Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

25. The Propeller Man of Marfa

✥ 25 ✥ The Propeller Man of Marfa We all know that Marfa is a center for the visual arts and that people come from all over the world to see the minimalist installations at the Chinati Foundation. Most of us know that several important films have been shot in Marfa, starting with Giant in 1954. Many people are aware that Marfa is a gliding and sail-plane mecca, and that international sail-plan competitions have been held here. Some folks even remember that in the 1920s Marfa was known all over the West as the source of purebred Highland Hereford cattle. But as far as I can tell, not more than a dozen people know that fifty years ago Marfa was famous in the aviation world for the handmade airplane propellers built here by Ray Hegy. Ray Hegy was a genius, a daredevil, and a fine craftsman, and there is no published biography of him. I have had to piece his story together from scattered newspaper clippings and the memories of the few people left in Marfa who knew him. There were never very many of those, because he was a very private man. I am indebted to Dr. Tom DeKunder of Schertz, Texas, for most of my information about his early life. DeKunder befriended Hegy shortly before Hegy’s death in 2000 and sent me a collection of clippings about his career before he moved to Marfa in the late 1940s. Hegy was born in Wisconsin in 1904, the year after the Wright Brothers made their first flight, and he started out in life as a cabinetmaker . But he got into aviation at the age of twenty-one when he answered an ad for expert cabinetmakers to build wooden air- ✥ 97 plane propellers at the Hamilton Aero Manufacturing Company in Milwaukee. He made laminated wooden props from birch and white pine for both commercial and military aircraft, as well as mahogany props for navy dirigibles. Years later he remembered that the dirigible props had to be hollowed out by hand to reduce their weight, and were then covered with fabric and painted navy gray. Hegy got the flying bug himself in 1928, and quit the propeller factory to become a barnstormer, doing stunt flying at carnivals and circuses all across the country. A clipping from a 1930 Hartford, Wisconsin, newspaper includes a photograph of Hegy and his friend Norman Zunker standing in front of a single-engine monoplane that they had just built; a later clipping describes Hegy parachuting from the wingtip of a plane piloted by his brother “before the gaze of thousands” at a Fourth of July celebration. A third clipping, dated March 3, 1939, identifies Hegy as the pilot of a plane from which “the veteran Negro parachute jumper, Suicide Willie Jones” jumped over Chicago’s Dixie Airport. Jones’s gimmick was that he jumped out of the plane at an altitude of thirtyone thousand feet but did not open his parachute until he had fallen nearly six miles and was one thousand feet above the ground. The next clipping in DeKunder’s file is dated 1944. It shows Hegy in an Army Air Force captain’s uniform while he was making aerial photographs of the Amazon River in Brazil from a Grumman Goose, a twin-engine amphibian. After the war he went to work for a San Antonio aerial mapping service, and that was what brought him to Marfa. “I was here on a mapping job,” he told an interviewer in 1969. “I liked the people, loved the climate, and after comparing it with winters in Wisconsin, I decided to live in Texas.” Hegy married a Marfa schoolteacher and they bought a house on Texas Street. He built the airplane that made him famous—a tiny red biplane that he called the Chuparosa, the humming98 ✥ bird—in a two-room shop behind that house. Hegy drew the plans for the plane in chalk on the wall of his shop in 1950; the plane was not finished until 1959. It was made largely from parts of other planes and was powered by a 65-horsepower Continental engine, with a propeller built by Hegy. The Chuparosa was often described as the world’s smallest airplane. It was just the right size for Hegy, who stood about five foot four inches and weighed one hundred twenty pounds at most. Hegy flew the Chuparosa to the Experimental Aircraft...