Despite overcoming the overwhelming odds of lifting into the air, Hodgkinson remained in terror of falling into the sea. True, survival in the English Channel was ten minutes at most, made even more impossible by the weight of thrashing tin legs. It was this fear, more than anything else in war, that caused him to search for a life-saving flotation solution. Chapter 14 of his autobiography is entitled ‘Ping Pong’ in honor of that failure.
“I was looking about serenely when, at 27,000 feet, just as we
were crossing into France, I was shaken by a series of sharp exp
losions
in the bottom of the cockpit. Jumped! I thought grimly, and immediately threw
the Spitfire into a violent evasive action. For a few seconds I twisted and
turned, scanning what I could of the sky…Nothing…only the squadron flying
impeccably on. More explosions; terrifying, louder than ever. Flak? It must be
flak. I banked steeply and glared downwards…My controls were intact, but I was
being hit, as a series of further bangs convinced me. The drill for bailing out
rushed through my mind: undo straps, pull back hood, invert the aircraft. Then,
just before I went through these fatal maneuvers, I remembered the ping-pong
balls I had stored in my legs. The rarified atmosphere at nearly 30,000 feet had
been too much for them…I decided after that farcical incident that I might know
explosions enough without creating my own, and flew for the rest of my service
with hollow legs.”13
“The big birds had a trick of coming in from the ocean and
fishing in the lake…The comedian resented these incursions bitterly. He never
fished himself, as one of his household pointed out to him, but he said he’d be
damned if he would provide free delicatessen for all the feathered drifters on
the Coast…He bought a gun, a worn army revolver, for $4.50 in a pawnshop, and
crouched for days behind a stump, trying to get a pot shot at the intruders.”14
Like another Icarus, this time in a straw hat, W C Fields plummeted earthwards. His fall was not fearful, it was fated. The scene from ‘Never Give a Sucker an Even Break’ had been written that way on the back of a supermarket bill in 1941.
This is a fitting place to end, with him dropping carelessly towards Shangri-La. It takes half a minute for him to fall. 30 seconds of black and white clouds, whistling and tumbling. The parade in the sky has gone by—comedians, birds, pot shots and aeronauts.
Footnotes (Stock Footage)
"Only he who seeks an oracle will naturally pay attention to
the flight of the crow, and he must loudly proclaim his question, addressing the
bird at the moment when it flies into the open."15
1 Hornaday’s American Natural History;
William T. Hornaday; Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY; 12th Edition, 1927;
Page 173
2 Birds of America; Volume IV; John
James Audubon
3 Ibid.
4 My Autobiography; Charles Chaplin;
Simon and Schuster, NY; 1964; Page 146
5 Motography, January 6, 1917
6 Slapstick Encyclopedia Volume 5; Chaplin & Company: The Music
Hall Tradition; Kino Video, NY, 1998
7 The Bestiary of Christ; D.M Dooling;
Arkana, NY; 1992; Page 275
8 Reach for the Sky: The Story of Douglas Bader, Legless Ace of
the Battle of Britain; Paul Brickhill; W.W Norton &
Company Inc., NY; 1954; Page 210
9 Ibid.; Page 223
10 Ibid.; Page 224
11 Best Foot Forward; Colin
Hodgkinson; W.W Norton & Company Inc., NY; 1957; Page 89
12 Reach for the Sky; Page 201
"Perhaps the greatest 'Captain Kangaroo' memory for
yesterday's children, today's adults, is of a Gus Allegretti creation--Mister
Moose and the ping-pong balls. I am often asked what word or signal Mister Moose
engaged to trigger the fall of those spheres. There were many cues, of course,
ranging from knock-knock jokes to rhymes to riddles. I am grateful to Gus for
this wonderful addition to the show, but I am able to write these words today
because of a change made the first time we performed that ritual. The writer had
called for golf balls to fall and I said, 'No!'"16
13 Best Foot Forward; Page 159-160
14 W C Fields: His Follies and Fortunes;
Robert Lewis Taylor, Doubleday & Company, Inc., NY; 1949; Page 254
15 'Bird Divination Among the Tibetans', Sino-Tibetan Studies,
Volume 2; Berthold Laufer; New Delhi; 1987; Page 9
16 Good Morning, Captain: 50 Wonderful Years with Bob Keeshan,
TV's Captain Kangaroo; Robert Keeshan; Fairview Press,
Minneapolis Minnesota; 1996; Page 73
