Searching for Hobey Baker
Episode 2: The Lost Generation
SONG: Give my regards to Broadway. Remember me to Herald Square. Tell all the gang–
DAVID DUCHOVNY: With his glory days playing hockey and football at Princeton behind him, Hobey Baker moved to New York City in the fall of 1914. No longer a college sports hero, he was now a low-level functionary buried deep in the basement of the J.P. Morgan bank.
Baker was now a member of what would be called the Lost Generation, a generation that was born into the thrilling possibilities of the new Industrial Age but soon found themselves facing the horrors of a global modern war, World War I. Hobey’s Princeton classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald described their generation in his novel This Side of Paradise.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: For Baker, his generation’s relentless pursuit of money felt empty. It was no replacement for the adrenaline rush of the cheering crowds at Princeton as he returned punts for touchdowns or effortlessly skated down the ice, scoring hockey goals seemingly at will. Hobey complained to friends that his bank job left him feeling like a caged and neutered tiger.
HOBEY BAKER: I realize that my life is finished. No matter how long I live, I will never equal the excitement of playing on the football fields.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In a letter to Baker biographer John Davies, a Princeton classmate recalled Hobey telling him how despondent he was with his post-college life.
HOBEY BAKER: And just think of all the things I could do today if I didn’t have to work.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: I’m David Duchovny. From 30 for 30 Podcasts, this is Searching for Hobey Baker, episode two: The Lost Generation.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Recognizing Hobey’s despair, Percy Pyne, a multi-millionaire and Princeton alum, threw Baker a lifeline, inviting him to come live in his sumptuous Midtown Manhattan mansion on Madison Avenue, an offer that Hobey eagerly accepted.
TIM RAPPLEYE: So, he says, “Hey, I’ll live in New York.” And, again, he has no real financial stability at this point.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Baker biographer Tim Rappleye.
TIM RAPPLEYE: His dad’s out of money, and Percy Pyne is there and says, “Come live with me at my mansion.”
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Pyne was a character out of America’s Gilded Age, a time when rapid economic growth led to massive wealth concentrated in the hands of a select but very visible few. In describing this era, Mark Twain coined the term “Gilded Age” as opposed to “golden,” maintaining that the excesses of the super rich were a shiny veneer that hid the growing inequality and frustration experienced by the unseen millions in the underclass.
However, this concentration of wealth did not trouble Percy Rivington Pyne II. A son of inherited mega-wealth, he moved easily in the refined circles of the masters of industry who owned the banks, railroads, oil companies, and steel mills.
Their money allowed them the freedom to spent their days as sportsmen, sailors, adventurers, clubmen, and high society hosts. They were the celebrities and influencers of the day. Hobey had seen brief glimpses of this world during his four years at Princeton, with Baker the celebrity athlete who the wealthy sought to befriend. But now, living with Percy, who is nine years his senior, Hobey was thrust into its epicenter.
EMIL SALVINI: Percy was very, very generous– to him, very generous.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Emil Salvini is the author of Hobey Baker, American Legend.
EMIL SALVINI: And he just had this– on-again, off-again hero worship of Hobey. He couldn’t spend enough time with Hobey.
EMIL SALVINI: Hobey and Percy would dine and party together at the over 35 private clubs where Percy was a member, clubs like Long Island’s South Side Sportsmen Club, whose membership included many of New York’s gilded elite. South Side even had its own stop on the Long Island Rail Road. On summer weekends, Percy and Hobey could be found hunting game or shooting trap at South Side, or lounging poolside at Rivington House, Pyne’s palatial mansion on Long Island’s North Shore. Tim Rappleye.
EMIL SALVINI: Hobey is living like– some scene out of The Great Gatsby, where he’s feeling insecure like the protagonist of The Great Gatsby, but kinda on the arm of Percy Pyne. These are manly pursuits: auto racing, polo, golf, cigars with other men, in the clubs. It was a club life he led thanks to Percy.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Percy showered Hobey with special gifts: an elaborate leather toilet kit; a silver-plated cigarette box engraved with Percy’s and Hobey’s initials, an item that you can still find today in the Hobey Baker archives at Princeton University.
A close friend of both Hobey and Percy was Charlie Biddle, an attorney, wealthy member of the Philadelphia Main Line, and a fellow Princeton alum. In a letter, Percy jokingly castigated Biddle for missing one of his extravagant weekends at Drumthwacket, his family’s mansion in Princeton.
PERCY PYNE: Dear Charlie, what under the sun was the matter with you over Sunday that you did not come to Princeton? We had a rippin’ weekend in– we ought to arrange a date in Princeton when we could all get down sometime before commencement. And we could have a small dinner or something of that sort. Write to me soon and let me know what you’re doing. As ever, your sincere friend, Percy.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Percy was the consummate host, one who loved giving lavish parties. When he died in 1950, The New York Times spent much of his obituary describing a gala party, one that Hobey and many other high society luminaries attended. Here’s an excerpt from the Times obit.
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Pyne gave a large dinner at Sherry’s on Fifth Avenue on February 5, 1917 before the Cornelius Vanderbilt dance at the Vanderbilt home. The Sherry ballroom was transformed into a section of a Paris boulevard with a line of cafes and restaurants.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: An article in The New York Sun added additional detail.
THE NEW YORK SUN: As the dinner was being served, there was a continuous vaudeville which suggested the street life of Paris. And under the street lamps, there wandered typical gendarmes, street gamins, donkey carts, performing clowns and acrobats, organ grinders and Hawaiian musicians.
TIM RAPPLEYE: When people say, “Percy Pyne was the Liberace of his time,” they cite examples like this of how flamboyant and how outrageous he was. So, it was not soon forgotten.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: As Hobey’s relationship with his housemate, Percy, became increasingly close, his college friends expressed their discomfort.
WENDELL KUHN: Percy was inclined to have a succession of fair-haired younger men, proteges, if you will. And Hobey became one.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Wendell Kuhn, a Princeton hockey teammate, shared his discomfort years later in a letter to Hobey biographer John Davies.
WENDELL KUHN: I think it’s too bad Hobey went to live with Percy, inconsistent with his money status and likely to spoil him for the creature comforts Percy could give him. I can’t imagine Hobe being happy in such a situation, dependent, obligated.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: From the 1920s, America saw growing repression of gay and bisexual men, reaching its peak in the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. But the pre-World War I New York that Hobey and Percy lived in was a place and a time where space existed for gay couples.
Men who had relationships with men had to be cautious and contained, avoid ostentatious demonstrations of love, and also navigate religious and cultural norms. But as Columbia University professor of history George Chauncey writes in his groundbreaking book Gay New York, the very severity of the postwar reaction to homosexuality has tended to blind us to the relative tolerance of the prewar years.
NICHOLAS SYRETT: In the later 19th and early 20th centuries, the categories that we know today as homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality were simply far less defined than the ones that we know today. The acts were understood as acts of sex but not defining of a person.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Professor Nicholas Syrett is an associate dean at the University of Kansas and an editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.
NICHOLAS SYRETT: It was in the later 19th and early 20th centuries when m– many societies, and particularly in the U.S., came to understand the categories of the homosexual and heterosexual as being different from one another. But the process was not complete really even by the 1920s.
So, what that meant is that some people of the same sex could have sex with one another without thinking that it meant anything in particular about their sexual identity. They didn’t have to identify as being different from the rest of quote-unquote “normal” people at that moment.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: David Doyle is a professor of history at Southern Methodist University and an expert on same sex relationships during this period.
DAVID DOYLE: When we think about, let’s say, same sex attractions before the late 19th century or, I would say, maybe even before the 20th century, there’s much more freedom. What we can see is that these relationships are very powerful and very intense. Sometimes, they coexisted with heterosexual relationships. Often, they didn’t. So, if we talk about the closet, I would say that’s completely a 20th century construct.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Percy Pyne was the archetypal gay bachelor, hiding in plain sight. Few had doubts about his sexual preference. Columbia University’s Chauncey describes the classic upper-class gay man of that era as, “Highly mannered, with ambiguous sophistication. He would have pronounced Anglophilia with a reverence of the elegance and wit of the English gentry.”
In short, this describes Percy Rivington Pyne II to a tee. And what of Hobey? Contemporary accounts of Baker portray him as a masculine man with a clear affinity for other men. Wendell Kuhn, Baker’s roommate at St. Paul’s and Princeton, wrote to Hobey’s biographer, John Davies.
WENDELL KUHN: I don’t think dating women interested him much in school or in college.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: After one of their college hockey games, Kuhn and Hobey found a note in the locker room addressed to them from two female admirers. Hobey biographer Tim Rappleye recounts the story.
TIM RAPPLEYE: Saying, “Hey, you and Hobey, meet us after the game. We’ll be there in a car. We’re gonna take you on a hot date.” And Hobey was terrified. And Hobey– snuck out– through the boiler room so he wouldn’t have to face these women.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Another friend, Alvin Devereux (PH), roomed with Baker on his post-college voyage to Europe in 1914. He wrote to biographer John Davies with this memory.
ALVIN DEVEREUX: With his lean but well-muscled figure and his handsome, manly yet boyish face, he was someone who would appeal to both men and women alike. Strange to say, I can’t recall that there were any girls on the steamer with whom he got acquainted.
NEWSIE: Unintelligible phrase… Unintelligible phrase… programs here. Unintelligible phrase… that Hobey Baker.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Hobey’s new life in New York included more than his living and partying with Percy. At a time when former college athletes had few options to play professionally, many joined amateur teams. In fact, a few months after moving to New York, Hobey was back in a world where he felt at home: the ice rink, playing for the St. Nicholas Hockey Club.
New York’s professional NHL hockey team, the New York Rangers, wouldn’t be established for another decade, so amateur teams like St. Nick’s were the only game in town. St. Nick’s and the teams they played against featured former players from Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. Their home ice was St. Nicholas Arena, the same Upper West Side Manhattan rink where Hobey had played his Princeton home games. On game days, Hobey would arrive at St. Nick’s in his own chauffeured car, courtesy of Percy.
EMIL SALVINI: People at the time said that it looked like an opera house.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Baker biographer Emil Salvini.
EMIL SALVINI: The limousines and fine carriages would light up around the hockey rink, especially if they knew Hobey was playing. He was a darling of the sports world. They played in New York, Philly, and Boston. Women wore, you know, their mink stoles, and– and men actually have– evening wear. It must have been quite a sight.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: After one of St. Nick’s home games, The New York Post‘s Lawrence Perry wrote glowingly about the Baker phenomenon at St. Nick’s.
THE NEW YORK POST: Men and women went hysterical when Baker flashed down the ice on one of his brilliant runs with the puck. I have never heard such spontaneous cheerin’ for an athlete as greeted him a hundred times a night, and never expect to again.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Inside St. Nick’s, heaving crowds would lean over the balconies for a closer view of Hobey’s athletic artistry. As they did during his college days, fans would often shout, “Here he comes,” as Hobey rounded his own goal to pick up speed and then streaked down the ice, weaving effortlessly through a stunned and hapless opposition. Hobey seemingly scored at will. Ever present at St. Nick’s games was Percy Pyne, keeping a bottle of rock and rye furtively stashed in his raccoon coat.
SONG: Ô Canada, terre de nos aïeux.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: But Hobey’s most famous hockey game for St. Nick’s took place not on his home ice but up in the Far North, in December 1915, in Canada, hockey’s proverbial mecca.
TIM RAPPLEYE: Hobey and St. Nick’s come up to Montreal and play in the predecessor to the Montreal Forum, a 10,000-seat super hockey arena. And it’s the biggest hockey city in the world.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Hobey biographer Tim Rappleye.
TIM RAPPLEYE: This is Montreal at its absolute best. The best players in the world come up there. And Hobey Baker had a reputation that preceded him. His teams had beaten the best amateur teams all through Canada. But the Montreal Stars were the defending Ross Cup champions, and no one gave these Americans a chance. And Hobey goes out and puts on this spectacular show where, at two goals, three assists, Hobey dominates all day, all long. Hobey blew their minds in the biggest venue of them all.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Hobey’s domination in front of the largest crowd ever to watch a hockey game made front page news in the Montreal press.
MONTREAL NEWSPAPER: Uncle Sam has had the cheek to develop a first-class hockey player. We had heard him advertised as a great hockey player, and we had always smiled a cynical grin at the thought. A few minutes of Baker on the ice convinced the most skeptical. He could catch a place and a star’s place on any of our professional teams. We didn’t want the St. Nick’s to win, but Baker cooked our goose so artistically that we enjoyed it.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In the end, St. Nick’s won 6-2, with Hobey playing a part in five of the team’s six goals.
TIM RAPPLEYE: If one game can get you into the Hockey Hall of Fame, this was it.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Impressed that this Baker fellow, this Yank, was as good a hockey player as advertised, the Montreal Canadians offered Hobey a contract to play professionally in the National Hockey Association, the predecessor to the NHL.
TIM RAPPLEYE: I s– read in multiple published reports that he was offered $20,000, which was more than almost anybody else was played (SIC) to become a professional hockey player, which is– people in Canada would say, “Why the heck didn’t he take that?” And Hobey didn’t even consider playing professional hockey. It totally violated the code. “We are amateur athletes, and it’s the amateur code, and there’s no way I’m gonna play hockey for pay.”
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Biographer John Davies described Hobey as a, “heady wine, a combination of Tom Brown and Sir Galahad, the superb athlete, mannered, modest, handsome, who was actually a gentleman, and an amateur, and a sportsman.” There was certainly a class dimension to amateur athletes at the time, a time long before college athletes unionized or negotiated NILs. Hobey venerated the amateur athlete while holding disdain for professional athletes, calling them “muckers.”
For Hobey, amateurism represented sport in its purest form, untainted by money or commercialism. We do not know whether he understood that amateurism also denied him the opportunity to play against the very best, regardless of their race or position in society. But in addition to his rigid adherence to amateurism, author Vernon Andrews was struck by another Baker trait, one that ran counter to the modest amateur athlete: Hobey’s love for showmanship coupled with a touch of vanity.
VERNON ANDREWS: Hobey played so people can see him, see his face, see his hair. And that’s what professional football players do when they take off their helmets. They want people to see who they are. Hobey decided that he was a handsome man, that he was attractive, that he wanted to be seen.
Leather helmet or not, it’s dangerous. But he said, “I’m gonna forego that danger. I want to show myself. I want people to see me out here. I’m the star.” Yes, Hobey was a showman. Hobey liked how he looked. Hobey liked the responses of other people to how he looked and how he played. There are three words that sound pretty close: showmanship, sportsmanship, showboating. All in the same little pot, all brewing together.
JOHN TUNIS: The whole atmosphere was electric when he was playing. Everybody would just stand up when he got the puck or caught the punt.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: A contemporary of Baker’s, John Tunis, a Harvard graduate and columnist for The New Yorker, wrote about Hobey’s charismatic presence.
JOHN TUNIS: He never wore a head guard in football, and I remember that great shock of blond hair, Hobey standing, waiting all alone. He was the only player on the field you looked at, the only player you saw. He did everything with a kind of showmanship that wasn’t showmanship because it was natural to him. Never was anybody like Baker.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Those who watched Hobey play admired him as much for his raw physical beauty as for his prodigious athletic gifts. In their letters to Hobey’s Princeton biographer John Davies, Hobey’s classmates didn’t hesitate to describe how he looked physically. Donald Watt (PH).
DONALD WATT: I worshiped him from afar. Seeing him in action on the ice was more beautiful than watching the movements of any ballerina.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Grant Peacock.
GRANT PEACOCK: A fine likeness of Hobey hangs in my apartment. I see it every day. He was an Adonis, a perfect specimen without blemish.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Henry Byer (PH).
HENRY BYER: I could still visualize that amazing Greek god physique, the finest I believe I have ever seen. It was difficult to take my eyes off that wonderful, beautiful body.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Hobey Baker would have found this praise from his classmates embarrassing. In fact, while he was the consummate showman on the ice or football field, once he was out of the limelight, he was a modest man, almost shy. After games, he would often beg newspaper reporters not to write about him or his athletic exploits, asking them instead to interview and feature his teammates’ accomplishments.
But increasingly, by 1916, the newspapers were reporting on matters greater than what Hobey Baker or his teammates were doing in Manhattan’s rinks. Attention was turning to the war in Europe, now in its third horrific year with a death toll in the millions with opposing sides gripped in the endless, bloody stalemate of trench warfare.
Yet Hobey longed to get into the war and had even tried to sign up in 1914 when he was in London only to be stopped by a Princeton professor from enlisting. Now, hoping that America might soon get into the war, Hobey took up a new challenge and what he considered a newfangled sport: flying, joining an Air National Guard unit in Manhattan.
JEREMY KINNEY: America’s looking at the war raging in Europe. There’s this thought. “Okay, America’s probably gonna get into this.”
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Jeremy Kinney is a leading authority on the World War I air war. He’s the associate director for resource at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
JEREMY KINNEY: They are flying. They’re demonstrating, you know, especially around New York. So, they’re really building this idea of what American military aviation will look like. “We need to create this body, this cadre of officers that, you know, pay on their own dime to learn to fly.” And they take it upon themselves to not only learn to fly, but they create their own reserve military aviation units.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Among Hobey’s fellow pilots were Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest son, Quentin, and Seth Low II, the son of the mayor of New York. Like Hobey, many of these early American pilots graduated from Ivy League schools and were top athletes, like Al Weatherhead, a former Harvard quarterback; Buck Church (PH), a former Yale end; and “Spuddy” Pishon, a former Dartmouth quarterback. But flying proved to be a dangerous game, much more deadly than football. Just a little over a decade from the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, the planes they flew were primitive, flimsy, and subject to dangerous engine failures.
JEREMY KINNEY: Flying is dangerous, and it’s because of the frail type of technology at the time. But in this idea of wood structures covered in fabric, they’re held together by wires with engines that could cut out or not run all the time in the air, it’s a very dangerous business.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In the late fall of 1916, Hobey triumphantly returned to his old haunt, Princeton, flying in formation to Princeton’s new football stadium, Palmer Stadium, where his alma mater was playing Yale. He was accompanied by 11 other pilots and planes, part of the biggest flight formation in the U.S. up to that time.
JEREMY KINNEY: The New York Air National Guard unit that Hobey Baker was part of, they did a demonstration flight, and they decide to fly to the football game. So, he’s the first person to arrive at a football game by air, by an airplane, but he also is– he’s showin’ his school spirit and kinda showin’ that deep connection between the Ivy League and the airplane and what it means for sports.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Sports reporter Robert Edgren described the flyover for the New York Evening World.
NEW YORK EVENING WORLD: Before the game began, two specks appeared above the northern horizon. They grew until it was seen that they were Army planes. One of the planes circles above the field and, spiraling down to a moderate height, sailed slowly overhead and turned again to the north. “It’s Baker,” yells a megaphone cheerleader. And (LAUGH) so it was. Hobey had flown down to see his old team win and to see the game as he had never seen it before.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: In early 1917, a few months after that epic flight over Princeton’s football stadium, Hobey picked up and left New York City for Philadelphia, his hometown, to live with his older brother, Thornton, and his wife, Marie. Exactly why Hobey moved back remains a bit of a mystery.
We know he was bored by his mundane life as a lowly banker. And now, older and no longer the physical Adonis he once was, perhaps he thought that rekindling his younger days when the Baker brothers played hockey together at St. Paul’s might spark the excitement that his New York life lacked.
He may have also felt a sense of filial duty to Thornton, who gave up his chance for college so Hobey could go to Princeton. And now, Thornton was still struggling to save the family upholstery business. Soon enough, the Baker brothers reunited on Thornton’s amateur Philadelphia hockey team. Then, as luck would have it, Thornton’s team was challenged by the top amateur hockey team in Pittsburgh, which played their games at the Duquesne Gardens. Hobey biographer Tim Rappleye supplies the play-by-play.
TIM RAPPLEYE: They get on a train, and they go play in Pittsburgh. And this game, it’s all Hobey, and he’s not in great shape. He’s been smokin’ cigarette and eatin’ licorice, and– and he’s gettin’ gassed out there. And they’re losing 2-1. And they’re almost gettin’ run out of the building.
And then, Hobey finds an extra gear, ties the game, sends it into overtime. And finally, after two overtimes, nothing had been settled. They had to agree to sudden death. And Hobey goes behind his own net, ends his final game with an overtime winner and the longest rush imaginable. There’s never been a longer one, ’cause no one plays hockey on a 300-foot sheet. Hobey won his last game on a rink-length rush that no one will ever replicate.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: With his beloved brother, Thornton, at his side, the preeminent player in the game had experienced one last magical hockey moment. As Hobey was packing up his hockey gear in Pittsburgh, rumors of war were resounding across America. Chief among the war hawks urging America to declare war on Germany was former president Teddy Roosevelt.
President Wilson, who won his 1916 reelection with the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” was now struggling mightily to maintain America’s neutrality. Then, on February 24, 1917, British intelligence intercepted a top secret coded telegram from the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann. The Associated Press broke the story.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: The telegram from the German foreign minister invited the Mexicans to, “Make war together and make peace together.” In return, Germany offered generous financial support and help to the Mexicans in occupying the states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, territories that Mexico lost in 1848.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: With this revelation, President Wilson now had little choice but to declare war on Germany, which he did on April 2, 1917 in an address to Congress.
PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON: With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it, and that it exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: July 23, 1917, New York City. Newly commissioned U.S. Army officer Lieutenant Hobey Baker was headed off to Europe and the Great War. He arrived at Pier 54 and boarded the troop ship SS Orduna. He had been chauffeured to the pier in Percy’s limousine after spending his last few days with Pyne at his Madison Avenue mansion.
From the pier, Percy waved goodbye as Hobey hung over the railing, shoulder to shoulder with his fellow soldiers and pilots, each man trying desperately to catch a final glimpse of loved ones. As the troop ship cleared the Verrazzano-Narrows and the New York City skyline slowly dipped below the horizon, Hobey penned the first of scores of letters he wrote to Percy during his 18 months on the front lines, letters written from Hobey’s heart, letters that provide us with an emotional insight into the depth and true nature of their relationship.
HOBEY BAKER: Dear Percy, it suddenly came over me as you drove off what was really happening, and I have not gotten over it yet. God knows I have not deserved all the affection you have given me. I feel and have always felt that I have stolen it from some other person for whom God meant it. I hope not. In any case, I am truly thankful. Affectionately, Hobey.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Hobey sealed the letter and put it safely away. He would mail it in England upon his arrival, but as he tried to sleep that night, Hobey remained troubled by the realization that today might have been the last time he ever say Percy Pyne or America again. Coming up on the third and final episode of Searching for Hobey Baker.
HOBEY BAKER: I commenced firing at close range. 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.
JEREMY KINNEY: There are about 600 pilots– when they start in the summer of 1917, and they lose 235, killed in action.
MALE VOICE: Hobey had flown perhaps a quarter mile after leveling off. At the worst possible place and fraction of time, his motor cut out.
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.
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