A half-century has passed since daring pioneers in the emerging sport of hang gliding, seeking higher and more challenging flights, took to the summit of Teakettle Mountain.
“We originally got there on dirt bikes and were inspired by the view,” Whitefish native Robert Combs explains in his new book, The Wings of Men. “Yes, we decided, this would be a perfect launch site for our hang gliders …
“But who should go first?”
There were only two adventurous men, the closest of friends, standing atop Teakettle for the blustery liftoff: Robert, who owned a small but busy cedar shake roofing mill in Kalispell, and Tim Schwarzenberg, who having survived a tour in Vietnam worked in drywall.
“We drew straws and I don’t mind admitting I was very relieved when Tim won the right to fly!” Robert writes. “After all, these lightweight gliders were only made of sailcloth and aluminum tubing.”
The anxious pair would remain motionless at the makeshift launch site for what seemed like 30 minutes or more, the glider resting the entire time on Tim’s shoulders while Robert held the nose.
“Well,” said Tim finally, “I guess this is as good a day as any to die!”
“I’m sure the fear on my face was quite evident,” Robert reflects. “I ducked out of the way, and he ran into the wind … lifted off and flew smoothly off the mountain. I can still hear his wild YAHOO as he flew away. I stood there transfixed … as he descended over the edge and then he totally disappeared. My heart was pounding because I knew he had to fly across the wide Flathead River at the bottom before reaching the open field to land.
“I ran as fast as I could to the motorbike and flew (as a matter of speech) down the steep backside of the mountain … to the landing field. When I got there, Tim was still running around the glider, jumping up and down shouting about the amazingly incredible experience and how well the glider flew.”
Robert’s turn to hang beneath the fragile triangular kite wouldn’t come until the next day and “let’s be honest here … I had never before felt such an overwhelming joy mixed with absolute GRIPPING terror.”
Fortunately he too soared unscathed “just like the eagles we had seen soaring there so many times before … I remember intently looking at the Flathead River as it flowed out of Glacier National Park and through Bad Rock Canyon. It was beyond epic. It was the coolest thing I had ever done. I was instantly hooked on free flight.”
To the extent that Robert would spend the next 50 years hooked into every version of glider for every reason that existed. “Montana Bob” not only made a name for himself as a certified Master Hang Glider Pilot, he made it his career.
It was Robert who starred in the breathtaking series of Wrigley’s Chewing Gum commercials, in one ad his glider taking off rather recklessly (sans crash helmet, so his handsome face wasn’t obscured) from an icy pinnacle in the glacier-filled Southern Alps — 12,250-foot Mount Cook in New Zealand — when it was 15 degrees below zero.
“It was getting harder to show pure enjoyment on my face to tie to the script, saying ‘For clean fresh taste that goes a long, long way, there only one Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum!’” he quips in the book.
Yet as the gum maker banked on during many months of costly production, the combination of Robert’s daring feats (read stunts) and good looks (they made him shave his mustache before each shoot) sent Wrigley’s sales soaring. At the same time, fan mail from admiring women poured into the pilot’s mailbox, along with the generous residuals from the gum commercials airing worldwide.
For those like me who’ve toured the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington and seen the iconic IMAX film To Fly!, that’s Montana Bob in the mesmerizing opening scene, seemingly floating effortlessly above massive volcanic islands.
As with other extreme sports, hang gliding in its infancy carried risks with any fame and fortune. Below a popular launch point in Hawaii, where three fellow gliders died in 1976, Robert spiraled out of control and crashed onto the edge of a cliff. Knocked unconscious and suffering deep gashes and other injuries, he came to at the sound of a rescue helicopter’s rotor blades spinning above him.
Once he was allowed to return to the Flathead, Tim encouraged his best friend to “get back on the horse,” which Robert soon accomplished from trusty Teakettle.
Hang gliders, meanwhile, continued to improve with innovation and development, and Robert and Tim made sure to keep their inventory current. They acquired a promising fixed-wing glider from California, which they built in their garage, and ordered one glider each from a respected Canadian manufacturer, the Flathead pair soon becoming U.S. dealers for the company.
It wasn’t long until Robert was injured all over again, this time during international competition outside Fernie. As Tim watched helplessly from above, Robert was blown downward onto the rocky slope of the launch mountain — “I was lucky to be alive,” he writes. Fortunately, as in Hawaii, a helicopter arrived to rescue him.
Released from the hospital with his leg in a cast, Robert was driven home that night by Tim, whose parents would be arriving the next day from California to visit their son.
Early the next morning the two were awakened by loud knocking on the door, a friend and fellow pilot announcing that winds on Desert Mountain in West Glacier were “perfect for flying.” Before rushing off with his glider, Tim prepared a stack of huckleberry pancakes for his injured friend, asking that he escort his parents to the landing area once they arrived.
“I fell back asleep after taking the pain prescription and was awakened by the phone ringing,” Robert remembers. It was Mel Ruder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Hungry Horse News, relaying early word of an accident on Desert Mountain.
It wasn’t until Tim’s parents, with Robert in tow, had reached the launch site that they learned their son had been flung from his glider, plummeting several thousand feet into the thick forest below.
The three remained on the mountaintop that night, and several nights thereafter, trying to keep hope alive that Tim somehow survived the horrifying free fall. But after three intense days of search and rescue efforts there were still no signs of the pilot.
“At one point during the night,” Robert reveals, “I stood on the launch and started yelling down, ‘Don’t worry Tim, we will find you.’ At that moment I choked up and collapsed. I knew it would be a miracle to find him alive.”
After many in the search crew had left after the third day, it was Tim’s exhausted father who suggested making “a human chain stretched out with as many men as we have left.”
“Tim’s dad and my brother Gary were at the end of the chain when they came upon Tim’s body,” says Robert. “Gary said Tim had part of a tree branch still tightly clutched in his hand.”
A minister in Mount Shasta, Tim’s father officiated a service for his son on the summit of Big Mountain. Afterwards, Tim’s ashes were scattered across Teakettle Mountain. He had died on Aug. 2, 1978 at the age of 28.
It was by chance I met Robert and Darlene at a cookout this summer along the Swan River. Which is how I got handed his just-released book (available through Amazon). How’s this for a closing chapter:
Robert was 65 and still gliding for a living, having spent another day above the beautiful jungles of Central America. Relaxing afterwards in a glider hangar, a friend of his observed that the pilot wasn’t getting any younger and why not give internet dating a try?
“Who, me?” he replied. “Go on a dating site? No way!”
Ultimately he gave in, albeit hoping to return to his Montana roots one day he uploaded his profile to a Flathead Valley zip code.
Soon an attractive woman named Darlene caught Robert’s eye. She’d been a marketing executive for a large banking and investment firm and later opened her own advertising agency in Florida until moving back to her native Montana.
“I started writing to her and said I was working in Belize, but would be coming back to Montana that summer,” says Robert, at which point Darlene asked what he liked to do for fun?
When he mentioned crisscrossing the globe in a hang glider, she replied, “Oh, I have flown a hang glider.”
As fate would have it, Darlene in the mid-1970s was an editor and photographer for the Daily Inter Lake. Not only had she covered a gathering of local glider pilots that Robert convened at Moose’s Saloon, she published a photo of the Teakettle crew (it’s reprinted in the book) as they prepared for flight.
“To this day I marvel at how we connected,” Robert reflects, “even though we were living thousands of miles apart.”
Robert’s no dummy. He returned to the Flathead that very summer, seeing Darlene for the first time in 40 years. And they’ve been together ever since.
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author.