Their adventures started after they left Akron. Operating from bases built or leased over the country, they would cover every state east of the Mississippi in a few years. They looked for hard things to do—or unusual things which would interest the public in airships. They landed on the roofs of buildings in Akron and in Washington—though a prudent Department of Commerce would later rule against that; they picked up mail from lines dropped on decks of incoming ships, and from small boats alongside; they fished for sharks and barracuda, hunted for whales; they picked up a bundle of newspapers from the Hearst building downtown, and lowered them to Al Smith on the top deck of the Empire State building; picked up another batch from The Toronto Star offices, delivered them at the Canadian Exposition grounds; they covered boat races, football and baseball games, the International Yacht Races, carrying press photographers, newsreel men and radio announcers; they went to the Mardi Gras, to the Carnival of States, the Cotton Carnival, Expositions at Chicago, Dallas, Cleveland, San Francisco and New York, to county fairs, plowing and corn-husking contests. They covered fires in New York, chased outlaws and reported forest fires in the high Sierras; they made traffic studies in New York and Washington, studies in bird life in Florida; they picked up stranded fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico, took Mr. Litchfield off the after deck of the SS Bremen in New York harbor; they surveyed canal projects; patrolled the Mississippi during flood time to rescue families from raging waters, to report to the engineers where the levees were weakening; they carried food and supplies to a boat ice-bound in Chesapeake Bay; they circled a thousand country school houses, dropped greetings by parachute to hundreds of cities. One of their spectacular feats was the rescue of an airplane crew in Florida in 1933. Two pilots flying to Miami from Tampa for the Air Races had made a forced landing in the Everglades. Searching airplanes located the ship, but it was far from any highway, inaccessible by boat or on foot, the men without food and tormented by mosquitos, and with apparently no way of ever getting out unless a road could be built in to them. But a blimp found it easy, because it alone of all craft could stand virtually still in the air. [Illustration: Few important cities east of the Mississippi have missed seeing a Goodyear blimp by now, not to speak of those in the Southwest, the Pacific coast. Trips have been made also to Cuba, Canada and Mexico. More than 400,000 passengers have been carried, without even the scratch of a finger.] SUMMARY TOTALS UP TO JANUARY 1, 1942 FLIGHTS 151,810 HOURS 92,966 PASSENGERS 405,526 MILES 4,183,470