Courageous young pilot saved his passengers but perished in crash. Memorial fund at The Trust supports training for young aviators.
Richard L. Perry (1906-1929)
Warmed by the late-spring sunshine, the crowd at the airfield was in a festive mood. It was Sunday afternoon, May 26, 1929, and more than 200 cars lined the road to the Millington, New Jersey, field, where local aviation enthusiasts had gathered to watch the antics of daredevil pilots and parachute jumpers. Some of the onlookers were eager to have a ride in one of the airplanes that darted in and out of the field every few minutes, and they were willing to pay for the privilege.
Business was brisk. By 5:30 that afternoon, Richard Perry, a 22-year-old pilot for Interurban Airways Corp. in Millington, had just completed his 15th sightseeing flight from Millington to Hadley Airport and back, and two more passengers were waiting to go up. Dick seated the young man and woman in the forward cockpit of his Challenger and climbed into the pilot’s seat behind them. Dick’s wife, Dorothy, watched them taxi to the end of the field and take off. She and many others at the field saw the plane climb to an altitude of 600 feet and then, a mile from the airport, bank, turn abruptly, and go into a nosedive. There was a crash, then silence.
The horrified spectators rushed to the spot where the plane had gone down. They found the nose buried two feet in the soft clay of a swamp, the cockpit smashed to pieces, the tail projecting at a 45-degree angle.
Later, it was learned that the connecting rod to the rudder had broken. When Dick realized they were going to crash, he called to his passengers to hang on, kept his hands on the controls, and fought the aircraft all the way to the ground in a desperate attempt to land safely. Just before the crash, he shut off the motor so no fire or explosion resulted.
The two passengers, although badly injured, miraculously survived, saved by their pilot’s cool courage. But Dick did not live. Rescuers carried him, breathing but unconscious and with nearly every bone in his body broken, to a nearby farmhouse. There, Richard Lounsbery Perry died.
Richard L. Perry was born in New York on November 23, 1906, the son of Henry P. Perry and Edith Perry. On his mother’s side, Dick was the great-grandson of James Ben Ali Haggin, who had built a fortune in mining interests and earned a formidable reputation as a breeder of racehorses. Haggin’s father was a Kentucky lawyer. His mother was the daughter of a Christian Turk who had fled his homeland, studied medicine in England, and later practiced in Philadelphia. Young Haggin studied law with his father and, in 1850, established his own practice in San Francisco.
During his flourishing law career, James Haggin encountered numerous business opportunities, and he had the shrewdness and foresight to profit handsomely. He bought copper-, gold-, and silver-mining interests, and at one time he was said to own more than 100 mines from Alaska to Chile. He acquired land in the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Fern River Valleys of California and irrigated them, turning them into rich farmland. Later, he became interested in horse racing and built stables near Versailles, Kentucky. From 1881 to 1891, James Haggin’s horses captured most of the important racing crowns in the East and the West.
Richard Perry was 8 years old in 1914, when his legendary great-grandfather died at age 87. One can only speculate how much the dynamic octogenarian influenced and inspired the child who came to visit frequently with his mother, Edith Lounsbery Perry, and his grandmother, Edith Haggin Lounsbery DeLong. Not long after James Haggin’s death, Richard’s parents divorced. His mother later married J. Lorimer Worden, who had been one of Theodore Roosevelt’s famed Rough Riders in the Spanish American War and who, like Richard’s father, became a stockbroker.
In 1919, when he was 12, Richard entered St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island. Dick was not a distinguished scholar. Although he passed all his other courses, he was defeated by a course in ancient history in his last year at the school. But he was a good athlete and was active in sports throughout his years at St. George’s. He played football on junior squads, and he went out for wrestling, boxing, and soccer. He took part in gymnastics, and in his last year, he was a member of the Gun Club, an organization for those interested in trap shooting.
But it was Dick’s enthusiasm for body building and health and physical fitness his classmates recall most vividly. Through self-discipline and diligent workouts with arm and shoulder muscle-developing equipment, Dick became quite strong. Acquaintances were soon inclined to settle their youthful disagreements with him in ways other than physical, for they all knew he could beat any of them.
A genial, good-natured fellow with a casual disregard for the strict rules and regulations that governed students’ lives, Dick was considered something of a rebel in his school days. In 1925, at the end of his Fifth Form year (11th grade), Dick left St. George’s and transferred to a ranch school in Scottsdale, Arizona. Fond of horses since early childhood, and perhaps inspired by his great-grandfather’s success with his racing stable, Dick wanted to spend his last year of school where he could ride as much as he liked. He soon proved his physical strength and fine horsemanship, and for a while he became a rodeo rider. During that year in Arizona, Dick met his future bride, Dorothy Martin. They were married in Florence, Arizona, on July 6, 1926. Dick had not yet reached his 20th birthday.
Then the young adventurer’s enthusiasm shifted from horses to airplanes. He and Dorothy moved from Arizona to Colorado Springs, where Dick learned to fly. From there, the Perrys went to Florida, and Dick built up considerable flying experience. Early in 1929, they moved again, this time to New Jersey, where Dick was for a short time engaged in experimental work for Fokker, a German-owned aircraft company in Hasbrouck Heights. Early in the spring of 1929, a pilot for Interurban Airways was killed when his plane crashed near Newark Airport, and Dick was hired by the Millington company to replace him.
Dick Perry’s talents had only begun to show themselves when he died at the controls of his plane that afternoon in May 1929, but he already had earned a reputation as one of the pioneers in the field of commercial aviation. In 1935, his grandmother, Edith Haggin DeLong, established the Richard L. Perry Memorial in The New York Community Trust to train young aviators and support them and their families.