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What Winsie Atkins stood for was clearly expressed. Though Winsie was Alger-rich, he was more in the mold of heroes created by Howard Garis for Edward Stratemeyer’s Tom Swift series. Winsie was at home with the technology of the day. Like Tom Swift, he loved inventions and machines; consequently, Winsie was the bellboy or “button boy” on the clipper. He held the transcontinental flying record for juniors and had his own radio on board. But unlike Tom Swift, who created five or six inventions per story, Winsie lived in an age when most of the inventing already had been done. The heoic job skills required were now those of controlling the technology already in existence rather than creating new machines. This was particularly true of the clipper, seen as the pinnacle of aviation advancement.
Flying the Sky Clipper incorporated other popular trends in children’s literature. It was not only an adventure-travel story, but also a frontier story harkening back to literature preceding the Dime Novel. The clipper opened up a new West, but this time the West was so far west that it became the Far Eat—a land of limitless expanse, strange cultures and people, and a lace where morals and courage could be tested. The clipper stories often showed much in common with the nineteenth century work of William Taylor Adams, author and editor of several children’s magazines. As in Adams’ stories that featured “the ship as education,” the clipper became a learning exercise for children. After all, the China Clipper was not just an airplane. It was a flying boat, a ship of the sky and water. Its captains and disciplined “crew” wore naval uniforms, a tradition that continues today on nearly all airliners. Not only did young readers learn of the Pacific, particular attention was paid to showing “science.” Illustrations, for example, show how sextant readings were taken. Why mohair makes good soundproofing material and why clocks are reset at the International Dateline are explained.
In the face of what could be intimidating science and technology for youth, most clipper fiction used buffer characters with which children could identify. As Roger Rawlings pointed out in The Last Airmen, it was difficult for children to identify with pure, superhero paragons (57). So just as Batman needed a Robin, Superman needed a faulted Clark Kent, Captain Midnight needed an Ichabod, Sky King needed a nephew named Clipper, and Captain Video needed the teenaged Ranger, the clipper needed youth character intermediaries between its hi-tech silver immensity and the reader. Winsie served as one such buffer.
Just as the cover of Flying the Sky Clipper with Winsie Atkins featured the China Clipper soaring through the sky, the cover of Wings of the U.S.A. took the clipper image a step farther, combining an image of a B-314 clipper with an American eagle clutching American flags. Though this 1941 Better Little Book largely described young Bob Clexton’s experiences flying various aircraft while undergoing U.S. Navy flight training at Pensacola, a source of Pan Am clipper pilots, his career goal was not to be a military pilot but to fly the clippers for “Trans-Atlantic Airways,” or, in other words, Pan Am. Clearly, clippers were seen as being the top aircraft in the world, and U.S. pilots were extolled as being the best because “The United States gives her students the finest and most complete training in the world” (419). The book waved the flag of American commercial enterprise, but it was an enterprise that existed on the even of war with the undergirdings of military training. Villains were not gangsters or mysterious gangs, but rather pilots who washed out, selfish young men who thought only of themselves or tried to sabotage others. As the nation stood on the brink of war, the commitment of the individual to teamwork was now more important than derring-do, monetary success, or Alger’s pluck and luck. Skill was what counted in mastering both personal excess and control of the machine; therefore, our hero was a Mid-American “ordinary boy” without money to continue his education. Military training at the local Naval Reserve Station was the answer, a far cry from Winsie Atkins and Jane Sprague in Manila.
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