"More With Less," Encounter Books, 2001

JACK LAMBIE, who had just come back from an around-the-world bike trip, was at first skeptical when MacCready asked him to help build a man-powered plane. Like most sailplane pilots he knew that British and Japanese engineers had repeatedly tired to build these beautifully constructed ultra-light planes to win the man-powered flight prize and all of them had failed. Except for MacCready’s reputation, there was no reason to think MacCready’s design would be any better. It looked like a big jack with kingposts and wires. MacCready didn’t even have any blueprints. He drew his plans on cocktail napkins and brown paper bags. On the other hand, Lambie had to admit in later conversations with his brother, Mark, MacCready certainly had an original approach. "You know," Lambie told his Mark, "there is a possibility this could work."

For two people so little alike MacCready and Lambie got along surprisingly well. MacCready was rational, introverted and shy around women and Lambie, a strong muscular type, was intuitive, gregarious and an inveterate ladies’ man. But they did agree on one thing--neither one particularly cared how something looked as long as it worked. "If it's worth doing," Lambie was fond of saying, "it's worth doing poorly." It wasn't that he didn't care about craftsmanship. He was quite gifted in making of models of things he really cared about, such as marble women’s torsos and wooden penises. He just knew that craftsmanship came at the cost of other things, some of which were even more important, such as getting the job done at all.

Unlike MacCready who wasn’t particularly coordinated, Lambie was a natural born pilot who had an unequaled ability to make tight coordinated turns at low speeds.. He flew hang-gliders, sailplanes, single engined, multi-engined, motor gliders. In the early seventies he owned a yellow piper cub with big fat tires which he liked to take down to San Filipe in Mexico. "I tend to get claustrophobic in planes," recalled Lambie's articulate and gregarious fourth ex-wife, Karen Hoiland, "so he used to fly it really slow, really low and keep the windows open. He could land that sucker anywhere. He liked to drop it down in the middle of the street. I swear he could land it in a kitchen." Once he landed his glider in a nudist camp, felt so much at home he stayed for dinner, took off his clothes and gave a speech.

Compared to most pilots, who worried constantly about running out of gas, Lambie worried no more about his plane’s fuel supply than he did about the gas level in the old Corvair vans he liked to drive. After he sold his Piper Cub, he bought a little Fournier motor-glider (a sailplane with a small Volkswagen pull-start engine) that he used to fly to San Francisco from Lake Elsinore. If he ran out of gas, he’d just work thermals and ridge lift till he finally had to land¾on a private strip, alfalfa field, barren hillside, or country road. Pretty soon someone would come by and offer to help. And Lambie was such genial conversationalist that pretty soon they’d be asking him to dinner, finding him some gas and inviting him to stay the night.

"He loved the feeling of adrenaline," said Charlie Webber, a old friend from the days when Lambie was so destitute he lived in a hanger at Riverside County's Fla-Bob Airport. "He loved being scared. He had testosterone coming out of his ears and his pecker." Once on a trip to South America the fuel pump for his reserve tank (a borrowed Honda pump) quit over the jungle, 600 miles from civilization. He didn’t panic, says Weber. "When he came to a fork in the road he took it." If he had to put his plane down, he figured, he’d just hike his way out. On this occasion he didn’t have to, the problem being the typically casual way he’d wired the fuel pump power supply.

Though outwardly different in almost every other way, both Lambie and MacCready had an ingrained appreciation of efficiency. In Lambie’s case, he streamlined everything he owned¾bicycles, all his cars and a tractor trailer truck (he helped develop the now ubiquitous streamlined fairings used on tractor trailer trucks). He would take his trailer truck (called the Drag Queen) out to Kellog Hill at the intersection of the 57 and 210 freeways near Pomona, put it in neutral, coast downhill, and see how long it took him to get to a given speed. With full farings it was possible to cut wind resistance (and thus fuel consumption) up to 18%. Even partial farings cut fuel consumption 4% to 10%. But still they were a hard sell. "What we found," says Mark Lambie, "is that the truck driver would get out there and all of a sudden he would have the equivalent of 50 more horsepower at road speed. What does he do? He goes ten miles an hour faster. So the fuel burned between Los Angeles and San Francisco was the same as before, except the driver got there an hour and half earlier. It was a nice pay raise for him."

For personal use, Lambie drove Corvair Greenbrier vans. To compensate for their blunt flat, air-resisting fronts and deeply inadequate air-cooled, six-cylinder engines, Lambie would completely overhaul the vehicles, adding full underpans, wheel fairings and shaping their fronts into huge bulbous noses. He taped little tufts of yarn to the windshield so he could monitor the airflow. He removed the side view mirrors to reduce drag and replaced them with vertically-mounted slit mirrors. He cut off the rubber molding that held in the windshields and filled the cracks with Bondo. He bought sound-deadening insulation of the sort used in military helicopters and covered the insides with it. He went to enormous pains to make his cars totally aerodynamic but he never bothered to take the last step and have them painted too. He put surplus DC-8 passenger jet windows in one of his Corvair vans, which made it look like something out of a Mad Max movie but it could hit 90 mph with on an 84 hp engine. Along with former Long Beach State University mechanical engineering professor Chet Kyle, he founded the International Human Powered Vehicle Association and then staged a meet for streamlined bikes. Lambie was subsequently caught on video describing a rider at that first event. "He got up to fifty miles an hour, then he crashed and went around and around," said Lambie twirling his finger in the air to show how the bike went into a vertical tumbling spin. "Then he went this way and around that way. I said to Chet, ‘This looks like this is going to be a lot of fun.’"

People who knew Lambie felt he was one of those people who could have been practically anything he wanted. He was smart, charming, persuasive and decisive. "He had incredible chutzpah," says Karen Hoiland, Lambie’s fourth and last wife. "He could tell a story like nobody’s business. He could hold a room. He embellished the truth quite a bit. He told people he was 39 well into his fifties."

Hoiland met Lambie in when he came to speak at the U.C. Riverside Glider Club. At the time she was an 18 year old college freshman and he was a 41 year old father of five with three ex-wives (he claimed at the time to be 39 with three children.)

"I sat in the front row," says Hoiland. "And on my part it was love at first sight. Absolutely. I was completely besotted with this man. I just looked up and I was in love. He looked like Papa Hemingway. He just oozed confidence. He was a wrestler in college and always felt in control of any situation. That’s why we never had any guns around our house. No matter what kind of situation we were in he always felt quite capable of taking care of himself and us. He just exuded it."

For Hoiland, that first meeting with Lambie opened up a whole new world in that suddenly she found herself meeting "all these wonderful and incredibly neat people. I was 18. I should have just been going to school and doing my thing. And I instantly went from this little tiny small town girl who had never been anywhere to someone who was flying all over Mexico, having all these wonderful trips, riding bikes, having airplanes. It was a great leap, a logarithmic leap." The downside was she had to recognize that he was totally in charge and she had to do everything he wanted.

Except in flying, Lambie wasn’t necessarily more talented than a lot of other people. The difference was he approached everything and every person totally without fear. Because the prospect of failure never occurred to him he gladly threw himself into every situation whether he was qualified or not. He once got a job as a co-pilot on a Citation twin-engine jet for Getty Oil after falsely claiming to have a commercial, multi-engine, instrument rating. He did fine when it came to flying the plane. What got him fired was his unwillingness to bother with everything else--filing flight plans, using checklists, getting the weather briefing or calculating fuel loads. To him such things were useless busywork. He thought that people who followed procedures were lacking in spontaneity.

He had inordinate faith in what he called "Lambie luck." He truly felt that (1) no really bad thing would ever happen to him in the first place and (2) if it did he could certainly talk his way out of it. Once when he got a job delivering a new motor glider from Los Angeles to Paraguay he wrangled an assignment from National Geographic to photograph Andean condors along the way, but in typical Lambie fashion he didn’t bother with visas or paperwork. He mounted remote-actuated Olympus cameras on the plane’s tail and wing tips and carried hundreds of rolls of film. When he landed in Peru (in the middle of yet another coup), the military took one look at his photo system, concluded he was a spy and hauled him off for interrogation. Lambie only talked his way out of it by convincing his captors he was on a photo mission to document their magnificent county’s spectacular birds.

Lambie may have been a great raconteur but his disorganization and messiness made him hard to live with. He could go for weeks without remembering to take out the garbage. He survived on Miller beer, cashews and marijuana. His den was so covered was it in books, papers, beer bottles and shavings from whatever model he happened to be working on it was hard to get from one side to the other.

Inordinately hard-headed, Lambie was famous for never changing his engine oil. He claimed the alleged need for 3000-mile oil changes was just a scheme to make oil companies rich. He would drive all the way to Oregon to register one of his beat up old cars because registration fees were cheaper there. Casually indifferent to the possibility of disaster, he drove around with five gallon water bottles full of gasoline in the trunk and put a TV in his van so he could watch movies while driving down the freeway.

A great fan of ravens, he would capture them while they were chicks and raise them himself, feeding them a mix of cottage cheese and raw hamburger directly from his own lips. He liked to argue politics, usually taking the liberal side, but it wasn’t so much the politics he cared about as the argument itself. "Jack’s politics were a bottle of beer in one hand and a broad in the other," says Charles Webber, an old friend from the Flabob Airport in Riverside County.

If there were one thing The one thing he regretted was not being more famous or respected. "He loved the accolades," says Karen Hoiland. "He loved giving talks. He loved being the center of attention." Being ordinary was worse than being dead. "He would do anything to avoid a life of quiet desperation. And that’s what he thought most people lived. He was obsessed with not being ordinary."

For a while during their marriage Hoiland and Lambie once lived on Heart Street in the city of Orange. It was only a three bedroom tract house, but so many people came and went Hoiland began calling it the Heart Hotel. "We had roommates all the time. People were always showing up. They’d stay a couple of months or six, anybody who needed a home. Jack would bring whole families home who were destitute some place. One of Jack’s kids was always coming to visit. It was like a dorm or sorority house filled with college kids who never outgrew it. There were always good discussions at dinner. We could talk till ten at night. Jack was so much fun to be with¾it was like living with an artist and a writer and a raconteur all rolled into one."

Unlike most people, Lambie comfortably lived on the edge. He didn’t believe in long range planning for retirement because he was permanently retired from the time of about 40 anyway. He didn’t pay taxes. He never had any insurance on his house, his car or himself. If he needed to see a doctor, he’d enroll in junior college and use the student clinic. It was impossible to embarrass him because he simply didn’t care. Once when he didn’t have time to buy an airplane ticket he walked out on the tarmac, climbed the ramp and seated himself in first class. When the stewardess asked for his boarding pass, he brushed her off so cavalierly—"Don't you know who I am?"--that she let the matter slide.

He supported himself with a series of low paying jobs--writing books on ultralights and airplane construction, serving as a parole officer, selling driveway re-repaving jobs and hearing aids ("the little old ladies loved him," says Hoiland) and teaching people how to fly. "He was a very easy going instructor," recalls Charles Webber. "He wasn’t dogmatic or over-controlling. He read sex magazines during the flight. He never got excited. He would let you go right to the edge of really screwing up before taking over."

Lambie worshipped the female anatomy, especially the "aerodynamic" shape of the buttocks. He had "the gift of seduction," says his brother Mark. He wasn’t self-conscious and he had no social inhibitions. As soon as he saw someone he liked he’d invite himself to stay the night. "It's okay," he'd tell her. "I'm Jack Lambie."

Although Lambie took great pride in his flying skills he was prouder still of his 8½ inches penis. He used to make balsa wood models of it and then spend hours sanding them smooth. He once made a sculpted model airplane with a penis for the pilot. He kept a table and a typewriter in the garage. He used to sit there naked all day with the garage door open, writing books and magazine articles on aviation. He yearned to be a better writer. But his high point was winning second place in a bad-Hemingway contest ("Across the Parking Lot Into Harry’s Bar and Grill").

Physically he was a bull. He used to fly up to San Francisco and ride his bike back to Los Angeles along the San Andreas Fault. He rode in two-hundred-mile bicycle races (known as "double centuries") which were so grueling he was left without feeling in his hands for months afterward. When he was 45 he sold everything he owned, cashed in his teacher's retirement plan and rode off on a 15-month ride around the world on a tandem bike with his new wife, Karen. Calling it their "honeymoon vacation," they wet the wheel in the Pacific at Costa Mesa and started east. It took them 42 days to cross the country. Karen, who was only 20 at the time, had long blond hair and an engaging personality. "They would meet people and be instantly taken in by them," said Mark Lambie. "I think he once said in crossing the United States they stayed at other people's houses 34 times."


JACK LAMBIE’S CAREER went downhill after Karen, his fourth wife, left him, saying she was tired of the swinging life. Even so leaving Jack, she says, was the hardest thing she’d ever done. When she broke up with him, he sat in the middle of the living room floor, holding his socks while tears ran down his face.

He’d written several technical books on aviation but sales were meager. In hopes of improving his writing skills he ordered books on making one’s dialogue come alive. In the meanwhile, he supported himself by making marble sculptures of naked women. He’d go to a swinger’s convention, talk a man into buying a sculpture of his wife’s torso.

As someone who passed himself off as 39 well into his fifties, Lambie didn’t grow old gracefully. He’d badly damaged his knee in a bike accident in Australia (he always claimed he’d hit a kangaroo) which caused him to walk with a rolling gait. Years of drinking beer and eating cashews had given him an alarming pot belly. Whereas he used to be able to have any woman he wanted, now even older women were turning him down.

In 1997, at the 20th reunion of the winning of the Kremer Prize for man-powered flight, Lambie announced that his new goal was just to make it through the next 10 or 15 years, by which time, he said, science would have conquered death. "Other people were saying, ‘What are you talking about?’" says Bryan Allen, the athlete/pilot who won the first Kremer Prize in the Gossamer Condor.. "And Jack was saying, ‘I want to live to be 1000 years old.’ He was quite outspoken about it. My first thought when I heard his brother killed him— ‘Gee Jack, I guess your mortality took a big nose dive.’"

Lambie’s death stunned everyone who knew him. At the time, Lambie and his younger brother, Bill, had been living in a couple of small houses on a desert compound in Morongo, a high-desert area northwest of Palm Springs. He’d planned to do the sculpture in the back yard but the fierce winds wind blowing through the San Gregornio Pass made it difficult to work. His brother Bill, a hard-drinking former sea captain, couldn’t have had more different personality from him. If Bill needed more power out to a remote location, he’d run Romex, put up a board, install circuit breakers. Jack in contrast would just throw an extension cord on the ground. Living out in the desert had begun to take its toll on Bill. He’d become paranoid over thefts. He began patrolling the fence line with a loaded gun.

In June of 1999, Jack came back from a weekend trip with a side panel missing from a small trailer. Bill called Jack "a mechanical moron." An argument started. It soon escalated when Jack discovered that a woman friend of his had spent the weekend, drinking with Bill and watching auto races on TV.

Exactly what happened after the police could never tell for sure. The only two witnesses were Bill, who had an incentive to put all his actions in the best possible light (Bill’s story "changed every few minutes," complained San Bernardino County deputy district attorney Camelia Mesrobian), and Jack’s woman friend, who was so drunk, said Bill’s attorney, she was babbling.

According to William Sasnett, the Joshua Tree attorney who represented Bill, Bill took out a 9 mm Makarov semi-automatic pistol which he kept hidden between the sofa cushions, pointed it at Jack and told him to leave.

Jack, who had been a college wrestler and in any case was bar bigger than Bill, just laughed at him and took his gun away. In return Bill whacked Jack on the back of the head with a carpenter’s level, says Charlie Weber, an old friend to both brothers. In response, Jack pistol-whipped Bill who retreated to the rear bedroom. In the meantime Jack sat in a chair with the Markarov under one leg while his woman friend tried to stop the bleeding. She was still working on Jack when Bill came down the hall with a Ruger .22 caliber target pistol. He fired one round, hitting Jack right between the eyes. Jack was dead, says Sasnett, "before he hit the floor."

Despite Bill’s claim that he shot in self-defense, the jury noted that the 9 mm Markaarov had left an imprint on the seat cushion, proving that Jack has been sitting on it. At his trial, the jury convicted Bill of second degree murder and the judge sentenced him to 15 to 20 years in prison where, against all odds, he seems actually happy.

"You know why blind people don’t go sky diving?" he recently wrote to Weber. "It scares the shit out of their dogs."