Vernell “Red” Irwin

By John Warner

It was in the spring of my first year in college,” recalled Red, “when Lindbergh hopped across the ocean. My college advisor told me that I was crazy – that aviation would never amount to anything.”

So, after studying engineering at the University of Illinois, where courses on aviation were conspicuously absent, Red withdrew from the college. Instead, on February 24, 1928, he invested $35.00 to join the Bloomington Flying Club. Flying lessons were furnished to members at $2.50 an hour and on February 25, 1928, Red took his first hour of instruction.

Said Red, “It was so cold that day my face got frost-bitten.”

“I flew for a couple of years before there were any regulations – didn’t even have to keep track of my flight time,” Red remarked.

“An old army pilot was my flight instructor. He let me fly solo after three hours in the air. When I had ten hours of flight time my instructor quit. I was the high-time pilot on the field and became flight instructor.”

May, 1928 brought the first aircraft landings at Hallsville. Red piloted a Curtiss JN-4D “Jenny” that belonged to the Bloomington Flying Club.

“I’ve always thought of that old Jenny as the aeronautical equivalent of a Model T Ford.” Red remarked years later.

Red Irwin stands with family members around his Travel Air Model 4000. Parents Minnie and Wilbur are alongside; fiancée Ruth Sutter stands behind him on a tire.

“At idle on the ground you could see the propeller ticking over. Straight and level it would cruise at 70 to 75 MPH. You could slow fly it at about 45 MPH. It would climb at about 200 feet per minute. I mostly flew about 700 feet above the ground. It took too much time and gasoline to climb any higher.”

The OX-5 was a V-8, water-cooled, four stroke engine that developed 90 horsepower at 1400 RPM. It burned 9 gallons of gasoline per hour. The crankcase held four gallons of oil. The rocker arms were exposed, clattering loudly and spewing oil whenever the engine ran.
“The old timers used to say that if it wasn’t blowing oil, the OX-5 wasn’t running right. We wore silk scarves to wipe the oil from our goggles. We wore flight suits to stay clean. You could always tell a high-time pilot by the oil splattered all over his flight suit.”

After he soloed in Bloomington, Red made his flying visit to Hallsville, heading directly south to Clinton and then turning west toward home. When he landed in his family’s clover field at Hallsville, Red caused a sensation – almost the entire village came running.

In the early 1930s Red bought a Travel Air Model 4000, a two-place open cockpit biplane powered by a 300 HP Wright engine. Travel Air was a premier aircraft company and their Model 4000 ranked among the finest aircraft in the world. A shed at his grandparent’s house became Red’s first airplane hangar.

Red’s initiation into the world of stunt flying came by accident.

“I was flying over Kenney, hauling passengers, when I made too tight a turn and went into a tailspin. By instinct I got out of it. I didn’t know what I had done – that it was a tailspin – until I was on the ground and a World War I veteran came over and told me it was the prettiest tailspin he’d ever seen. I got sick to my stomach.”

“In those days you weren’t schooled in stunting,” he explained. “You had to go aloft and figure out all the maneuvers for yourself. To sum it up, really, I was lucky. More luck than brains. I did tricks I would never do today. Tricks that scared me.”

For the Thorp’s offspring, flying was part of life on the farm.

“We never knew a day without an airplane,” said Thorp’s youngest daughter, Zelda.

As a teen, Nelson Thorp chose aviation over motorcycles. When Nelson asked his father to help with the cost of a motorcycle, his father told him, “I’ll pay for your pilot’s license or I’ll buy you a motorcycle—not both.”

Nelson considers the decision to pursue a pilot’s license “the best decision I ever made.”

When three of Thorp’s cousins also expressed interest in learning to fly, his father hired a flight instructor from Champaign who made weekly trips to the family farm. Mary Ellen Thorp served the instructor supper before his return home.

Nelson, Zelda, and their younger brother Lewis earned pilot licenses.

At 16, Nelson completed his first solo flight and a year later, he became the youngest pilot to fly to the National Flying Farmers annual convention in Denver. Zelda and Lewis rode in the back seat.

The Thorps used their planes like other farmers used their pickups. A machinery part located in another town was picked up in a plane and fields were surveyed from the air. De-tasseling crews often were treated to a plane ride at the end of their summer employment at the seed business.

The Ford Tri-motor was among America’s earliest airliners. It had three engines: one on the nose and one on each wing. It had corrugated metal skin like a machine shed and carried twelve passengers.

“The Tri-motor put me in business,” Red recalled. “I had an advance man who would visit a town and obtain permission from a nearby farmer to land in his field. Then the advance man would put up hand bills advertising airplane rides for the next weekend. When the weekend came, we landed in the farmer’s field and sold tickets for $2.50. People didn’t have a lot of extra money in those days but they could always come up with the cash for an airplane ride.”

“We would fill the plane and I would take off, circle town once so everyone could see their houses, and then I’d land,” Red explained.

“We averaged a new load of passengers every seven minutes. At the end we paid the farmer and his family by giving them a free ride. It was common to clear $1,500.00 dollars over a weekend. And during the depression that was a lot of money.”

After Eastern Air Lines Red went to work for Mene Grande Oil Company, a division of Gulf Oil Company that operated in Venezuela.

“When I interviewed with Gulf in Venezuela,” Red remembered, “two other job candidates and I were loaded on board a company airplane and flown around over the jungle. Every now and again, the company representative would point to a grass strip lying way down below. Some were small; some were on the edge of cliffs; some were bounded by trees. I told the company man that I could land on any of the fields that he’d shown to us. By the time we got back to the main airport, the other two pilots had withdrawn their applications.”

Major corporations all over the world have their own airlines. They own fleets of aircraft: passenger planes for traveling executives and employees, cargo planes for the transport of heavy equipment and so forth. They employ pilots and co-pilots, maintenance crews, ground handling crews, office staffs and even flight attendants. Corporate flight departments maintain flight schedules all over the globe and employees of the company book their flights on their company’s airline.

In Venezuela Red Irwin managed the entire South American division of the Gulf Oil Company airline.

Early in the 1960s Red was promoted to Director of Corporate Aircraft for the entire Gulf Oil Company. The Irwins moved from Caracas, Venezuela to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, where Red managed one of finest corporate flight operations in America. Yet at every opportunity he and his wife Charline came back to Hallsville and the family farm.

Petticoat Junction and Green Acres were popular television situation comedies that ran from 1963 through 1971. The stories were set in the fictional farm village of Hooterville, near the small farm town of Pixley.

“Whenever Charline and I came home on vacation,” Red explained, ‘the staff at Gulf teased us about our trips to “Hooterville.” We played right along with their jokes. I told everyone that we lived at Hooterville Airport. About that time, we turned the old clover field into a sod runway and I registered it with the FAA as ‘Hooterville Airport.’ It’s been on all the aeronautical charts that way ever since.”

A few years before Red’s retirement, Gulf Oil Company arranged for the restoration of a classic Stearman open cockpit biplane, to be flown by its barnstorming chief pilot and employed to advertise Gulf aviation products at airshows all over the country.

“A glossy custom Stearman streaked in, slick from cowled engine and wheel pants back to faired rudder and headrest,” wrote Gordon Baxter for Flying magazine, describing the sensational 1972 Stearman fly-in in Galesburg, Illinois.

Out of its cockpit there arose a most unlikely figure, like Faust coming up from Hell. First a great, red nose framed in white whiskers, and then the bulk of a magnificent paunch heaved upward. All of this balanced on the cockpit rim to unsheathe a pink, bald pate, and then it dropped to earth with surprising agility, like some giant Santa Claus, and was swept away by a throng of admirers.

“For God’s sake, what was that?” I asked the little Italian chef with the Kaiser mustache who got out of the front hole.

“That’s Red Irwin. He flies for Gulf Oil.”

“Flies what for Gulf oil?”

“All of it; he’s their chief corporate pilot and you are standing beside a mighty pricey Stearman. Look inside, but be careful.”

There, packed like jewels in black leather, was a full IFR panel. Instruments from crotch to chin, two of everything. When Stearman 811 Golf calls Chicago Center and squawks ident, wouldn’t you love to be there?”

Red Irwin’s career in aviation took him from open-cockpit biplanes and clover fields to four-engine jets and international air travel. Yet after almost 50 years of flying everything, from Jennies to jets, Irwin’s first love – the open cockpit biplane – remained his strongest.

“Any man that can make a living doing what he likes is lucky, and I’m that,” Red always said of his life in the air.