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hailstones. Sherman’s war did not have a thing on our peace.” Still in the North Atlantic on May 16, 1919, Kyle noted,
“At 10:30 P.M. picked up a broadcast radio message saying planes started for the Azores at 10:19 P.M. They are due to pass over us at 11 A.M. tomorrow.” The events that followed kept the crew on edge into the early hours of May 18: “We could hear planes talking to each station passed. The NC 4 is in the lead followed by NC 1 and NC 3.... NC 1 said she was lost in the fog and had come down in the water. A few minutes later we got her SOS saying she was sinking...much to our joy, we got a radio flash on Sunday morning saying she had been found and all hands were safe. NC 4 landed at Horta.”
The U.S. Navy Curtiss Flying Boat NC-4 successfully landed first at Horta in the Azores and then made it to Por- tugal, flying 4,526 statute miles from Rockaway, New York, to Plymouth, England, in fifty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes. While not a non-stop flight, this was the first trans- Atlantic flight. Charles Lindbergh’s non-stop solo flight that received international acclaim did not occur until May 1927, eight years later.
On the evening of November 29, 1919, Kyle and two colleagues created a stir that was noted in official government records but not with the accolades his later accomplishments would receive. In the time-honored tradition of young of- ficers on leave in San Diego, California, Kyle and two col- leagues drove across the border to Tijuana, Mexico. At eleven o’clock that evening, FBI agent W. A. Weymouth received a telephone call from a deputy sheriff twelve miles outside San Diego. The deputy reported three very intoxicated men in a Regal Roadster had blocked the road with a disabled vehicle and were trying to stop passing cars in order to be towed back to San Diego.
As cars passed by refusing to tow them, the driver blocked the highway with the Roadster and one of the men cut the tires of the unwilling motorists. The FBI agent fully docu- mented the condition of the men, the fact that they were
out of uniform, and that the ringleader, who was not Roland Kyle, had been very surly. This Navy lieutenant, junior grade, told the agent that he was on official duty as an intelligence
Position of the USS Dent and other ships along the NC’s flight path.
"Kylemore”: The home at 3809 Peakland Place was built by James and Alice Kyle in 1923, continuing Lynchburg’s love of Georgian Revival architecture.
ALICE AUNSPAUGH KYLE was the mother of Ro- land and his two brothers, Holmes and Gordon. She served as president of The Woman’s Club of Virginia and founded the Virginia Federation of Woman’s Clubs. The house on Peakland, now owned by Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Nexsen, is graced with a plaque that rec- ognizes Alice and her work with the woman’s clubs.
The Kyle home at 3809 Peakland Place (first known as Catalpa Drive) was one of the first houses built in Peakland. Named for the view of the Peaks of Otter, Peakland was an extension of the planned suburb of Rivermont and the street and streetcar tracks were built in 1913. “Kylemore,” as the home was known during the years the family resided there (1923-1959), was designed by the architectural firm of Clark and Crowe, Inc. Pendleton Clark and Walter Crowe worked together from 1921 to 1936 and designed Lynchburg homes as well as working for a number of educational insti- tutions including Sweet Briar, Lynchburg, and Mary Baldwin colleges, and Washington and Lee University.
When Lea and Mary Morris Booth bought the home on Peakland from the Kyles in 1959, this trunk was found in the basement. The trunk was donated to the Lynchburg Museum in 2007.
FALL/WINTER 2009 