Las Vegas man played key role in saving Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose

Bob McCaffery had an outsized role in helping to preserve a piece of Howard Hughes’ legacy.

Somewhere between directing movies and becoming an eccentric recluse hiding out in Las Vegas, Hughes built a behemoth wooden aircraft with a wingspan nearly as long as a football field.

Skeptics doubted it would ever get off the ground, but Hughes manned the cockpit as the Spruce Goose was airborne for one glorious minute, flying roughly 70 feet above the Long Beach harbor in Southern California on Nov. 2, 1947.

The short hop proved that the Spruce Goose could fly, but it never saw mass production as a military transport plane as the billionaire aviator intended.

Now living in Las Vegas, McCaffery insisted the plane’s one and only flight 70 years ago plays a significant role in aeronautical history.

“It’s an example of ingenuity,” said McCaffery, who oversaw efforts to preserve the plane in 1980 during his stint as chairman of the Committee to Save the Howard Hughes Flying Boat.

“It’s the biggest airplane of its kind built from wood due to a wartime restriction on using metal,” the 78-year-old McCaffery said. “Howard Hughes put his money and his reputation on the line for this plane.”

Dubbed by Hughes as the H-4 Hercules, the experimental plane was built under a $27 million contract with the U.S. War Department as a way to haul 750 soldiers or one Sherman tank to overseas war zones.

Even though World War II ended in 1945, Hughes put up $9 million of his own money to continue building the plane. After its sole flight, the Spruce Goose remained hidden for 33 years within a climate-controlled hangar at the Port of Long Beach.

McCaffery and other preservationists were concerned when rumors circulated that the Smithsonian Institution, which gained partial ownership of the plane, wanted to cut out several parts for various museum displays. The rest of the Spruce Goose, McCaffery said, would be scrapped.

“You don’t cut up the Mona Lisa, so why would you do that here?” McCaffery said. “It didn’t make sense. It’s a piece of American history, and they cannot destroy it.”

After a very public campaign led by McCaffery, the Southern California Aero Club acquired the Spruce Goose in 1980. The plane was leased to the Wrather Corp., which built a white geodesic dome, roughly 400 feet in diameter, next to the decommissioned luxury liner Queen Mary in Long Beach.

The Walt Disney Co. purchased the Spruce Goose and Queen Mary in 1988, and wanted to get rid of the plane to make way for a theme park that was never built.

McCaffery said he led a bid to display the Spruce Goose where the Bali Hai golf course now stands. Instead, Hughes’ flying boat was disassembled and placed on a barge in 1993 and then moved to its current home at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

“It’s an honor to be a steward of such a significant piece of aviation history,” said Terry Juran, curator of the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum. “It’s our anchor exhibit, drawing visitors from all around the world just to see it.”

McCaffery said he continues to believe it was “a big mistake” to haul the Spruce Goose to Oregon rather than Las Vegas, but he takes some comfort in knowing that he helped to preserve the plane.

Photos and a plastic model of the Spruce Goose adorn McCaffery’s apartment within a senior citizen complex on the east end of the valley. Plates, mugs, posters and other keepsakes stand among family photos of his seven children and 21 grandchildren.

The prized possession within his Spruce Goose collection: the signatures of crew members who were alive in 1984, scribbled on a piece of birch — the same type of wood used to build the plane.

“Howard Hughes was driven to prove himself as an aviator,” McCaffery said. “It came at the risk of killing everyone on board, but he had some luck on his side too.”

Contact Art Marroquin at amarroquin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0336. Follow @AMarroquin_LV on Twitter.