He paid for the instruction with money he’d earned driving a hearse for the local undertaker during the great influenza epidemic of 1919. On his sixteenth birthday, Mantz took his first flying lesson. After Beachey rolled his ship over and was descending from 6,000 feet, to do his trademark “Dive of Death,” with which he closed his shows, a wing snapped, and Beachey plunged in the Bay.Īlthough his death had shocked the young Mantz, his enthusiasm for the sky returned while watching another pilot perform at night, shooting Roman candles off from the cockpit of a Jenny. On a windy March day, he waited to see Lincoln Beachey make his first public flight in a new yellow-and-silver monoplane, a Curtiss pusher called the Lincoln Beachey Special. His mother went back to teaching school for a living, and Mantz began taking odd jobs to help. In 1918, his father died of a heart attack. However, when his mother spotted him, and shouted for him to come down and deliver his papers, his “solo” had to be postponed. In 1914, when he was 11, he fashioned a pair of canvas wings that he hoped would help him to fly-from his tree house.
9, 1903, in Alameda, Calif., but grew up in Redwood City. It wasn’t easy for Paul Mantz to become a Hollywood stunt pilot, but when he did, he quickly mastered the craft.īorn Albert Paul Mantz on Aug.
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