Sep. 24—In our post-9/11, pour-out-your-water-bottle-before-you-reach-TSA world, this feels impossible: a 12-year-old boy slips unnoticed onto a major airline, curls up among pillows and wakes up half a country away.
But that’s precisely what happened in early April 1940, when a Washington state boy ended his joyride in Fargo, with the police and quite a story to tell.
I spotted the tale on the
Fargo Police Department’s Facebook page.
As the department marks its 150th year, it’s sharing “remarkable, unusual and groundbreaking moments” from its past.
This one is both remarkable and oddly sweet.
Some readers asked what became of the boy, Gordon Mullen. I wondered, too. So I took my own trip through the archives.
It all began on Monday, April 1, when Gordon left his home in Renton, a suburb of Seattle.
“My stepfather is a sheet metal worker in the Boeing airplane plant in Seattle, where they are making those war bombers,” Gordon later told The Forum.
He decided to go to Boeing Field and sleep in a plane in a hangar.
He stayed at the hangar all day Tuesday, then decided to board a plane to run away from his preteen troubles.
“I climbed through the baggage compartment door of a ship standing on the field. Then I got on top of a shelf where they keep pillows and fastened the canvas down over me,” he said.
The plane took off.
Somewhere east of Billings, Montana, flight attendant Eunice Otsea discovered the boy in the compartment among the pillows and blankets.
“They took me to the front of the plane, gave me a good seat, some cornflakes, pineapple and milk, and wrapped me in a blanket,” Mullen told The Forum in 1940.
The Northwest Airlines plane was Chicago-bound, but the crew elected to have the boy deplane in Fargo on Wednesday morning, where police met him.
Sgt. Walter Olson served him toast and milk as he “rubbed his sleepy eyes,” while Police Chief Charles W. Albright tried to reach Gordon’s mother, Nellie, and stepfather, Clarence, who were no doubt worried since Gordon had been gone for nearly 48 hours.
Gordon said he’d left school three weeks earlier because of “some trouble.” He didn’t elaborate.
It wasn’t his first plane ride, he added, but it was his longest and most exciting.
His mother had married a month earlier; his stepfather formerly lived in Williston, North Dakota.
Airline officials said Gordon was well known at Boeing Field. Had he been a stranger, they noted, he wouldn’t have made it past guards and onto Northwest planes.
By Wednesday evening, he was headed west again, boarding a Fargo-to-Seattle flight and arriving home early Thursday. At the sight of his mother, he burst into tears.
“I’m a nervous wreck from worry,” he said.
The newspaper archives tell us, this wasn’t his last brush with North Dakota — or at least a North Dakotan. By December, Mullen and his family had moved to Juneau, Alaska.
During a geography lesson, Gordon asked his teacher, Margaret Maland, “Have you ever been to Fargo, North Dakota?”
Maland smiled. She knew the city well: she’d attended Moorhead State Teachers College and worked at the Moorhead Daily News and The Dickinson Press before taking a job in Alaska.
“I was there once,” Gordon told his teacher proudly.
Maland got such a kick out of it that she shared her story with The Forum later.
By high school, Gordon was back in Washington, attending Lincoln High, where he threw himself into theater — perhaps drawing on the same dramatic flair that once led him to stow away on an airplane.
He graduated in 1942, just as the world was at war. Like many of his classmates, he enlisted and went on to serve in both World War II and the Korean War, rising to the rank of staff sergeant in the U.S. Air Force. (This time, no need to sneak aboard Uncle Sam’s planes.)
(Sidenote: another search record showed “Gordon Mullen” was injured parachuting from a plane in 1962 — a story that would have perfectly fit the arc of our high-flying stowaway. Alas, the records make it pretty certain it was a different man. Bummer. But it’s fine. Our Gordon Mullen’s story hardly needs embellishment.)
In the 1950s and ’60s, Gordon seemed to settle down. He married, later divorced and worked various jobs, including at Montgomery Ward.
He died in 1975 at age 48 — a short life, but not one without adventure.
Congratulations to the Fargo Police Department on 150 years. Keep the history stories coming; I’m always game to dig through the archives with you.