Places I'm Visiting: Alameda on the 90th Anniversary of Transpacific Airmail

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m something of a nerd. My interests are many – art, art history, and particularly the history of pigments; cooking and fine wine, including making wine; birds and bird photography; classical music and classical record collecting; and, philately among them. This last, stamp collecting, I write about the least. That’s in large part because the USPS effectively destroyed stamp collecting for me when it switched from the little works of art that well-made stamps once were to the cheap adhesive stickers that today pass for stamps. The switch to “forever stamps” has not been helpful either as all US stamps are now the same denomination. I no longer actively collect stamps, but postal history still interests me (more about that below).

Aesthetics aside, the shift to cheap-looking stickers makes collecting mint stamps difficult because the stickers always have to be attached to their paper backings and they often don’t separate cleanly into individual stamps. Some long-time collectors have resorted to collecting full sheets of 20, but that multiplies the cost of collecting by 20 times, which discourages collecting by children in particular. That’s a shame because an active interest in philately among children can foster life-long curiosity about myriad subjects. Stamp collecting as a child greatly expanded my general knowledge of the world, knowledge that has often been useful in adulthood. Philately – stamp collecting – was once the most popular hobby in the world. Dedicated philatelic windows at post offices were once a commonplace in the US. Now they are virtually non-existent. Collecting used stamps, meanwhile, has become very difficult, as self-adhesive stamps (stickers) can’t be soaked off envelopes. 

The move to stickers was presumably intended to cut costs. I imagine it’s worked, as the US is not alone in having made the switch, but, as I say, to the detriment of aesthetics. Many other countries have adopted self-adhesives – for example, Canada, the UK, and Australia, according to Wikipedia. It‘s mostly in Europe that countries still issue traditionally perforated stamps with water-activated gum that often are beautifully printed miniature engravings. Ironically, stamp collectors are in some sense a postal service’s best customers: stamp collectors pay in advance for a service that they never demand.

I’ve been thinking about stamp collecting today because yesterday was the 90^th anniversary of the transpacific airmail service, flown by Pan Am flying boats (Pan Am “Clippers”) from San Francisco to Manila in the Philippines by way of Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and Guam, an event remembered at this remove by few but us nerds.

My mother collected stamps in her youth. Her mother collected stamps before her. Both were at one time members of the Dayton Stamp Club, in Dayton, Ohio. Their presence in such a club was unusual then. To this day, most philatelists are male. My mother appears to have often attracted benevolent attention from the older men in the club who would give her stamps and covers to foster her collecting (in the world of philately, a “cover” is a stamped envelope, either one that actually moved through the mails or one made as a commemorative of some kind). She was once given the cover that later inspired my particular postal history interest – a cover flown on the inaugural transpacific airmail service mentioned above. It was flown on the entire route from Manila to San Francisco, receiving colorful cachets and backstamps along the way (pictured). 

The first flight across the Pacific that carried official airmail (there were earlier survey flights) left the lagoon at the Alameda Naval Air Station on 22 November 1935. As Alameda is only a little over an hour from my home today in Santa Rosa, I designed commemorative covers for the 90^th anniversary and took them to Alameda to get them cancelled on the anniversary date (pictured). I was the only person doing such a thing and the postal employees I interacted with were unaware of the significance of the day despite working less than a mile from the Alameda departure point of the Clippers. 90^th anniversaries are perhaps little recognized compared with others. The US and several other countries issued stamps to commemorate the 50^th anniversary in 1985. There were events in Alameda in 2010 on the 75^th anniversary and I expect the USPS will issue a commemorative sticker in 2035 on the 100^th anniversary. We’ll see. 

In 1935, the start of transpacific airmail service was a big deal, reported on across the nation and around the world with the kind of hoopla that would later attend moon launches. The service reduced the time to send mail from the US West Coast to the Philippines from over two weeks (by ship) to about six days via Pan Am’s Clipper service, flown by Martin M-130 flying boats. Later the route was extended to Hong Kong and Macau. Passenger service, which started in 1936, cost about $42,000 one way in inflation-adjusted dollars. Needless to say, only the very rich took advantage. The mail, too, was expensive. One-way mail across the Pacific cost $0.75 – about $18.00 in today’s dollars.

After getting my commemorative covers cancelled at the Shoreline Dr. post office on Alameda, the closest extant post office to the old Naval Air Station (now a museum; it was temporarily closed, a casualty of the recent government shutdown), I determined to find California Historical Marker No. 968 (which commemorates the Clipper service). It’s at 950 West Mall Square, Alameda, I know now, but I was unable to locate it as I had inaccurate information. In front of the Naval Air Station building (where I expected to find it) I discovered instead a plaque commemorating an anniversary of the 1942 Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo, which was flown by bombers launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. The Hornet is now a static museum, berthed across the Clipper Lagoon, the lagoon from which the Pan Am Clippers were launched until the Clipper base was moved to Treasure Island in 1939 during the run of the Golden Gate International Exposition. Among other things, the Exposition celebrated the city's two newly built bridges: the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. There were other plaques in front of the building, but the Clipper plaque was not there. Next time I’m in the area, I will look for it again.

Frustrated in my search for the Clipper plaque, I decided I might as well tour the nearby Hornet. Being a “senior” saved me $10 on the $25 admission fee. The Hornet is an impressive vessel even though compared with an aircraft carrier of today, such as the USS Gerald R. Ford, it is significantly smaller in every dimension. The Gerald R. Ford is about 338 meters long. The Hornet is about 267 meters long and it displaces only a little over 28,000 tons, while the newer carrier displaces over 100,000 tons.

You enter the Hornet today on its spacious hangar deck, on which several aircraft are displayed, some from the WWII era (a Wildcat and a dive bomber) and others from later eras (the Hornet was decommissioned in 1970). Also on display are NASA-related artifacts, including a space capsule; Hornet recovered Neil Armstrong, “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins after their return to Earth from the first moon landing in 1969. Many areas one or two levels down are open to wander through. These include one of the ready rooms where pilots were briefed before missions and de-briefed afterwards; the sick bay, including operating rooms; crew quarters; the section occupied by the Marine contingent assigned to the ship; and a generator room, among others.

You exit the ship by ascending to the flight deck, where three or four other aircraft are on display, two in position on the ship’s launching catapults, which I was surprised to see are quite close to front of the vessel – a testament to the immense thrust generated by the hydraulic catapults. Murch more of the deck was used for landings. The positions of the arresting cables are indicated and still visible are the pylons from which emergency arresting nets were deployed to stop aircraft that for whatever reason couldn’t rely on the arresting cables (typically because of a missing tail hook or when fuel was so low that a pilot had no chance of making more than one landing attempt). 

The flight deck offers excellent views across the Clipper Lagoon toward the Naval Air Station building. At the edge of the Lagoon, three concrete ramps that were used to launch the Clippers into the water or to bring them up on land for maintenance and repair are still there. To the left, looking over the back end of the Hornet’s flight deck, the Bay Bridge is visible. Further in the distance and shrouded in fog were the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Clippers were towed out of the Clipper Lagoon into the open water here to make their take-off runs out toward the bridges. Over the bow of the Hornet, at its opposite end, Oakland Airport’s control tower was visible. At regular intervals, I saw modern aircraft departing over the same waters that launched the Clippers almost a century ago. 

In between visiting the post office and the Hornet, I spent about an hour walking along the water at Shoreline Drive. There were a couple thousand shore birds resting on the flats. I noted Dunlin, Black-bellied Plovers, Western Sandpipers, Least Sandpipers, Whimbrels, Avocets, Marbled Godwits, Willets, Greater Yellowlegs, Snowy Egrets, Black-necked Stilts, a number of gull species, and even a Bald Eagle flying high over the water. The birds were strongly backlit, making it difficult to see details sometimes and making photography rather challenging, but I include here a few of my better bird shots from the day.