Stanley Washburn, 96, Pilot, Adventurer, Author

Stanley Washburn, who died on September 11 at 96, was an aviator and blimp pioneer, an adventurer-turned p.r. man, and author whose accounts of wartime high-jinks graced the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and various servicemen’s publications.He also was the inventor of the Bongo Board, a ski-training device he based on a toy he observed during a World War II posting in Gold Coast Africa.Washburn’s father, also named Stanley, was one of the leading foreign correspondents in Russia, starting with the Russo-Japanese War and extending through World War I, which he covered for the Times of London. Commissioned a major, he was said to be the only American with access to the Russian front. After being invalided out late in the war with injuries and shell shock, he spent the remainder of his career with the State Department.Washburn’s mother was Alice Langhorn, a member of a prominent Virginia family. Her cousin became Lady Astor, the first woman ever to serve in the British House of Commons. The connection proved invaluable to Washburn in 1926, when he turned up on her London doorstep, penniless and without luggage, after a transatlantic voyage aboard a steamship. He paid for his passage by working as a cable greaser. He later returned to America and attended Yale.Washburn learned to fly after college in the Navy Reserve, and then moved in with his parents in Lakewood, N.J., while casting around for a job during the Depression. A stint as a vacuum cleaner salesman was not a success.Lakewood was near the naval airship training grounds in Lakehurst. Lacking gainful employment, as he wrote in his memoir, “Facts, Fables, and Frenzy on Land, Sea, and Air,” Washburn and a friend launched the American Airship Company to display advertising on blimps. Despite some recent catastrophes, many still viewed blimps as the next big thing in aviation technology.With designs from veteran zeppelin pilot Anton Heinen and an advertising contract from Noxzema – blimp-borne advertising aimed at sunbathers seemed perfect for sunburn remedies – Washburn began his blimp works at an abandoned dance hall near Lakehurst in 1936. An initial 120-foot model proved successful enough to fly, with Washburn as co-pilot, all the way to the Miami Air Races of 1937. Sadly, the venture had to be abandoned after the spectacular immolation of the Hindenberg, which Washburn happened to witness from the ground. His dreams of blimp barony burned up with the German fixed-frame airship.During World War II, Washburn was a pilot with the cargo-carrying Air Transport Command, ferrying supplies between West Africa and India. His experiences, written with period-appropriate devil-may-care bonhomie, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, and other wartime publications.The Bongo Board, akin to a skateboard on a rolling pin, was born of a children’s toy he saw being used in Takoradi, Ghana, during the war. In 1952, he built one as a Christmas present for his daughter Nina. (It was a consolation present, really; she had asked for a shrunken head.) On a family ski trip to Lake Placid that winter, the Bongo Board proved useful as a ski trainer. Eventually, they became popular, and Washburn set up a company to produce them commercially.After the war, Washburn became promotions director for Pan Am World Airways, a kind of public relations job that involved flying around the world to publicize glamorous destinations. He published promotional books on ski resorts and educational opportunities at Pan Am destinations, and marshaled armies of beautiful stewardesses for trade shows – it was an era when airlines could still promote themselves thus.Pan Am’s multiethnic stewardesses had to be taught to give emergency instructions with naturally inflected English. Washburn ended up marrying the airline’s vocal coach, a speech therapist, who obtained a pilot’s license so she could co-pilot his single-engine plane, the Coupon Clipper.Summers they flew to Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, where Washburn’s mother bequeathed to them a former whaling captain’s house. Washburn also had a small summer home on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands.In recent years, he had become interested in animal ecology and spent a memorable safari in Uganda viewing mountain gorillas.Stanley Washburn Jr.Born October 6, 1908, in Minneapolis, Minn.; died September 11 in New York; survived by his wife, AnnaBell nee Leinbach, children Nancy and Brodie, four grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Stanley Washburn, 96, Pilot, Adventurer, Author

More from the New York Sun

Pam Bondi Plows Past ‘Paperwork Mistake’ To Revive Criminal Prosecutions Against Letitia James and James Comey

How Margot Robbie Made Girlboss Cinema a Brand

Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Cutting Funds to California for Not Disclosing Students’ Gender Transitions to Parents

More from the New York Sun

Pam Bondi Plows Past ‘Paperwork Mistake’ To Revive Criminal Prosecutions Against Letitia James and James Comey

How Margot Robbie Made Girlboss Cinema a Brand

Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Cutting Funds to California for Not Disclosing Students’ Gender Transitions to Parents

‘Wuthering Heights’ Is a Mad, Bad, and Sexy Romp That Makes Brontë ‘Brat’

Pro-Hamas Activist Provokes Outrage — by Insisting Dogs Should Be Homeless

The Democrats Beyond the Water’s Edge

Student Sues University of Michigan, Claiming It Mistook Her Anxiety-Ridden Writing Style for AI

Bipartisan Group in Congress Warns of ‘Serious Safety Risk’ From Illegal Biolabs