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Byrd Flies South – how The New York Times, Wrigley’s, Paramount Pictures, and other early 20th century icons helped to usher in the age of the personal brand

33:39 |

About The Episode

Richard Byrd

Photos from Admiral Byrd’s famed Antarctic expedition brought in 2021 to GBH’s Antiques Roadshow in Sands Point, NY reveal rare glimpses into life at the South Pole almost 100 years ago. Join host Adam Monahan as he discovers how science and PR collide in this tale of one man’s quest for fame and a secured place in history and how that compares to modern influencers today.

Richard Byrd Ladies and gentlemen, my comrades and I are glad to be home. For almost two years we have ...

Adam Monahan This is Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the 1930 documentary film, With Byrd at the South Pole. Byrd and his crew had just returned home to the United States after a two year expedition to one of the last widely unexplored places on earth, Antarctica. Byrd and his team traveled to Antarctica in the name of science. They conducted climate studies and geological surveys, but most importantly for Byrd, they mapped new sections of the continent by airplane.

Richard Byrd We invaded the bottom of the world for advancement of science and to add to the known areas of the surface of the air.

Adam Monahan The expedition was a success, and as Byrd had hoped, it made him really famous and that was by design. He brought along all sorts of media personnel to document this expedition. There were cameramen, radio operators, journalists, and photographers all along for the journey. But there was another member of the expedition, not part of the media crew also taking pictures. His photos show the expedition from an angle Byrd wasn't even thinking about. A couple years ago, some of these photographs made their way onto GBH's Antiques RoadShow.

Ken Gloss We have a nice collection of photos... Tell me what they are.

Show Guest Photographs, I believe, of the Byrd's expedition to Antarctica. To our knowledge, there are two copies of each of these photographs.

Adam Monahan All right, so do you remember the Richard Byrd expedition photos, the journey to the South Pole basically?

Marsha Bemko Ken Gloss appraisal, I do. Yeah, I remember it.

Adam Monahan So as it turns out, we do a glowing appraisal of the discoveries of Richard Byrd, all the advancements he made for science. But then when you start tugging at the strings, when you go to look at this appraisal, he's kind of like an early 20th century Instagramer. His motivations are a lot muddier than that. He just wanted to be really, really famous, and the way to do that was to do something like this.

Richard Byrd As for the definite accomplishments of the expedition, we must leave the verdict to the future and to science.

Adam Monahan So was this actually an expedition for science or just a publicity stunt or both? I am Adam Monahan, a producer with GBH's Antiques Roadshow, and this is Detours. Today, Byrd flies South.

Lori Gwen Shapiro Richard Byrd himself, he was a romantic character.

Adam Monahan That's Lori Gwen Shapiro.

Lori Gwen Shapiro I am a journalist for places like The New Yorker and The New York Times, and I'm also an author.

Adam Monahan Lori knows a lot about Richard Byrd. She published a book about his first Antarctic expedition, the same expedition those photos that were brought to our show are from.

Lori Gwen Shapiro One thing that's interesting, a little tidbit about Richard Byrd or Dickie Byrd as they called him back then is that he was a descendant of Pocahontas and John Rolfe from Jamestown Colony.

Adam Monahan Richard Byrd was born in 1888 to the notable Byrd family of Virginia. He studied at the United States Naval Academy and graduated in 1912. During World War I, he got a job overseeing the Rhode Island Naval militia.

Lori Gwen Shapiro He was a gentleman who was a naval officer and he was very quick. He was just very smart at pushing himself further and further.

Adam Monahan Towards the end of World War I, Byrd attended Naval Aviation School where he learned the ins and outs of flying. He practiced flying and landing in all kinds of weather conditions and developed various tools for navigation. He even invented a device to help aviators know where they were when they couldn't see the horizon. Aviation back then was completely different than how we think of it today. It would still be another 20 to 30 years before commercial passenger aviation really took off.

Lori Gwen Shapiro Aviation was new. We don't realize how new it was. It was really seen by Americans first in World War I, but when the people came back, they were mostly getting stunt work or like they would be mail carriers or they'd get circus work. The aviators helped put aviation in the minds of Americans.

Adam Monahan In 1919, Byrd volunteered to be part of the US Navy's first transatlantic flight. This was a huge deal because at the time, nobody had crossed the Atlantic Ocean by plane. Although he wasn't actually on the plane, Byrd designed the flight path and helped with navigation. The mission was a success, and Byrd got his first taste of glory.

Newsreel May 16th, 1919, a historic day in aviation, start of the first fight ever to be made across the Atlantic. Three American ...

Adam Monahan This post-war period was also the beginning of the Roaring Twenties in America. The country had just come out of four years of war and everyone was celebrating, people were enjoying a, well, less inhibited lifestyle. There were parties, jazz was everywhere, new dance crazes were popping up. And on top of it all, the economy was doing great. People had a strong appetite for excitement.

Lori Gwen Shapiro They were seeing movies, they were seeing new worlds, they were seeing news reels, there was radio that was everywhere, and nobody wanted to be stuck into a life of ordinaryness.

Adam Monahan One of the ways to break out of an ordinary life was to become famous.

Lori Gwen Shapiro Now in this new age of media, there was extreme attention in newspapers and radio. You could get famous overnight by doing something outrageous.

Adam Monahan And because airplanes were so new, there were still many firsts to accomplish in the air. At the time, nobody had flown a plane over the North Pole, so Byrd gave it a shot.

Lori Gwen Shapiro The 1926 expedition to the North Pole was really what put Byrd on the map as a young man. He organized the expedition to leave out of New York for the coverage. There were planes strapped onto the ships. He's not flying from JFK, they got to get there somehow.

Adam Monahan In April of 1926, Byrd, his plane, and his 52 member crew set sail out of Brooklyn, New York. 24 days later, they docked their ships at an island in northern Norway, about 2,500 miles from the North Pole. From there Byrd and his pilot, Floyd Bennett, flew north. They claimed to have circled the North Pole for about 13 minutes before flying back. The whole flight lasted 15 hours, 57 minutes. When Byrd and Bennett returned to New York, they were international stars, but not everyone was convinced. Their departure from New York had been covered in the papers, but Byrd didn't have any photographs of their actual flight.

Lori Gwen Shapiro And so when he came back to New York, it was his word against anyone else's. And very early on, and this was a jealous group of people, they were doubting that he actually did it. Did he fudge a little bit of it? And this is still being argued about to this day by the way. You could get into a great argument about whether or not Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett, his pilot, flew over the North Pole.

Adam Monahan This wasn't how Byrd wanted to be remembered.

Lori Gwen Shapiro The doubt nagged at him, it really nagged at him, and he really was a man concerned about legacy.

Adam Monahan His claim to fame had to be something no one could doubt something like winning a really big public competition.

Lori Gwen Shapiro There had been a prize going for a while that no one had actually ever accomplished. It was run by a French restaurateur named Mr. Orteig. He wanted to better relations between France and the United States, which was not great after World War I, and he loved aviation like many people did. He was air minded, as they would say back then.

Adam Monahan Mr. Orteig offered $25,000 to the first Allied aviator to fly directly from New York to Paris or Paris to New York nonstop. This was known as the Orteig Prize.

Lori Gwen Shapiro There had been government planes that had gone across, but no, this was for an individual.

Adam Monahan Orteig first offered the prize in 1919, and by 1926 it had yet to be claimed, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

Lori Gwen Shapiro A few people did not make it across, we'll put that gently. They did not make it. There was a French pilot named Renee Fonck, F-O... You better check that pronunciation.

Adam Monahan That's Fonck, F-O-N-C-K.

Lori Gwen Shapiro Was completely overloaded. And when it was leaving Roosevelt Field in New York, it just like immediately was doomed, and two of the people on this flight were killed.

Adam Monahan In 1927, there were several European and American aviators preparing for attempts on the prize.

Lori Gwen Shapiro And one of the men that thought he could easily do it with careful planning was Richard Byrd. And Byrd was actually quite favored to win this, and he thought that would secure his legacy.

Adam Monahan And it very well could have, but during a practice takeoff in the spring of 1927, his plane crashed, leaving Byrd and his co-pilot, Floyd Bennett, injured. While their plane was being repaired, a young, relatively unknown American pilot named Charles Lindbergh successfully flew his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic.

Lori Gwen Shapiro He became an overnight sensation when he landed in Paris. There's never been a ticker tape parade like the one for Charles Lindbergh, and there never will be. He was beyond a superstar.

Adam Monahan The Orteig Prize had been claimed, but Byrd didn't give up. About a month after Lindbergh's historic flight, Byrd made his own nonstop flight from New York to France. He wasn't actually able to land in Paris due to cloud cover, so he crash landed on the coast of Normandy.

Lori Gwen Shapiro Byrd got a ticker tape parade for coming in second. I mean, there was a ticker tape right for everything in the 1920s, but that really didn't sit well with him. I mean, that was going to be his fame? They doubted the North Pole, now he's number two. He wanted a legacy that would last.

Adam Monahan To secure his legacy, Byrd needed to think even bigger. He consulted with the father of modern public relations and nephew of Sigmund Freud, a man named Edward Bernays. Bernays suggested that Byrd secure his legacy by leading an Antarctic expedition.

Lori Gwen Shapiro In 1928, what was left to be discovered? They weren't thinking about space missions. Really, it was Antarctica that was left, that was a great unknown.

Adam Monahan People had actually explored Antarctica before. In fact, the previous decade was known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. The public was familiar with the big names of this era. European explorers like Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen, but there was still a lot of land to explore and there hadn't been an American expedition to Antarctica in almost 90 years. Byrd liked the idea and he decided to take it one step further. Not only would he lead an American expedition to Antarctica, he would be the first person to fly an airplane over the South Pole. This was the opportunity Byrd had been searching for.

Lori Gwen Shapiro He dreamed of claiming this accomplishment for the American people. And what happens is that he had didn't have the money for it.

Ken Gloss First of all, it wasn't a United States sponsored expedition, this was a private expedition.

Adam Monahan That's Ken Gloss, the one who appraised the expedition photos on our show. Byrd needed money. Fortunately, there was a lot of money to be had. Explorers in this era were celebrities. Newspapers and magazines would often sponsor expeditions in exchange for the explorers firsthand accounts of their travels. Brands also got in on the action and offered sponsorships in exchange for the publicity.

Ken Gloss This was a private funding. In order to get people to give you money, you have to sell yourself essentially. He had to be famous, he had to be well known, he had to do all of that. And to be quite honest, he loved being that.

Lori Gwen Shapiro He was a very charming person. He was a very good schmoozer as we would say. He didn't have a lot of money, but he had connections and he had this wholesome all-American appeal that just struck a chord.

Adam Monahan The All-American and his team marketed the whole trip as a scientific expedition. They planned to do geological surveys, climate studies, and most importantly, map new areas of the continent by airplane. The New York Times sponsored this expedition and it caught the public's attention very quickly, in part because of how new and different an explorer Byrd seemed to be.

Lori Gwen Shapiro One of the ways they helped promote this expedition was saying that, yes, in the golden age of exploration, in the days of Amundsen and Scott and Shackleton, those were already names that people were thinking about with misty eyes, but that was 10 years earlier. This was a modern time. This was the jazz age. We have radio, we have planes, and we're going to fly over.

Adam Monahan They were going to see Antarctica like it had never been seen before.

Lori Gwen Shapiro And maybe, just maybe, and this is a PR touch, there might be lost creatures that we've never seen, maybe there'll be lost peoples. There was just all sorts of stuff to get people excited. And if you imagine public relations executives thinking, mention the dinosaurs, maybe there's lost dinosaurs. But really this was front page coverage from the time it was announced.

Adam Monahan And everyone wanted to be a part of Byrd's crew.

Lori Gwen Shapiro Many people were writing to him wanting to volunteer. This was an all volunteer staff except for the pilots. There was even a Boy Scout along on this expedition, that was a big promotional opportunity. And people like the Rockefeller sons wanted to become bottle washers on this trip. I mean, it was a big thing to be going to Antarctica. It was like being chosen to go to the moon.

Adam Monahan Brands wanted in too. Almost everything on the expedition was either donated or provided by sponsors.

Lori Gwen Shapiro Wrigley's gave some money and they also gave all the people on the expedition free gum. I think it was Spearmint gum that they were promoting. It was new to the American people. Chesterfield cigarettes were the cigarettes on this expedition, and many of the people became addicted to cigarettes. Be careful what you get promotions for.

Adam Monahan To hype things up even more, Byrd hired a captain for one of the ships with a very famous last name.

Lori Gwen Shapiro His name was Captain Melville, who was chosen for publicity value. He was the second cousin of Herman Melville, and Moby Dick was as famous back then as it is now.

Adam Monahan And of course, Byrd brought along all sorts of media personnel to ensure that this expedition was properly documented. Paramount Pictures provided two cameramen, and there were radio operators, journalists, and photographers. By late summer of 1928, everything was packed and ready to go, two ships, three airplanes, 84 sled dogs, 40 tons of dog biscuits, and one lucky Boy Scout. After the break, we'll hear what life was actually like when the crew reached Antarctica and prepared for Byrd's historic flight.

Ken Gloss How do you start a plane at 50 below zero?

Adam Monahan And we'll examine the photographs that made it to our show and what they might be worth in today's market.

Show Guest I wouldn't have expected that. Amazing.

Adam Monahan It took roughly four months for Byrd and his crew to reach Antarctica. In early January 1929, they set up camp on a section of the continent called the Ross Ice Shelf, directly south of New Zealand. They named their camp Little America. This would be their home for the next year.

Ken Gloss It was incredibly difficult once you got to Antarctica to go anywhere.

Adam Monahan Again, Ken Gloss.

Ken Gloss The only real mode of transportation was dog sled. They had some snowmobiles and so on, but they weren't like the ones we have now. And if you wanted to do a geological survey and get to the South Pole by dog sled, that could take days. Even to go a few miles could take days.

Adam Monahan During the summer months of January and February, the crew carried out expeditions and geological surveys. Their outpost was equipped with a library, hospital, and various laboratories. They also set up a radio tower and were able to send telegrams back home. They even had a photo lab and were able to develop film. That was a pretty impressive feat.

Ken Gloss Just think about this, the old time developing, it wasn't like you pulled out your cell phone, snap, snap, snap, emailed them somewhere. You had to have film, you had to develop the film.

Adam Monahan And developing film is very temperature dependent. It works best if the developing chemicals are around 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ken Gloss When the temperature is at your level, at your waist level, maybe 30 degrees, and at your feet level, maybe zero, they had to figure out how to do that.

Adam Monahan By the end of the first summer, some of Byrd's crew left Antarctica for New Zealand. They had to move the ships before the ocean froze, and it made sense for only the necessary crew to spend the winter. When part of the crew left Antarctica, they took photos from the expedition with them. Many of these photos were published in various newspapers, including The New York Times. They showed Little America, some portraits of Byrd and the scientists, and stunning landscapes.

Lori Gwen Shapiro As we look at pictures of space exploration, we can understand what it felt like to see things no one had ever seen before. And no, they did not find dinosaurs, and no, they did not find people. But there were landscapes below that were breathtaking, that caught the imagination of the public. They didn't need the dinosaurs after all.

Adam Monahan Most of the photos from this expedition were taken by professional photographers for scientific and journalistic purposes, but one of the other crew members managed to bring his own camera along. These are the photos that made it onto our show in Sands Point, New York in 2021. Here's the guest and our appraiser, Ken during the appraisal.

Show Guest These were all taken by the fuel engineer. My grandfather had a business, a lab and photography, had the oil company as a customer. And the fuel engineer brought the film back and asked my grandfather to process it, print it. My grandfather asked if he could make a copy for himself, and he said yes. So to our knowledge, there are two copies of each of these photographs.

Ken Gloss The man who took these photos, Mulroy, was an oil engineer, but he was also for the expedition, he was the energy. They had to conserve energy. They only had so much they could bring. So how you use your fuel, how you heat, how you have engine, plane fuel, Mulroy was a very important person on that expedition.

Adam Monahan In his downtime, Thomas Mulroy took pictures, and his pictures show an entirely different perspective on the expedition.

Ken Gloss Since it wasn't the scientific photos, you could see what some of the people looked like. And instead of imagining what the boats and planes looked like, they were actually there, what they wore, the clothing. It's like you're walking around and snapping a picture here, snapping a picture, and it really brought the human part of it out.

Adam Monahan As you can imagine, taking pictures in sub-zero temperatures was no easy task.

Ken Gloss I think the photos don't really show as much how difficult it was to get these photos, how rare they are, how important they are. Just think if any moisture got in his camera at 30, 40, 50 below, it would freeze solid inside. So what you had to do to take a picture was you had to take it apart, dry it out, reassemble it, make sure it stayed dry. So the fact that we are seeing what looks like simple, sort of everyday photos that you would've taken back in the thirties and forties, or maybe a lot of us remember the fifties, we just snap it, and that's what they look like. There was a lot more to it.

Adam Monahan After a long and dark winter, Byrd and his aviation crew began to prepare their planes for flight. After a couple test flights and some tweaking, it was time. On November 28th, 1929, Byrd, two pilots, and a cameraman boarded their tri-motor airplane and set their sights on the South Pole. Their goal was to fly over the South Pole and drop an American flag directly on it.

Lori Gwen Shapiro The most important moment as Byrd saw it was the second that he was flying over the South Pole and he had a film crew documenting when the flag was thrown out the window. There was no doubting him. And immediately, word got wired back because, again, there's telegrams, there's radio. And Congress voted him within days to become Admiral Byrd. And that sounds pretty good to me, sounded pretty good to Richard Byrd as well. He lived off of this expedition for the rest of his life to be honest.

Adam Monahan At long last, Richard Byrd accomplished what he had been dreaming of. His place in history was secured and successfully documented. For the next couple months, the crew took advantage of the summer weather and carried on with their geological surveys and various exploration flights.

Lori Gwen Shapiro They also were able to map, I mean, that's actually a very important part of this expedition is that they were mapping Antarctica. There were cartographers along. That might not be strict science, but it's something important.

Adam Monahan By the following summer, January 1930, they had accomplished what they set out to do and wrapped up the expedition. The ships returned to Antarctica to pick up the crew, and by February of 1930, they were on their way home. Byrd and his crew made it safely back to New York in June of that year.

By this point, Byrd was super famous. The New York Times had continuously published articles about the expedition since they first set sail in 1928. People had been following along at home and Byrd became the face of adventure. The expedition was a success. As you can imagine, they were expecting to return home to a hero's welcome, and they did, sort of.

Lori Gwen Shapiro One thing that we have to consider about this expedition is the timeframe. This expedition starts August 1928, they come back in 1930. Well, what happened while they were away on ice for two years? America has had the stock market crash. And when they come back, there is a ticker tape parade, I mean, this was the era of ticker tape parades, but it wasn't as big as they thought. People were concerned with an economy that was spiraling out of control.

Adam Monahan Despite his efforts and successes, it would seem as if Byrd just wasn't meant to be one of history's biggest names, but perhaps his legacy is more of a slow burn. How does the world look different because of Byrd?

Lori Gwen Shapiro He found a great affinity for Antarctica. He then helped coordinate four expeditions that lasted up until his death. This is not all in the 1920s. There were stations that were built with his help. There's one at the South Pole, which is jointly managed with other nations, and we have our own station called McMurdo. There's many scientists taking ice cores and studying climate change, they can trace themselves back to Byrd. The other thing that happened is that he was very instrumental in trying to protect Antarctica. The wildlife there is stunning, the landscape is stunning, and he, I think, understood this much earlier than the rest of us and helped with the negotiation of what is called the Antarctic Treaty, which prevents any nation from taking part of the continent and calling it their own. It has kept Antarctica neutral and it has kept it a scientific hotbed, and we can thank Richard Byrd for that.

Adam Monahan While Byrd might not be a household name today, his Antarctic expeditions did impact history, and those photos our guest brought to Rocha offer a rare and valuable glimpse into this slice of history for both the public and collectors.

Ken Gloss Collectors and institutions and libraries have funds. They have endowments to buy and build up collections on the Antarctic, but what they want is the unusual, what you can't get, what nobody else has.

Show Guest Okay.

Ken Gloss There are only two copies of these.

Show Guest Right.

Ken Gloss I would say now if you were selling these retail, they would easily get eight to 12 thousand dollars.

Show Guest I wouldn't have expected that. Amazing.

Adam Monahan I decided to follow up with the guest to see if there were any updates on the photos. I wanted to thank you for sharing them with our audience and us of course. And so do you have any plans for what you do with them?

Show Guest Well, I'll probably hold on to them for the next number of years, but as I get older, I'm not going to want the responsibility... because I have no children so I don't want them just to end up getting tossed in the garbage because somebody doesn't understand the value of them. So I'm going to probably in the next couple of years, be looking for someplace that I can entrust them.

Adam Monahan You're a better person than me. They'd be sold right away and I'd be on a trip to someplace warm.

Show Guest Well, if somebody offers, I might consider it. But right now that isn't my concern. Maybe in a year or two it will be.

Adam Monahan So in the end, Byrd did succeed in leaving a legacy. He might not go down as one of the biggest names in history, but his mark is an important one. We can see Byrd's impact in both the science world and the world of PR. He laid the groundwork for polar exploration and for how to promote your own #personalbrand. I can actually visualize those old timey reels of like, "Admiral Byrd going down to South Antarctic, the first to ever"-

Marsha Bemko The newsreel.

Adam Monahan The newsreel of this.

Marsha Bemko Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Monahan And I could see why somebody would do it. It is just their version of TikTok.

Marsha Bemko You know what? I don't get the need to want to be that famous, but that's a whole different story. We can go down that rabbit hole in a different podcast.

Adam Monahan Yeah, I don't have it in me, but if you just go to TikTok, you can tell there's people who are dying to be hugely famous and he had that in him.

Marsha Bemko Millions.

Adam Monahan Millions.

Marsha Bemko Millions of people want to be famous, and it's easier today than... You don't have travel so far, you can do it from home.

Adam Monahan I challenge some TikToker to go out there and get Kellogg's and Wrigley's gum to sponsor you, and you take your butt down to the South Pole with a camera and take photos, and try to bring a plane with you, and fly over the South Pole. That's what Richard Byrd had to do in his day.

Marsha Bemko I don't think anybody even want to reenact that, but it would make a good social media project.

Adam Monahan Detours is a production of GBH in Boston and distributed by PRX. This episode was written and produced and sound designed by Jack Pombriant, our assistant producer is Sara Horatius, script editing by Galen Beebe. And our senior producer is Ian Coss. Jocelyn Gonzales is the director of PRX Productions, Devin Maverick Robbins is the managing producer of podcast for GBH. And Marsha Bemko is the executive producer of Detours. I'm your host and co-executive producer, Adam Monahan. Our theme music is Once in a Century Storm by Will Dailey from the album National Throne. Thank you all for listening. Have a good one.