Richard Halliburton: A 36-Cent Panama Canal Swim and the Lost Sea Dragon

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Richard Halliburton was born in Tennessee in 1900 and raised mostly in Memphis. A rapid heartbeat condition around 1915 confined him to bed and sent him to John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium, and in 1917 his athletic younger brother Wesley died suddenly, likely of rheumatic fever. Rejecting his father's plea for an even tenor of life, Halliburton vowed never to die quietly in bed. In 1922 he trailed the bridal procession of China's last emperor into the Forbidden City, launching a career in syndicated columns and lectures. He rode an elephant rented from a Paris zoo over the Alps in Hannibal's footsteps, lived as a castaway on Tobago in goatskins, and in August 1928 swam the Panama Canal with a rifleman watching for alligators, paying a toll of 36 cents.

In 1930 he and pilot Moye Stephens flew an open-cockpit biplane called the Flying Carpet 33,000 miles through 34 countries over 18 months. Privately, Halliburton shared his life with men, including writer Paul Mooney, at Hangover House, built on a cliff 400 feet above the Pacific at Laguna Beach. In March 1939 he sailed from Hong Kong for San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition aboard the Sea Dragon, a Chinese junk refitted with a diesel engine, a high poop deck and 10 tons of concrete ballast. About 1,200 miles west of Midway it met a typhoon and vanished without a trace.

• He stood up in the open cockpit to take the first aerial photograph of Mount Everest.
• In Borneo the Ranee of Sarawak became the first woman in that country to fly.
• A grateful headhunter chief gave them over 100 pounds of shrunken heads, which they dumped over the jungle.
• A 1935 French police report noted surveillance of him in Paris.
• His last radio message to the liner President Coolidge read: having a wonderful time, wish you were here instead of me.