By Sue Bergstrom for Valdez City News –
Robert Campbell Reeve is best known as the founder of Reeve Aleutian Airways. He began his Alaska career flying out of Valdez in 1932. Before leaving Valdez in 1938, Reeve made over 2,000 glacier landings, hauling over one million pounds of freight. His technique of flying off the Valdez mud flats with skis allowed him to service his mining clients year round. It was famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle who gave him his lifelong title of ‘Glacier Pilot’.
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Reeve heard about Alaska as a child from both a Klondike prospector and a mining engineer from the Kennecott mine. He dreamed for years of going north. But Bob Reeve had lots of adventures before he moved to Alaska. He joined the Army at the age of fifteen and served throughout World War I. He had dropped out of high school to join the army and tried to go back after the war, but he soon quit and sailed to Shanghai as a common seaman, finding work in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service on the Yangtze and Taku rivers. He ended up, somehow, working in Vladivostok before going home to Wisconsin in 1921. It took him six months to finish his high school requirements. Then he entered the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1922 at the age of 23. But his interest in flying was strong and by 1926 he was training as a pilot. He spent some time in the Army Air Corp. He flew a mail route in South America and flew the first Ford into Lima Peru for Ford Motors. But Alaska still beckoned, so he decided it was time and stowed away aboard a steamship. He arrived in Alaska with two dollars in his pocket.
In Valdez he discovered that Owen Meals had a wrecked Eaglerock biplane that had been a spare for Sir Hubert Wilkins when he flew over the North Pole. He worked for Meals at one dollar per hour to repair it then leased it from him for ten dollars an hour and his flying career in Alaska was begun. When he flew it over Valdez Glacier for the first time Reeve is often quoted as saying, “And I thought the Andes were tough.” Some sources say his first paid charter flight turned out to be two shady ladies who paid him $500 to fly them to Nome. But that may have meant his first profitable flight. Because others say his very first was to Middleton Island, where his plane’s wheels sank into the sand on landing and he had to use a block and tackle to get it out before the tide came in. He was grounded by a storm in Seward on the return leg and by the time he got back the cost of the trip had eaten up all his profits but he said the experience was worth a thousand dollars. He founded Reeve Aleutian Airways in 1946 and it operated until December of 2000, twenty years after his death.
