I put in a request for a month’s leave and bought tickets for my wife and myself on the Panama-Pacific liner, _Mongolia_, sailing direct for San Diego via the Panama Canal. We sailed from New York where Fred Rentschler, Chance Vought, Guy Vaughan, and many other friends in the aircraft industry saw us off. After a lovely cruise through the Caribbean and the transit of the Canal, we headed north for the West Coast and San Diego, where my wife and I had first set up housekeeping at the Coronado Hotel, while I served my tour of duty in the old Pacific Torpedo Flotilla. It was there we had made our first contact with aviation. When the _Mongolia_ pushed her nose into San Diego harbor that morning late in October of 1927, the bright sun glittered on the white sands of North Island just as it had done some fifteen years earlier when we had last looked upon this pleasant scene. Meanwhile, however, North Island itself had undergone change. Then it had been a flat, brush-covered expanse on which we had hunted jack rabbits; now a latticed airship mooring mast thrust its height above a cleared surface, and white hangars lined the shores of West Beach. The mooring mast, located there as a haven for Admiral Moffett’s rigid airships, lay down near the entrance to the ship channel; the hangars, intended for heavier-than-air craft, faced across the bay to San Diego or across Spanish Bight to Coronado Island’s bungalows and cottages. The ancient Hotel del Coronado, with its white sides and red-pinnacled roofs reminiscent of the lush days of the land-and-railroad boom, still dominated the bright scene. As our ship nosed into the pier on the San Diego side, we could look back at North Island and the Naval Air Station where the experimental carrier _Langley_, alongside her dock, filled the immediate foreground, and the tower of the yellow stucco mission-type Administration Building pierced the blue heavens. Here, less then twenty years earlier, had stood the tent hangars of the pioneer Army and Navy aviation schools, the one operated under the supervision of the Wright Brothers, the other by Glenn Curtiss. Here too had been born the early rivalries that still dominated the aircraft establishment, a pattern of Army versus Navy, and of manufacturer versus manufacturer, that had put the spark in the development of a new art.