Searching for Hobey Baker
Episode 3: Going West
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In the late summer of 1917, after arriving in France, former Princeton football and hockey great, Hobey Baker, along with the other American pilots in his squadron, began their training program to prepare themselves for aerial combat, training that was not without its own challenges. (AIRPLANE)
In diving on a balloon used as a target, Hobey tried to maintain his fire, until very close. (GUNFIRE) Baker’s commanding officer and a Princeton alum, Charles Biddle, wrote the Princeton Alumni Weekly about an accident that Hobey encountered during his training. (AIRPLANE)
PRINCETON ALUMNI WEEKLY: He riddled the balloon but misjudged his distance and ran into it, just as he was pulling away. (NOISE) The impact shattered his propeller and badly strained the machine. And the cloth of the balloon became wrapped around one wing and thereby threw the plane out of balance.
Those watching on the ground held their breaths and gave him up for lost. But Hobey was one of those who never give up and realize that in aviation, the surest way to lose your life is to lose your head. (MUSIC) By the most skillful handling of his crippled machine, he was able to bring it safely to the ground, to the great delight and astonishment of his French audience. (GASP) (APPLAUSE) (AIRPLANE)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Baker was born to fly on the gridiron, on the ice, and now through the air. (AIRPLANE) Hobey loved being a fighter pilot. For him, the air war was the ultimate sport. In a letter to his father, he described the commonality between football and flying. (AIRPLANE)
HOBEY BAKER: You handle your machine, instinctively, just as you dodge instinctively when running with a ball in an open field.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: But aerial dog fights in World War I were a much more deadly competition than what Hobey experienced in football. (AIRPLANE) And World War I pilots had their own unique expression for what occurred too often when flying, going west; in short, dying. The life expectancy for World War I pilots was shockingly short.
JEREMY KINNEY: Over the course of the war, it could range from two weeks– to six weeks.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Jeremy Kinney is a World War I aviation expert and associate director of research for the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
JEREMY KINNEY: There are about 600 pilots– when they start in the summer of 1917. And they lose 235, killed in action. In addition to that, it’s 45 killed in accidents. (MUSIC)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: I am David Duchovny. From 30 for 30 Podcasts, this is Searching for Hobey Baker, episode three, “Going West”. (MUSIC) Although it was just over a decade since the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, the airplane played a critical role in World War I, as aeronautical technology evolved rapidly over the course of the war.
There were three classes of planes used during the war: Bombers, scout planes, and fighters, known as pursuit planes. The top pilots, like Hobey, flew these pursuit planes, many from elite colleges; Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Yale. Despite fielding the best and the brightest pilots, the U.S. Army Air Service had a bumpy beginning, as described by Samuel Hynes in his classic book on America’s World War I air war, Unsubstantial Air.
SAMUEL HYNES: The Air Service would enter the war in Europe, two and a half years late, ill equipped, ill trained, and on demand; a 19th century army in the world’s first 20th century war.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: As a result, Baker and his fellow American pilots spent most of their first year grounded, flying desks for lack of enough aircraft or proper air fields. In a letter home, Hobey’s colleague, Quentin Roosevelt, son of Former President Teddy Roosevelt, bemoaned their slow start.
QUENTIN ROOSEVELT: Dear father and mother, we have now about 600 non-flying cadets here with nothing (LAUGH) in the world for them to do and, apparently, no chance of their flying in the next couple of months. The future is crammed with any number of possibilities, most of them highly discouraging. (MUSIC)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: While waiting impatiently for his first aerial combat, Hobey also became a fervent letter writer, as well, writing scores of letters home to his father, Alfred, and also to Percy Pine. Pine was nine years older than Hobey, a Princeton alum and heir to a family sugar and banking fortune.
After Hobey graduated from Princeton in 1914, he lived with Percy for over two years in his New York City mansion. Then, when Hobey went off to war, Percy continued to send a stream of care packages, including cigarettes, underwear, shirts from Brooks Brothers, candy, and photos. Hobey’s letters to Percy are now in the Baker Archives at Princeton University. They provide us an intimate window into the nature of their evolving relationship. September 21st, 1917, Pouxeux, France.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear Percy, for heaven’s sake, don’t stop writing me, even if I am here for a year, for I can’t tell you what your letters mean to me.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: September 27th, 1917.
HOBEY BAKER: At times, I don’t miss you, at all. And then again, I get horrible homesick and get thinking of the wonderful times we had when we weren’t scrapping. And I wonder if they will ever be again or whether this damn war is going to end it all.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: December 29th, 1917, Arcachon, France.
HOBEY BAKER: Percy, the picture of you came, also. I think the one standing is wonderful. The other, not so good. But that one standing could not be better and I love it. When I feel especially dirty, I shall look at that picture. These photos sort of connect me up again.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: David Doyle is a professor of history at Southern Methodist University and an authority on same-sex relationships in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (MUSIC)
DAVID DOYLE: The bar is always much higher in same-sex relationships because people are trying to either cover them up or prove that, you know, something deviant happened, especially when we get into the 20th century.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: So to name this as love, or affection, or sex between two men is to criticize them, to ruin their reputation, to say something quite negative about them. And that’s why the bar gets set high. I think the more we come to accept that there’s nothing wrong with gayness, the– the bar will lower.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Professor Nicholas Syrett is an associate dean at the University of Kansas and editor of The Journal of the History of Sexuality.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: The bars are set in very, very different places. And I think it’s not just the presumption of heterosexuality, though; it’s that it is also that the reason I think we struggle so hard to name couples as soon as being whatever they would have called themselves, being sexually, romantically involved, is that for many people, still, homosexuality was seen as a bad thing. (MUSIC)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Might Hobey have thought of himself as gay or bisexual? Syrett knows that the pressure to label one’s identity didn’t exist in the same way, 100 years ago.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: I think he could have thought of himself as gay, but he also might not have. That is, it’s possible that he also found himself attracted to women and so that would preclude a very rigid understanding of homosexuality in that, you know, attraction to both sexes. (MUSIC)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Now, a century later, no one can say for sure the exact nature of Hobey’s personal relationship with Percy. And, unfortunately, the large cache of World War I letters that Percy wrote to Hobey, which would have afford us a fuller and better understanding, were either destroyed or lost.
But there is compelling evidence that Percy and Hobey were most likely in a loving relationship. We ask professors Nicholas Syrett and David Doyle to examine Hobey’s letters to Percy, along with contemporary accounts to shed light for us on Hobey and Percy’s relationship, Nick Syrett.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: To me, it sounds like definitely affection, absolutely attraction, and I would lean towards sex. Did they think that this was going to be forever? That, I have a very difficult time sort of speculating about. There is clearly affection and longing, when they are separated from one another.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: David Doyle concurs.
DAVID DOYLE: Love, affection, attraction, sex, romantic friendship, lovers, in some ways, all are possible. I wouldn’t use something like the term, “Homosexual,” because– I am very certain that Hobey Baker would not have identified in that way. What we can say is same-sex or opposite-sex attractions transcends time and place, but one’s culture, one’s historical moment changes. So the way it’s interpreted or understood is different. So, by reading these letters, I would say this relationship is very central, very important to his life.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: One fact that both professors cite is Hobey’s decision in September, 1914, to move in with Percy in New York City, living with him for over two years, even though Percy was well known for being gay, Professor Syrett.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: As a historian who tries to piece together, you know, pieces of the sexual past of people, we’re always looking for clues. And sometimes, the clues are little more than breadcrumbs, but this is a pretty big clue. (LAUGH) That one figure was so– sort of universally known to be queer, if another person chooses to live with them, to be involved with them, that, to me, is a fairly strong signal about what might be going on.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: October 10th, 1917, Cazaux, France.
HOBEY BAKER: I had such a vivid dream about you, last night. And it was so strong, it sort of stayed with me all day. I went somewhere to meet you and was terribly glad to see you.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: Reading those letters by Hobey, I read genuine affection and playfulness there that I think would be difficult to– hey, it’s fake-able, but I– that’s not how it reads, to me.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: October 13th, 1917.
HOBEY BAKER: If you were here, life would be so different, to me. I am, at present, very depressed. I wish you had not sent me that picture, in a way, for it makes me want to see you so much.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Many decades later, the 1960s, when John Davies, a Princeton alum, wrote the first biography of Hobey, he asked Hobey’s friends and teammates to share their memories. He did not ask them to comment on Hobey’s or Percy’s sexuality or relationship, but some did, anyway. One of those was Wendel Kuhn, a close friend of Hobey and his hockey teammate at both their prep school, St. Paul’s, and Princeton.
WENDEL KUHN: Now, I’ve heard sinister implications put upon Hobey’s relation with Percy. I don’t swallow that, for one moment. Don’t believe it, completely out of character for Hobey. And I resent this sort of backstairs gossip and loathe the contemptible people who indulge in it. I think it’s vicious and salacious. The fact that Percy Pine never married is scant proof of what is inferred here.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: I have read some of those reminiscences by classmates, friends of Hobey Baker. And many of them were penned or spoken in the middle of the 20th century, which was a time of particular persecution for gay and lesbian people. So they were, in essence, trying to save their friend from the– the– stain, the taint of homosexuality. Many people who say, “No. There’s no way,” don’t (LAUGH) actually know gay people. And so what they know is this version of homosexuality, which they perceive as being diseased and negative. So their Hobey could not possibly be like that. (NOISE)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In his numerous letters to Percy and also to his father, Hobey wrote vividly about his war experiences and how his life as a World War I pilot differed from the grim existence of soldiers fighting in the trenches. While the air war was a high-stakes and deadly game, it was one that was played with honor and respect for their German foes and also included moments of wonder. May 7th, 1918.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear father, I never get used to the beauty of clouds from above. Chasms, mountains, planes, they were all there, done in great billowing masses, pink tinted in spots by the setting Sun.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: But on the ground, there was no such natural beauty. May 15th, 1918.
HOBEY BAKER: You can’t imagine the horrible feeling of the whistle of those bombs coming down and the terrific explosions which shake the ground like an earthquake. (NOISE)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Author Samuel Hynes also noted the disparity.
SAMUEL HYNES: Once the cavalry charged with pennants flying had proved suicidal against machine guns, aviation was the only kind of combat left in which one man mounted on a machine instead of a horse could fight a personal war. If the big words of war, glory, and honor, and chivalry, and romance, applied anywhere in this vast conflict, it would be in the air.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: To relieve the stress of aerial combat, many American pilots found their way to Paris, on days off, another luxury not afforded soldiers in the trenches. (NOISE) (MUSIC) War time had not entirely dampened the city of lights, which continued to revel in bohemian delights. Groundbreaking African American musicians, like James Reese Europe, mingled with artists, writers, European royalty, and high society. Hobey wrote to his father about one of his Paris forays, August 15th, 1918.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear father, took the morning train to Paris and had quite a party with Cole Porter at his apartment, where we sang and he played. He is very good.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: During the war, Baker reignited his college friendship with famed 20th century songwriter Cole Porter. When Baker was at Princeton, Porter attended Yale, where he was a composer of the college’s beloved fight song, “Bull Dog”. (MUSIC) And, like Hobey, Porter sang in his college choir and was also a Yale cheerleader, giving him a front-row seat on Hobey’s football exploits during Princeton-Yale games. Susan Weiss is an Emerita professor at Johns Hopkins and a leading Cole Porter scholar. Weiss describes the parallels between the two ivy leaguers.
SUSAN WEISS: Going to boarding schools, being interested in music, Cole was a jock-type sports fan. He was a wannabe athlete. And perhaps, I think, in many ways, Hobey was a wannabe musician.
TIM RAPLEY: Cole Porter saw all the Yale and Princeton games, from the singing that they did together. They were both in ivy league glee clubs that would travel to each other’s venues.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Hobey biographer, Tim Rapley. (MUSIC)
TIM RAPLEY: I researched what Cole Porter’s parties were all about. And it’s copious amounts of opium, and– and Indian royalty, and cross dressing, and bisexuality. These parties were insane.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In December of 1917, Hobey attended a soiree at Cole’s Paris apartment, where he met the heiress and New York City débutante, Mimi Scott, who was a Red Cross nurse. In Paris, Mimi and Cole had become good friends, often singing together.
SUSAN WEISS: She was an interesting person, too, because she went and served in the relief as a nurse. And, in terms of the music, she must have been good because Cole didn’t have a high tolerance for people who were not talented.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Cole, who was known to be gay, was enamored both with athletes and a man in uniform. He even wrote a sing, “Pilot Me”, full of double entendres about the flyers he adored.
WILFRIED VAN DEN BRANDE: Pilot me, pilot me. Be the pilot I need. Please, give my ship a maiden trip and we’ll get the price for speed.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Wilfried Van den Brande is also a leading Cole Porter expert and a renown singer of his songs.
WILFRIED VAN DEN BRANDE: So cast away your fears, shift my gears. Let me carry you through. And when afraid you are of going too far, then I’ll just pilot you. “Pilot Me” could be a tribute to Hobey. You feel Cole Porter’s– amazement and admiration for the aviator. So I do think that– he would have been in awe, not just for the football man, for the– but– but being such a hero. (MUSIC)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: But on that cold December night in Paris, Hobey was less taken with Cole Porter than he was with Ms. Mimi Scott. Mimi was from great wealth. Her father, George, was a successful banker; and her mother, the daughter of a French count. The Scotts maintained homes in New York City, Newport, and Palm Beach.
On paper, Hobey and Mimi made quite a pair: The famous American athlete and Army aviator whose family money had mostly vanished and the uber wealthy Newport socialite who was a Red Cross nurse. It read like a page out of Hemingway’s World War I novel, A Farewell to Arms. In August, 1918, Hobey wrote home with exciting news.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear father, well, it is all fixed and we are engaged. Don’t quite understand how I put it across, but I did, and she is so much what I have always wanted that I feel all sort of safe and happy. She is a very decided sort of person with lots of brains, not beautiful, but, oh, I don’t know, just so sweet, and big, and real. (MUSIC)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: The impending nuptials were the talk of the society pages, back home. The New York Sun even described how Hobey proposed to Mimi, a story perhaps long on romantic fantasy.
NEW YORK SUN: Now, he was somewhere along the battlefront, doing his bit. Hobey Baker was more than doing his bit; he was doing his all. And one day, while Mimi Scott was busy nursing her men, there was a great whirring in the air. It was Hobey Baker, flying on the wings of the wind to the girl he loved.
Down, he swooped and landed lightly. A few hours later, that little plane went into the air again. It swooped, and dived, and pirouetted joyously, for hadn’t its pilot asked a question that day and received an answer. Within a few days, the announcement was made. Mrs. George S. Scott announces the engagement of her daughter, Mimi Scott, to Lieutenant Hobart A.H. Baker of Philadelphia.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Due to his own financial constraints, Hobey hit Percy up for $500 to buy an engagement ring. Hobey later expressed his concern about the huge differences between Mimi’s economic status and his own.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear father, I wish she did not have so much money and I had more. What will I do if I live through this war? I am worth about a frank a week, to Thornton. We will figure on living through this war, but the chances are not good. (MUSIC)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: But some of Hobey’s close friends were less than enthralled with Mimi. Fellow aviator and Princeton alum Charles Biddle expressed his doubts about Mimi in a letter to Hobey biographer, John Davies.
CHARLES BIDDLE: She was a good-looking girl in a flashy sort of a way, what the French would call, “Chic.” But my impression of her was that she was hard and had no sweetness. To me, she had no charm at all. And I remember being very dubious of Hobey’s prospects for happiness, if he should marry her.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Hobey’s engagement, in fact, fits with the social norms of the time, norms that countless other same-sex loving men had to follow, including Cole Porter, who, despite being gay, married a wealthy older heiress shortly after the war.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: Lots of men who identified as gay got married to women and had, you know, varying degrees of success in their relationships. If they were not sexually attracted to their wives, you can imagine some people being able to fake it well, and others not so well. The wealthier, the more high-profile a person was, the more expectations there were upon them to marry and to live out societal ideals, which generally were, you know, marriage and a family.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: And the fact that Percy gave Hobey the modern-day equivalent of $10,000 to buy Mimi’s engagement ring does not surprise Professor Syrett.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: Part of it hinges on what they thought their future was. So if they were involved in– in sexual– affectionate relationship, but perhaps Hobey did not think that he could do this in the long term, but that they very much cared for one another, it’s completely possible that they also talked about the fact that Hobey, at some point, was going to have to get married.
That Percy might contribute to the engagement ring doesn’t surprise me, in that context. I also think that it wouldn’t surprise me at all, even if he had gotten married and they had continued their relationship. As we know, many gay men who got married to women did. (MUSIC) (NOISE)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Meanwhile, as World War I dragged into its evermore bloody and horrific fourth year, Hobey’s letters to Percy took on an increasingly intimate and personal tone. (MUSIC) April 4th, 1918. Chalou, France.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear Percy, I supposed if you ever get here, I would never see you, even once. Wouldn’t that be hell? You would probably work a tour and I on the front. And since no permissions for leave are granted for Paris, I don’t know where we would meet. You are still a long way off. And I may be dead and buried, by the time you get here.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: July 9th, 1918, Tulle, France.
HOBEY BAKER: Wouldn’t it be queer to see each other again? You, I know, will look just the same, possibly a little larger fellow around the belt. I am almost as bold as Thornton and getting more so, each day. I don’t think you would know me, for I feel I have changed quite a lot, as far as looks go.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: A few months earlier, Percy heard a disturbing rumor that Hobey had been killed in action. Learning of this Hobey saw to reassure Percy. December 13th, 1917, Arcachon, France. (MUSIC)
HOBEY BAKER: Percy, I am sorry that you should have worried about my being killed. It is a rumor that has gone everywhere. And everyone I see seems to think I am a ghost. I was afraid the rumor might get back home and felt like cabling that the new of my death was exaggerated. Why you care so damn much will always be a mystery. But that I care more than I ever thought I did, is more than apparent to me now.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Yet, the ever-present specter of death of death of going west was never far from Hobey’s mind. (MUSIC)
HOBEY BAKER: Dear father, there couldn’t be a nicer way to die. If I go west, it would be a pleasant death, a quick and sure one.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: And Baker’s fellow pilot, Quentin Roosevelt, also wrote about going west, February 23rd, 1918.
QUENTIN ROOSEVELT: Dear father and mother, still, there is no better way, if one has got to die. It solves things so easily for it. You have nothing to worry about it. And even the people whom you leave have the great comfort of knowing how you died. It’s really (LAUGH) a very fine 30 seconds of horror. And it’s all over.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Sadly, in July 1918, Quentin Roosevelt was shot down by the Germans. He was just 20 years old. A grisly photo of his dead, limp body laying next to his plane was used by the Germans as propaganda.
JEREMY KINNEY: It actually backfired in Germany– ’cause there was sentiment towards Theodore Roosevelt, as they liked him.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: The Smithsonian’s Jeremy Kinney.
JEREMY KINNEY: So that story resonates quite a lot with the American public, in terms of, “Here’s a pilot that gave his life, but he was the president’s son.” Theodore Roosevelt doesn’t live six months after this. He’s racked with guilt because he encouraged his sons into military service.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In April 1918, after almost a year of training and impatiently waiting, Hobey finally saw combat, (MUSIC) after being assigned to the Lafayette Escadrille, one of the top American fighter units. In late May, he shot down his first German plane, which he described in a letter to his father, using a derisive term for his German opponents.
HOBEY BAKER: It was the biggest thrill of my life. I am still all excited over it, just as I used to be after a big game. We went way into boche lines over their balloons. I don’t think I got a boche, but I came very close. Report just came in. The boys got two of them, just as I was writing this. Two have been confirmed and I am wild with joy. I am so excited, I can hardly write. I wish you could have seen the fight. I was so excited, I forgot to be scared.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: For Baker, the great war gave him a sense of fulfillment, of purpose he hadn’t experienced since his days at Princeton. As World War I author Alan Moorehead wrote, “He was, for a moment of time, a complete man.” In August 1918, Hobey’s leadership talents were acknowledged when he was given command of his own pursuit squadron. He wrote to his friend, Wendel Kuhn, about his plans to paint his squadron’s planes in Princeton’s colors and use the school’s tiger mascot, as well.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear Wendel, it may be rah-rah, but I am having all the planes’ radiators painted orange and black and a tiger’s head for the squadron insignia. And it will be damn pretty.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In late October 1918, Hobey, now a squadron leader, managed to get his second shoot down of a German plane. In a letter to his father, he revealed the surreal intimacy of aerial dog fights.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear father, he got over a woods (AIRPLANE) and I lost him for a few valuable seconds, then picked him up as he shot across a road directly below me. I dove again and came out on his tail, where I commenced firing at close range. (GUNFIRE) He pulled a climbing turn, then came up over me. I saw the pilot look down and would recognize him if I saw him on a street. We were so close. He was a beautiful pilot in a beautiful machine. I fired 150 rounds into him, at close range. (AIRPLANE)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Hobey now had a second of three confirmed kills, with a third coming a few days later. But then, on the 11th hour of the 11th day, of the 11th month, November 11th, 1918, World War I ended with Germany’s surrender and an Allied victory. Disappointed that he did not become an ace with five kills, Hobey writes home.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear father, I am very well pleased with the work of a squadron. We lost no men and have two Germans to our credit in two weeks of operating. I’m glad it’s over, but I would not have minded a few more weeks to get this squadron at its height of efficiency.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: But as the war ended, so, too, did his engagement to Ms. Mimi Scott. (MUSIC) November 27th, 1918.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear father, I think she is in love with some man in Paris. It seems so queer, for she made me feel so sure of her. We really had been engaged for about five months, but I was anxious not to announce it until after the war. I believe she honestly believed she loved me, until the right one came along. I am certainly good, when it comes to girls. Someday, father, I want to have a long talk with you about Mimi.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Forty days after the war ended, on December 21st, 1918, Hobey Baker, now a captain, finally received (MUSIC) his orders to return home. But Hobey wanted to remain in France with his pursuit squadron, stay until they could all go home together. (ENGINE)
So Hobey rode his Harley Davidson to the squadron’s headquarters to plead for his discharge orders to be countermanded. But his request was denied. After returning to the Tulle airfield, that cold, rainy December day, Hobey encountered his old Princeton football coach and mentor, Lieutenant Heff Herring (PH). In a letter to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Herring wrote a detailed account of what happened that day.
HERRING: The rain still pouring down, Hobey burst into his quarters. All he now wanted was one lost hop in (UNINTEL). The Air Service personnel had its superstitions, chief among them, that no one should ever take an avowed last flight. We were still arguing, as we walked to the field. All I had gained was a promise to fly straight out to Pont-à-Mousson, turn around, and come home with no acrobatics anywhere.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: But when Herring and Hobey reached the hangar, Hobey’s plane was at the back. Hobey didn’t want to put his men out by moving the other planes around, so he took the nearest one, which had just had its faulty motor repaired.
HERRING: Hobey jumped in the cockpit and promised me, once again, he’d go easy, just up and back from Pont-à-Mousson. It might take him 15 minutes. With the motor thoroughly warmed up, Hobey headed into the wind. With the motor delivering full power, he suddenly pulled up in a right chondel.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Chondel is a French term for a steep, vertical climb. In short, Hobey had executed an aerial acrobatic, breaking his minutes-old promise to Heff.
HERRING: Hobey had flown, perhaps, a quarter mile after leveling off and was approaching the little square of trees and barn just here, at the worst possible place and fraction of time. His motor cut out.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Baker, instead of doing what he had done many times before, gliding the plane straight forward to a pancake landing, instead tried to turn his powerless plane back towards the air strip.
HERRING: He made a right turn, lost flying speed and began to fall off on a wing. He then did the only thing that might have possibly saved him, had he just a little more altitude. He turned the nose straight down. About 90 feet from the ground, the plane started to spin. My legs gave way, as I ran. (MUSIC)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Herring and the chief of the 2nd Army Air Service, Colonel Frank Laum (PH), were the first people to reach the crash site. Herring tried to pull Hobey from the crumpled plane, now embedded into the muddy earth, but Hobey’s leg was trapped in the wreckage. So Laum used an ax to cut Hobey free.
When they removed his helmet, Hobey’s golden locks fell across his bloodstained face. A deep five-inch gash ran down the middle of Hobey’s forehead, the result of slamming his head into the forward machine gun. There was so much blood that at first, Laum didn’t recognize Hobey. As Herring and Laum pulled Hobey’s limp body from the wreckage, he passed away in Herring’s arms. He was only 26 years old. (MUSIC)
JEREMY KINNEY: The death of Hobey Baker is a tragically ironic story that happens more than not in the story of military aviation.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: The Smithsonian’s Jeremy Kinney.
JEREMY KINNEY: The worst weather imaginable, Baker takes this airplane up. And what happens? The engine cuts out. And an experienced pilot would just put it straight down, let it glide down and– and be done with it. But, as a squadron commander, he turns back towards the air field.
In the process of turning, he starts losing lift. So he puts the nose down, which gives you speed. It’s almost like a roller coaster. If he had 90 more feet, he would have just kind of glided in and landed. But the SPAD hits the ground and crashes.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, years later, perhaps thinking of Hobey, “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” To this day, there remain lingering questions about Hobey’s untimely death. Was it an unfortunate accident, or just bad judgment fueled by the overconfidence of a talented flyer, or was it deliberate? Sam Slaughter was a pilot assigned to Hobey’s command.
SAM SLAUGHTER: Had he more altitude, he could have put his ship into a nosedive and then pulled out before he hit the ground. All of us were told never to try a turn near the ground with a dead stick. But Hobey was as near to being Superman as a human can get. And he didn’t live according to the book.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: And here’s what his former commander, Charlie Biddle, wrote about Hobey’s death.
CHARLES BIDDLE: As anyone who knew Baker well should know, he was not the kind of man who would deliberately end his life. While I was not there at the time of the accident, I have talked to numerous men who were there and saw what happened. If he had wanted to kill himself, he could have done so easily, by diving into the ground, instead of trying to extricate himself from his troubles, as eye witnesses described and photos confirm.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In his own detailed description of the crash, Herring noted that Hobey may have saved himself, if he hadn’t decided to try and make it back to the field.
HERRING: Quite possibly, Hobey could have held the SPAD’s nose up long enough to clear the telegraph wires, and stone barracks, and land, and the plowed land behind. He would have washed out the plane, but he might have got out without serious injury to himself. I had seen crashes on the hard ground, where the plane was demolished, and the pilot walked away with not even a bloody nose.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Baker biographer, Emil Salvini, is unpersuaded by the arguments that Hobey’s death was merely a tragedy accident or bad judgment.
EMIL SALVINI: If you’ve seen pictures of the wreck, it looked like he took a nosedive, you know, right into the ground. He didn’t dry to pancake it, at all. I know he did not want to go back to being a trainee banker.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Salvini believes there was a strong possibility that Hobey died by his own hand.
EMIL SALVINI: Yes, that he committed suicide. As a matter of fact, if I had to say yes or no, I’d say he probably did.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: With us now aware of Hobey’s emotional back story, we can speculate about his state of mind, that late December day in France. Was he, perhaps, afraid of returning to an America that was increasingly turning against gay and bisexual men? Professor Nicholas Syrett.
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS SYRETT: I think it’s possible. Even a man like Hobey, who did not present as effeminate in any way, indeed was a sort of model of masculinity for all of his classmates, indeed for the nation, could come to understand himself, perhaps, as that kind of thing that he, maybe, did not want himself to be.
I think, even more plausible, though, is simply what might have been going on in his own head about whether he wanted to have a life that would put him outside the mainstream. If he had come to understand that his emotional and erotic attractions were really primarily (LAUGH) to men and were not going to be satisfied to women, is that the kind of life that he wants to lead, either as a closeted person or shunned by some people in society around him?
DAVID DUCHOVNY: It’s also likely that Hobey was feeling unsettled and ambivalent about returning home, going from his sports glory at Princeton, to wartime glory in France, and now seeing little in his future to match the exuberant adrenaline highs of his heroic past.
If his plane had landed safely, Hobey contemplated the possibility of mindless work on Wall Street, waning looks and fading adoration. Salvini sees tragedy in Hobey’s rigid commitment to sports amateurism, a dogma that prevented him from becoming a professional hockey player and pursuing a career he would have found satisfying after the war. (CHANTING)
EMIL SALVINI: I would have loved to have seen him play, but I feel that the greatest irony in his life was that his entire amateur athletic career prepared him for doing what his social class and conscious would never let him do. And that was to play sports for money, which could have solved problems in his life, if he had made it home. (MUSIC)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: But Hobey didn’t make it home. And a few months after the crash, Heff Herring was tasked with bringing Hobey’s personal effects and his letters back safely from France. He placed them in a satchel bag and headed to the Paris rail station. Inside was the silver cigarette case engraved with, “To HA HB, from PRPII, September 15th, 1914.”
That was the date of Percy and Hobey moving in together in New York City. (MUSIC) In addition, the satchel also contained dozens of what must have been intimate letters from Percy to Hobey. Herring maintained that the satchel was stolen from between his legs at the Paris train station. Yet, somehow, the cigarette case managed to make its way to Princeton’s special collections. Salvini believes that the loss of the satchel, containing Percy’s letters, might not have been a theft, after all.
EMIL SALVINI: The Pine Family was very powerful and had a lot of connections. And they might have been– intentionally destroyed. But it also could have been, yeah, somebody just very close to Hobey that they’ll– they were for Hobey’s eyes only, maybe, and– and– and destroyed them.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: It was Percy whom the U.S. War Department first notified about Hobey’s death, not his father, nor his brother Thornton. To deal with his emotional loss and honor Hobey Baker’s legacy, Percy soon launched a campaign to fund a fitting athletic memorial to him, the Hobey Baker Memorial Ice Rink, dedicated in 1923.
Five years after Hobey’s death was the first college hockey arena in the country. A century later, Princeton’s hockey team still plays there. And displayed prominently in the Princeton locker room is this simple phrase, “Make Hobey proud.” Today, the Baker Rink stands as a stone and mortar symbol of one man’s love for another, Percy’s for Hobey.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the Hobey Baker Memorial Rink. Tonight, Princeton Tigers play the Bull Dogs of Yale.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: After raising the funds for Baker Rink, Percy sunk into alcoholism and lost much of his inherited fortune in the 1929 stock market crash. In 1950, Percy died, almost penniless, in a shotgun house in California’s San Fernando Valley. He was 68 years old.
Meanwhile, Hobey’s brother, Thornton, never got to attend Princeton or any college. But as a tribute to Thornton’s selfless decision to let his younger brother go to Princeton instead of him, Thornton was made an honorary member of Hobey’s class, the Princeton class of 1914.
To honor Hobey, Thornton named his first son, Hobey Baker Jr. His wife, Marie, compiled a large scrapbook of Hobey Baker memorabilia and newspaper clippings that are a permanent part of the Baker Archive at Princeton’s Mudd Library. So, as we look back on Hobey’s life and legacy, questions remain.
Was Hobey Baker one of America’s first iconic athletes same sex loving or has our new reading of the historical record led us down the wrong path? We will never know the full extent of Hobey’s and Percy’s relationship. But the countless letters and remembrances attest to the fact that theirs was clearly a relationship beyond friendship. It was intimate, playful, loving, and most likely romantic. (MUSIC)
More than a century after Hobey played, college and professional hockey and football still remain unwelcoming places for gay and bisexual male athletes. In fact, entering the 2023-2024 hockey season, there is yet to be an out gay or bisexual player in the NHL.
To date, the only two out gay athletes in the NFL had very brief tenures. Hobey’s lasting impact on American sports remains the Hobey Baker Award, the award give annually to the top men’s college ice hockey player, equivalent to college football’s famed Heisman Trophy.
ANNOUNCER: The Hobey Baker Memorial Award winner is Johny Gaudrea. (APPLAUSE)
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Since 1981, the Hobey Baker Award Committee honors Hobey by choosing winners not merely based on their athletic prowess or stats alone, but for exhibiting strength of character, integrity, and sportsmanship, traits that Hobey fully embodied. Yet, for the most part, Hobey’s incredible athletic exploits have been lost to history and his renown legacy flattened into a mere name on a trophy. (MUSIC) Today, Hobey Baker lies buried in a cemetery near his Philadelphia mainline home. Etched on his tombstone is an epitaph that captures the tragedy and enigma of his all too brief life. (MUSIC)
MALE VOICE: You, who seemed winged, even as a lad. With that swift look of those who know the sky, it was no blundering fate that stooped and bade you break your wings and fall to the earth and die. I think, someday, you may have flown too high so that immortals saw you and were glad, watching the beauty of your spirit’s flame, until they loved and called you and you came. (LONG PAUSE) (MUSIC)
ANNOUNCER: Searching for Hobey Baker was narrated by David Duchovny. The series was executive produced by Ross Greenberg Andrew Reynolds and Timothy Smith. From Silver Sound, the producer and re-recording mixer for the production was Cory Choi.
The supervising sound designer was Luke Allen. Our original music and music supervision was done by John Sands and Wayne Sharpe. The associate producer for this podcast was Evan Janikan (PH). Also from Silver Sound, additional producing by Hunt Beady and Reid Adler.
Studio recording by Tom Fama (PH), location recording by Tarchesio Longobardi (PH) and Christian Cuccionello (PH), and script support by Wenrei Joao (PH). Special thanks to Steven Arcieri and Matt Brody from Arcieri Talent. Our production manager was Christina Diledgi (PH), and the production accountant was Donna Bruccalei (PH).
Legal services provided by Jordan Manekin (PH) and Sam Bayard for 30 for 30 podcasts. This episode was produced by Carolyn Hepburn, Tara Nadolny, and Adiza Egan (PH). Our line producer was Cath Sankey. Senior editorial producer for 30 for 30 podcasts was Preeti Varathan.
The associate producers were Gus Navarro and Isabella Seman. Production assistants were Diamante McKelvie and Anthony Salas. Senior producers are Marquis Daisy and Gentry Kirby. Heather Anderson, Marsha Cooke, Brian Lockhart, and Burke Magnus are executive producers for 30 for 30 and ESPN films. Rights and clearances by Jennifer Thorpe and Kaal Griffith. Fact checking by Daniel Tomorrow and Andrew Distler. This podcast was developed by Eve Troh, Adam Newhouse, and Trevor Gill.
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