As noted in yesterday’s “Boxer Uprising” post featuring Mickey Hahn, Hugh Woods, and Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway spent time with CNAC in late 1940 and early 1941, and he was so impressed with what the airline accomplished that he gave the CNAC pilots a plug in his posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream, pp. 289, when the book’s main character, Thomas Hudson, is musing about the time he’d spent in Asia with “Hong Kong millionaires,” including “about six pilots for the Chinese National Aviation Company [sic], who were making fabulous money and earning all of it and more.”
I couldn’t fit the Hemingway anecdotes into China’s Wings, but it’s great to know that Ernest Hemingway admired the CNAC pilots as much as I do. My best guess as to the six pilots Hemingway was referring to is Hugh Woods, Chuck Sharp, Hal Sweet, Bob Pottschmidt, Billy MacDonald, and Frank Higgs.
And here’s “All Right, Mickey, but why a Limey?”
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