Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988) had four stories in Weird Tales from April 1925 to May 1927. Two months after his last story for "The Unique Magazine" was published--at 12 o'clock noon on July 20, 1927, to be exact--Keyhoe took off on an aerial tour of the United States. That tour would take about three months and cover more than 22,000 miles in all. Keyhoe, referred to as Lieutenant Keyhoe for his previous rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, flew in an advance airplane piloted by Philip R. Love (1903-1943). Also on board was mechanic Theodore R. Sorenson. Following along behind them was the most renowned aviator of his day, Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974), piloting the most renowned of aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis. Keyhoe, who had previously been connected with the Byrd Polar Plane Tour of 1926, served as manager of Lindbergh's tour, and he wrote about it in The National Geographic Magazine of January 1928. Over the years, there were tellers of weird tales in the pages of The New Yorker, but could Lieutenant Donald E. Keyhoe, U.S.M.C. (Retired), have been the only one to have written for or had his picture in National Geographic?
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Many years ago, the man who lived upstairs from me walked away from his apartment and left it like the cabin of the Mary Celeste. It remained that way, pretty well undisturbed, for years. Then, last year, he died, and earlier this year his heir came and cleaned out what we wanted--and left the rest. That was over a weekend. On Monday morning, I saw that there were workmen cleaning out the apartment and throwing things into the bed of a pickup truck for delivery to the landfill. I saw a box of books go in the bed, and that was enough for me. I went out to talk to them. They said I could have anything I wanted of what remained in the apartment. I said I would take the books at least. They replied, "There are a lot more of them upstairs." I had to go to work. I asked, if I were to leave boxes and containers for them, would they save the books for me? They said yes. I think they were happy not to take books to the dump.
When I came home that afternoon, the whole front of my house was piled with books and magazines--hundreds of them. Could there have been a thousand or more? Anyway, included in those piles were hundreds of National Geographic magazines going back to 1915. And in those piles within piles was The National Geographic Magazine for January 1928 with a lead story, "Seeing America with Lindbergh," by Donald E. Keyhoe, forty-six pages in all and with dozens of photographs, most of them aerial views of the American landscape. Others are of members of the tour, as well as of spectators and dignitaries they met along the way. One of these photos includes a young Lieutenant Keyhoe, seated in front of Colonel Lindbergh:
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| Donald E. Keyhoe, shown at the bottom right, in The National Geographic Magazine, January 1928, page 11. He had just turned thirty years old when this picture was taken. Charles A. Lindbergh, who sat just behind him, was five years his junior. On Lindbergh's right is Philip Love, pilot of the advance plane. Love was later killed in an airplane crash in Nevada. The others in this picture are not identified, but I believe the woman on the lower left is Lindbergh's mother, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh (1876-1954). The man on the far right may be mechanic Theodore R. Sorenson, who flew with Love and Keyhoe in the advance airplane during their tour. |
Pulp magazines have had a reputation for being a lowly form, made by undistinguished writers or just plain hacks for a simple, working-class, or barely literate readership. One of the reasons I have written about those who wrote letters in "The Eyrie" is to show that the readership of Weird Tales at least came from all walks of life and all levels of society, even from prominent and well-respected men and women. As for the writers, they, too, came from all walks of life. They, too, could be prominent, well-respected, able and active in other fields besides just writing. I have to tell you, it was a thrill for me to discover a writer for Weird Tales in a mainstream magazine of the 1920s. In fact, I would call this extraordinary. And I wonder if there is any equal in the pages of other magazines of that time.
Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
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