Allan Hancock: The Man Who Funded the Pacific Crossing and Trained Eight Thousand Pilots

G. Allan Hancock was born into the kind of California oil fortune that the late nineteenth century produced, and then did something unusual with it: he became useful to an extent that is almost difficult to catalog. Oilman, sea captain, Arctic explorer, musician, railroad engineer, aviation philanthropist. His family's Rancho La Brea, which he managed, became one of the most productive oil properties in early California. He drilled it methodically, built the company, and then turned his attention to other things.

In nineteen twenty-eight, Hancock financed the Southern Cross, a Fokker trimotor aircraft, for a team of Australian and American aviators led by Charles Kingsford Smith. The Southern Cross lifted off from Oakland on May thirty-first, nineteen twenty-eight, and after refueling stops in Hawaii and Fiji, landed in Brisbane on June ninth, completing the first flight across the Pacific Ocean. The distance was roughly seven thousand five hundred miles. No one had done it before.

Hancock built a private aviation school and airfield in Santa Maria in nineteen twenty-nine. When the United States entered World War Two and General Henry Arnold needed training capacity for the Army Air Corps, he came to Hancock. The school opened for military training and over the course of the war graduated eight thousand five hundred pilots and fifteen hundred aircraft mechanics. The pilots flew in every theater. The mechanics kept the planes running.

In nineteen fifty-four, with the war long over and the school no longer under military contract, Hancock leased the entire campus to Santa Maria Junior College for one dollar per year. The institution that now stands on that land is Allan Hancock College. The community college system of California has an unusual number of origins in gifts like this: the kind of gesture that was, once, a California habit.