My grandfather was quite a man, whom I adored and admired for his courage and love of life. I have never met anyone who so truly embraced life and all its experiences. Not much interfered with his appetite for adventure. Living on different coasts, we did not see each other often, but when we did he completely charmed me. My first memory of him was of his visit to New York. As I watched him hobble down the airfield toward us, it was love at first sight. Here was my hero, of whom I had heard so much. I remember sitting on his lap and him calling me “princess.” If I was his princess, then he was my prince. When I was born, he changed the celebration of his birthday to mine.
My family and all who loved him called my grandfather Cap. Growing up, I heard many wonderful family stories about him, and I had the pleasure of living with my grandparents for a short time in 1962 when I first came to California. Of my many memories, these are but a few:
Cap spoke of the devastation of World War I and his experiences in the war. I remember him telling, with sadness, of returning to the officers’ mess after a day’s sorties to find it nearly empty of the familiar faces that had been there in the morning, with new men filing in to replace the missing. Many of those absent faces belonged to dear friends who would never return. When he began flying for the Royal Flying Corps, most of his comrades were in their early twenties. Before he left the front, the British were bringing in boys in their teens. I’ve read that, at the time when Cap logged his three hundred fifty combat hours, the average lifespan of a flier was about ten hours. The young men putting their lives on the line had to be truly courageous.
I remember Cap’s immense respect for the British. He spoke of World War I as a war of honor, one that was very personal, as the combatants in the air seemed to know many of their enemy intimately and held some in great respect. Cap recounted how, when the German ace Oswald Boelcke was shot down, pilots from the RFC flew over enemy lines and, to honor him, dropped a wreath over his home squadron.
Back in the United States and out of the air service, my grandfather met my grandmother, Caroline Von Stein, whom he called Peg. Cap was such a romantic that I wouldn’t be surprised if he nicknamed her Peg after the song “Peg o’ My Heart.” Yes, she was of German heritage. They met in a train station. At the time, she was on her way to Chicago to marry a famous cardiac surgeon whom she had met while in the Red Cross. But once Peg and Cap crossed paths, prior plans went awry. Three weeks later they were married, a union that lasted, with mutual adoration, until their deaths. This was in the Gay Twenties, and Peg was no stranger to gaiety. Granddad had given her a thousand dollars to buy herself an engagement ring. She spent sixty dollars on the ring and the remainder she spent on their engagement party.
To me, they seemed destined to marry each other. Caroline was born in El Paso, Texas, to a well-to-do family. At sixteen she wed an American who owned a ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico. While living there she had many encounters with the notorious bandit and revolutionary Pancho Villa, who would occasionally stop by their ranch to borrow livestock and supplies. Of course, no replacement or return was ever expected. After her divorce from her first husband she returned to the States, and during World War I she was active in the American Red Cross. Before meeting Granddad, she adopted her brother’s two daughters, her nieces Madeline and Merle, whose mother had died of influenza during the infamous “Spanish flu” epidemic that was responsible both for my grandmother joining the Red Cross and for the overflow of patients in the army hospitals in Texas. Madeline was my mother.
Two years after their marriage, Peg confessed to Fred that she had failed to mention her two adopted girls, aged twelve and ten, who were living in a convent in Texas. Though astonished, my grandfather declared without hesitation, “Well, what the hell are they doing in a convent? Bring them here!” From then on, Madeline and Merle lived with Peg and Granddad.
My mother told me how my grandfather would soak in a bathtub of iodine to relieve the pain from his war injuries. Those injuries, combined with a crippling arthritis, made my grandfather’s spine fuse and left him hunched over. He was not yet thirty years old when his doctors predicted he wouldn’t live past forty, owing to the compression of his lungs and other internal organs. However, not for one minute did this stop Captain Libby in his pursuit of life.
My mother had stories of an alternative use for that bathtub when Cap was not soaking in it, which was to brew gin and beer. My grandparents would store the contraband in the basement. One time someone had not properly corked the beer and, on a very hot summer day, one bottle after another exploded, flooding the basement and giving the house the odor of a speakeasy. Doubtless this memory was all the stronger for my mother because she and her sister were responsible for cleaning up the mess.
Curiously, I never saw my granddad drive a car and never heard of him owning one. He went everywhere in a taxicab. For years he would rely on the same driver, who would come at his every call. Whether his spinal injuries played a part in this my parents couldn’t say, but to their knowledge Cap had never driven a car, much less a truck, since the war. As for me, I wonder whether this was a delayed reaction to his first driving experience, the Canadian adventure with the Ford and the pillars, or whether he just decided that breaking horses and flying planes were less risky than driving a car.
Following the war, Cap worked in the oil industry as a wildcatter. Oil, as you may recall, was what brought him into the war in the first place. Afterward, he still wanted to be a millionaire. He became well known as an oil engineer and traveled the world consulting for companies, including Richfield and Union Oil, and prospectors desirous of tapping his knowledge and ability to locate oil. He founded the Eastern Oil Company and struck it rich with his own wells. He made his millions, but retire young he did not. He founded Western Air Express, which began as a cargo airline and became a commercial carrier. It was later sold to Western Airlines. Later in his life he drilled wells in Playa del Rey, near the Hughes Aircraft Company, and lost everything. As it turned out, the oil was there, but deeper than his capital could take his drill. He spent the remainder of his life writing his memoirs, short stories, and screenplays and endeavoring to set up another wildcat oil operation. He was completing the editing of his memoirs when he passed away
When he was sixty-five, to his delight, the Air Force presented him with the honor of flying in a supersonic jet with a top test pilot in celebration of their fiftieth anniversary. The pilot, Captain Ivan Kincheloe, turned over the controls to granddad while in flight and Cap flew his first jet. Captain Kinchelow had flown 101 combat missions in Korea and set the world’s altitude record in the X2, the forerunner of the X15. Kincheloe, who was thirty at the time, had just been selected to fly into outer space the following year, but unfortunately, before he could accomplish that feat, he was killed soon after takeoff on a test run at Edwards Air Force Base.
My grandfather died on January 9, 1970, at the ripe old age of 78. Despite the prognostications of doctors, he lived a long and active life that spanned aeronautical history from what he humorously calls in his memoir the jet-propelled flight of an antelope to the age of jet planes and space travel. This cowboy turned World War I ace lived to witness the American landing on the moon. My grandfather was a romantic and a character. He stepped into the living of life with little forethought other than to enjoy and test the adventure of it, much the way he roped that antelope as a young boy. But true to his cowboy heritage, where a man’s word and handshake were all there was and his honor was never to be forfeit, he lived with the consequences of his actions honorably and most admirably.
Sally Ann Marsh