PORTLAND HARBOR, MULTNOMAH COUNTY; 1920s, 1930s:
Victor Strode: Oregon’s own real-life Tom Swift
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“It was a thrilling experience for those watching to see the little 17-foot racer in its trial performance lift above the water surface at about 45 miles an hour to ride on its cushion of air,” Ruth Strode wrote, in her brief biography of her husband’s life and work. “It was airborne! An (airplane-style) rudder mounted aft on the craft was then used in auxiliary to the water rudder. It served the dual purpose of vertical fin and directional control with the boat at high speed.” Even with just 55 horsepower, the little racer was overpowered, she added. “Opened to only part of full throttle,” she wrote, “it could attain speeds of up to 70 miles per hour.” Strode’s boat was a sensation, and for a few months everyone was talking about it. It was featured at Portland’s 1933 automobile show. The boat, trailered up to Portland and launched in Lake Oswego, got even more attention from the rich and famous there. A Pathe Newsreel crew showed up and did a newsreel story about it to play in movie theaters nationwide. And, best of all, Popular Science magazine featured the boat on its front cover in March 1933. “It behaves like an ordinary craft until it attains a speed of 45 miles per hour,” the PopSci article notes. “At this velocity, which corresponds to the taking-off speed of an airplane, an abrupt change occurs. The pilot can feel the boat rise from the water as the fins take hold on the air. Only the propeller beneath the hull remains in the water where its full thrust is effective.” Fresh from this success, the following year Strode applied for and got funding from the federal government’s Depression-era State Emergency Relief Agency jobs program to build a bigger version of the Aerohydrocraft — a high-speed ambulance boat for the Portland harbor. And a year and a half later, the boat was there, finished, ready to launch. It was to be christened the Jack Luihn, after a popular civic leader. Compared with the little prototype racer, the Jack Luihn was a hulking monster. It was 24 feet long, and powered with a flathead Ford V-8 engine. Most likely the craft was underpowered, because according to Ruth Strode’s biography, it topped out at 45 miles per hour — a lot by boat standards, but considerably less than the smaller single-seat prototype could do. In the fuselage, there was a tight cockpit with seating for two people; behind them, there was an ambulance bay, with accommodations for two patients on stretchers. From looking at photographs of the launch, it appears the ambulance bay was open-air, like the back of a pickup truck. And on that spring day, at the foot of Stark Street where a few dozen years earlier the ferry used to land, a group of city notables was there to launch what they surely believed was the future of high-speed motorboating. There had been plenty of coverage of the event in the Portland Morning Oregonian and Portland Journal, so a crowd of locals had come down to watch as well. It was a proud moment for inventor Victor Strode. His wife and biographer, Ruth Hopkins Strode (a staff writer for the Portland Journal) christened the new service boat with a bottle of champagne, and the futuristic speedboat motored away across the river as waterfront factories celebrated and welcomed the new boat with whistle blasts. So — was the Jack Luihn a success? The answer seems to be a pretty firm “no.” However, its failure must have involved some embarrassing details, because there is simply nothing more about it in the Oregonian — until six months later, in January 1937, when a “year in review” article mentions that it was “noisily christened and then quietly retired from public view.” Just seven days later, a three-inch-long article buried deep on Page 11 announced that the City Council had voted to officially release any interest in it. “For some time the boat has been out of service,” the article read, “but it was said the boat might be salvaged if title were transferred to Mr. Strode.” The obvious implication is that this larger version of the aerohydrocraft design suffered from some sort of design flaw that would require more than just repairs and reinforcement. It would have to go back to the drawing board entirely, so that the inventor could invent a solution. But I was unable to find more details about what happened. The Oregon Historical Society has the Victor Strode papers, but they’re from Ruth, who was Victor’s number-one fan and not about to air any of his dirty laundry. All she mentions is that it was washed away and wrecked in the flood of 1948, many years later and after Victor’s death. But at least one educated guess can be made, based on the laws of physics, as to why the aerohydrocraft didn’t work out for Portland. At speed, this boat would be essentially skipping across the surface of the water like a skipping stone, half-hovering in the air, with the propeller shaft dropping down into the drink. Throw the rudder over to make a hard left turn, and what’s to prevent the centrifugal force of the turn from tipping the boat over until the outboard “wingtip” touches the water doing 60 mph? What would happen then? A jolt? A terrifying cartwheel crash? It’s hard to say. In the smaller racer, with less mass over the water, the airplane-style rudder was apparently effective enough to prevent this. Maybe — probably — with a larger, heavier boat, it wasn’t. Or, maybe it was something as simple as the ride quality. Anyone who’s ever been in a flat-bottomed boat planing across even slightly choppy water knows it’s a rough enough ride to knock fillings loose. That might not be acceptable in an ambulance boat. In any case, the Aerohydrocraft disappeared from the world of boat types almost as quickly as it vanished from the Portland waterfront. Today, few powerboat aficionados have even heard of them — or of the time Portland took a chance on the cutting edge of naval architecture.
Unfortunately, the war ended before that happened. The prototype worked beautifully — apparently Strode fixed whatever it was that ailed the Jack Luihn — but the War Department never placed the promised order, and that was that. Victor Strode wouldn’t live to see it, though. He died in the late spring of 1944 at the age of 51.
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