 Model 95s primarily for use as mail planes. Of the 25 built, 10 crashed while in service. Source: San Diego Air & Space Museum.

Graham was an experienced pilot. He flew for the U.S. Army Air Service in World War I and was credited with finding the "Lost Battalion," a group of about 550 U.S. soldiers isolated by German forces in the Argonne Forest in October 1918. He worked at various jobs after the war but never lost his enthusiasm for aviation.

Graham was one of the first pilots hired by Western Air Express after it won the contract to fly mail from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City via Las Vegas. Graham flew the first eastbound mail on CAM 4 on April 17, 1927, and by the time he took off on January 10, 1930, he had flown that route hundreds of times without an accident, forced landing, or loss of a single ounce of mail. Remarkably, he had never been late.

Graham made it to Las Vegas later that evening where he met fellow Western Air Express pilot Charles James. James had just arrived in Las Vegas from Salt Lake City on the westbound leg of CAM 4 and warned Graham of the blizzard conditions between the two cities.

Despite James’s warning, at 10:10 p.m., Graham took off for Salt Lake City. The mail had to get through. He and the mail never arrived.

Western Air Express immediately launched a search to find Graham. The search party would eventually number in the hundreds, and the USPOD offered a $500 award to anyone finding the plane. Initially, most thought the 34-year-old pilot was safe, having landed short of Salt Lake City to take shelter from the storm. Reports in early February of seeing a “mysterious column of smoke” in the vicinity of where it was thought Graham landed raised hopes that he was alive. There was even a rumor circulating in early June that he had been found working as an auto mechanic in Oklahoma.

The search was stymied by the more than eight feet of snow that covered the area, and the searchers conceded that they would have to wait for the spring melt to find Graham and his plane. It wasn’t until June 24, 1930, that Graham’s plane was found near Cedar City, Utah, about 170 miles northeast of Las Vegas and 250 miles south of Salt Lake City (Figure 7). The mail bags were found securely locked up in the plane, but there was no sign of Graham nor of the negotiable securities he was carrying (Figure 8). Nevertheless, back in Los Angeles, his wife Alice and twin children Monte and Melodie held on to hope that he was still alive. 

Figure 7 – Remains of Maurice Graham’s Crashed Plane. Source: UNLV University Libraries.

Figure 8 – Jim James (left) and E.P. Smith with Mail Bags from Graham’s Plane. Source: The Oregon Daily Journal, June 28, 1930.

Finally, on July 16, Graham’s body was found about six miles from the plane. He had a slight skull fracture, which he might have received when landing his plane, but the cause of death was from exposure to the intense cold that lasted for three days after the crash. Ever the pilot, Graham’s last entry in his log was, “January 11, 1930. Arrived 2:35 AM. No destination.” He had taken the negotiable securities with him after the crash, and they were found clutched under his arm. Graham was cremated, and his ashes were dispersed along the air mail route that he frequently flew.

All the mail he carried was salvaged. It received the cachet “Delay due to wrecked mail plane/January 10, 1930” and was machine canceled “RETURN/TO WRITER/UNCLAIMED” and dated June 28, 1930. Making good on its promise, the USPOD awarded $500 each to two sheepherders – Ward Mortensen and Elburn Horton – for finding the plane and safeguarding the mail.

Whether “Miss Woof-Woof Jones” ever received another missive from the mystery writer in Los Angeles in unknown. If she didn’t, it would not be because the air mail service failed her. As the San Bernadino County Sun said on July 18, 1930, “No more dramatic chapter has been written in the history of the air mail than this sacrifice on the part of a devoted pilot, who faced death in the storm to carry the mail through.”