At an unknown date, my great grandmother, Mary (Mrs. Howell E.) Jackson visited her half-brother, John Harding II, and found him “alone and ailing.” She brought him home to live with her at West Meade, where he later died. John Harding’s first wife was Sophia Merritt. They had a daughter, Sophia M. His second wife was Margaret A. E. Owen. They had three children — Selene, Wiliam Giles II and John Haridng III. John III, an inventor and engineer, married Roberta Chase.
They lived on General Harding’s Stones River Farm. John and Roberta had two sons, one of whom, John Harding IV, would fly around the world. Roberta became desperate at her husband’s bad behavior and did not want her sons to suffer from his influence so she divorced him and married Col. Robert Gates.
John Harding IV was born June 2, 1896. One day when he was still a child, his mother came home to find that John had completely disassembled her sewing machine and scattered its parts across the floor. John told his mother that he wanted to understand how it worked. She was relieved when he reassembled it.
John Harding IV later graduated from Webb School in Bell Buckle. As a teenager, he loved fast cars and there is a photograph of him seated in a 1902 one-cylinder Cadillac. One summer, John found a job in a garage where he earned enough money to enter VanderbIlt University. When his money ran out, he went to Detroit where he got a job as a road teeter for the Chalmers Motor Car Company. By August 1917, John had enough money to reenter Vanderbilt.
Soon America entered World War One and John immediately left Vanderbilt and entered the U.S. Army as a private in the Army Air Service. The Army did not realize that John, who went by the nickname Jack, was a mechanical genius and gave him a kitchen job for five months. He then went to Kelly Field in San Antonio, where he got in a fight with a cook. The army punished Jack by assigning him a job digging ditches.
Finally, someone realized that Jack could fix almost anything, so they sent him to Aviation Mechanics Training School, where he “shined like a rose.” Harding was promoted to sergeant with a Master Signal Electrician rating. When Harding fixed the engine of a Martin Bomber that no one else could fix, Lieutenant Ernest “Tiny” Harman realized how good a mechanic Sergeant Harding was. A few months later, in 1919, Harman was selected to make a “Round the Rim”flight. Lt. Harman invited Jack to go with him as his mechanic.
They took off from Washington, D.C. and flew to Maine, then straight west across the United States to Puget Sound, down the Pacific coast from the Canadian border to the Mexican border and back to Washington by way of Arizona, New Mexico, the Gulf States,Florida and the Carolinas. This was the first time the United States had ever been circumnavigated, and, since Jack Harding was aboard the plane that Harman piloted, his future was made.
Harding was a handsome man, six feet tall, with dark hair and a charming smile which caused people to call him “Smiling Jack.”
By 1920, the British had tried two around the world flights and crashed both times. France had tried once and also crashed. An Italian around the world flight was lost at the southern tip of Greenland. America decided to try. Those who came to this decision included General Mason Patrick, Chief of the Air Service; General Billy Mitchell, his chief of staff; and lieutenants Eric Nelson, Robert J. Brown Jr., St. Clair Street and C. E. Crumrine.
First, they had to find a plane capable of flying around the World. Lt. Eric Nelson and a new plane designer Donal Douglas put their heads together and came up with a suitable plane, a bi-plane. It was decided to fly from West to East and that there would be four planes: The Seattle, which would be the flagship plane; The Boston; The Chicago and The New Orleans. Lt, Neson would fly The New Orleans with “Smiling Jack” Harding, his navigator.
The four planes left Seattle on April 6, 1924. The journey went well until The Seattle crashed in the mountains of the Alaskan Peninsula, leaving the other three planes to go on. Only two of the four were to land back in Seattle a little more than five months later. New Orleans would be one of them. On the morning of May 15, an historic step in aviation history was made when the three remaining planes flew across the Pacific Ocean. Finally, Japan came into sight and at Tsuchimiya, Japan, “Smiling Jack” first saw a tea house and women in traditional Geisha attire. In Tokyo, the American flyers were wined and dined and treated to a light earthquake.
The month of June saw The Chicago, Boston and New Orleans flying over the China Sea toward Shanghai. Next they flew to Siam, the land of Royal White elephants. From there they flew to Burma which took only one day. There, as at every stop, repairs were made.
While flying over the Indian desert, The New Orleans sprung an oil leak. Eric and Jack, no longer smiling, had to fight to keep the plane in the air until they reached Karachi. They made it, covered in oil. At Bucharest, Romania, the flyers had separate rooms in a downtown hotel. That night, Eric’s room flooded when he turned on the water faucet. He didn’t get much rest that night.
The planes landed in Paris on July 14, Bastille Day. Jack went to the Folies Bergeres that evening but, after 10 hours of flying, was so tired, he fell asleep. Next, in London, Leigh Wade, pilot of The Boston, fell asleep at a dinner party with a General on one side and a Lord on the other.
The New Orleans had a narrow escape on the flight from London to Iceland. Jack and Rick got caught in the propeller wash of another plane and went in a spin and nearly crashed in the ocean. On the same leg, The Boston ‘s oil pump went out and its pilot Lt. Leigh Wade was forced to land in the water. While being towed to Iceland by a cruiser, The Richmond,The Boston capsized. A Boston II was sent to Nova Scotia by General Patrick for Wade and Ogden to pick up and fly the rest of the way with The Chicago and The New Orleans. So three planes flew to Boston over puffs of smoke from warships firing 21 gun salutes.
The three planes flew to Washington, D.C. where President Calvin Coolidge met and shook hands with each flyer. Jack and his fellow pilots were fed and kissed by pretty girls in every stop across America. In San Diego, each pilot was given a silver service. Jack’s mother, Roberta, came down from Los Angeles the night before to greet her son. After stops in Santa Monica and Hollywood the three planes were flown to Seattle, where they landed at 1:28 p.m. on Sept. 28, 1924. These men in three small planes had flown 26,345 miles in a total of 363 hours and seven minutes. Seattle gave them a huge reception and presented each Magellan with a platinum and gold ring from Alaska.
A year later, Jack married Blondena H. Carstens of Davenport, Iowa. In 1925, Jack Hadring, now a lieutenant, and war correspondent and official historian of the Around the World Flight, Lowell Thoma, crisscrossed the country on a lecture tour. They came to Nashville for a week where Harding spoke about his epoch-making adventure. One of the family members he saw was my 19-year-old mother, Miss Elizabeth McClung Buckner.
Even the funny papers got in on the act. A cartoonist used the adventure of “Smiling Jack” Harding to create a funny paper comic series named Smilin’ Jack.
In 1926, Lt. Harding left Lowell Thomas to join with Captain Eddie Rickenbacker to form Florida Airways, flying mail between Jacksonville, Tampa and Miami. When a hurricane wiped out all of their equipment. Harding closed the book on that phase of his life. The Boeing Company of Seattle then grabbed Harding as their field representative. Later in the 1930s, he worked for PESCO in London as their European representative. In 1942, Jack moved to Dallas where his brother, William Giles, lived. They formed a company that produced Harding electric fuel valves that Jack invented. The values were used by B-29 Bombers in World War Two.
Jack Harding died in La Jolla, Calif., on May 26, 1968, at age 72. After his memorial service in La Jolla, Harding’s Air Force pals arranged for an Air Force plane to scatter his ashes over the wide Pacific, one of the oceans above which he made history.