Jim Bradshaw: He didn't reach the moon, but his pilot's license did

Jimmy Mattern was never as well known as Charles Lindbergh, but he was at the height of his fame when hundreds of people from across South Louisiana turned out to hear him talk about exploits every bit as riveting as Lindbergh’s celebrated adventures.
He flew into Abbeville on July 8, 1934, as part of a tour of 100 towns and cities to promote that year’s World Fair in Chicago. Abbeville may have been one of his stops because he was also a technical adviser for the Pure Oil Co., which was interested in drilling thereabouts, and because of a friendship with one of his old flying instructors.
“Hundreds of persons in cars lined near the landing field witnessed the graceful landing made by Mattern after he circled the city several times,” according to the Abbeville Meridional. He was greeted by scores of townspeople, Mayor Fred Schlesinger, former mayor F. U. Broussard, representatives of Pure Oil, and two south Louisiana aviators, Leo J. Bulliard and Glynn Jones.
Mattern flew from New Orleans to Abbeville in about 45 minutes and “alighted from the comfortable cabin as nonchalantly as the autoist steps out of his car,” the newspaper said.
At the airfield, the aviator presented invitations to the mayor and former mayor to attend the Chicago exposition as personal guests of the fair’s president, and was then driven to Frank’s Theater, “packed by a large crowd interested in the flier’s outstanding achievement in aviation history.”
It was a history worth hearing, too. Mattern learned to fly in 1926 and almost immediately began to push at aviation limits, doing stunt flying in the movies. He also set several speed records, but he was best known for two attempts to fly around the world.
In July 1932 Mattern and copilot Bennett Griffin flew a Lockheed Vega from Newfoundland to Berlin in 18 hours and 41 minutes.
They set a record by crossing the Atlantic in 10 hours, 50 minutes, but the round-the-world attempt ended in a crash landing in Belarus, which was then part of the Soviet Union. A year later, he attempted a solo flight that ended in a crash landing in Siberia.
As the Meridional summarized, “Although Mattern has been establishing aviation records for the past five years, he is best known for his heroic attempt to girdle the globe in record time alone last June. After the longest solo flight that had ever been made — New York to Norway — and a perilous dash across Europe and Russia, Mattern ran out of oil and was forced to crash in the desolate wastes of Arctic Siberia.”
He vanished for three weeks, but “one day in early July a wireless station [at an isolated Russian military post] at Anadyr, Siberia, flashed the news that Mattern had been found by Eskimos, ill with pneumonia, half-starved, and with a broken ankle.”
Mattern told that tale in Abbeville, then visited with W. E. Baker, who was an instructor at Kelly Field, Texas, “when Mattern was learning blind flying preparatory to his solo trip around the world,” according to the newspaper report.
“Lieutenant Baker of Abbeville was seriously injured in a crash while he was giving final instructions to a student pilot … and since that time has been disabled.”
After his visit to Baker, Mattern was kept busy signing autographs “between bites” at an “old-time barbecue” that included 150 Pure Oil representatives from Morgan City, Franklin, St. Martinville, Opelousas, Lafayette, Kaplan, Gueydan, Jennings, Church Point, Abbeville, Broussard, Delcambre, Morse, Welsh, Lake Charles, Rayne, “and others,” according to the Meridional’s list.
Mattern flew out of Abbeville early in the evening, headed for Beaumont to hand out more World Fair invitations. Otherwise, the Meridional said, the famous pilot was “suspiciously silent as to his future flight plans.”
The newspaper suggested that “shortly after the conclusion of his present national tour, Mattern will announce a series of new flight plans that will eclipse even his past achievements.”
He did continue to push the limits of aviation, but there were no more crash-landing adventures.
From 1933 to 1938 he traveled the world as a celebrity pilot giving lectures much like the one he’d delivered in Abbeville.
In 1938 he became a Lockheed test pilot and continued to fly until 1946, when — probably because of stresses from pushing planes and himself to the limit — he was diagnosed with a ruptured blood vessel in his brain.
That ended his flying career, but not his interest in the cutting edge of flight.
He attended three Apollo spacecraft launches and so avidly supported the U.S. space program that in 1969 Neil Armstrong carried Jimmy’s pilot’s license to the moon aboard Apollo 11.
Jimmy worked in relative obscurity as a realtor after his flying days ended and died in December 1988 at the age of 83.
His license made it around the moon, but he never made it around the world.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.