Just before the plane took off from New Zealand, the pilot advised his passengers to check their life vests for shark repellent.

“For the first 300 miles, if we have to ditch, it won’t be so bad because the water will be comparatively warm,” he said. “But farther down, if we have to go in, God help us. The water is freezing and you won’t stand a chance if you get in it.”

This was a flight to Antarctica.

Portland adventurer Colin O’Brady’s trek across the southernmost continent in 2018 has been in the news the past few weeks, thanks to his newly released memoir about the journey -- and criticism of claims that his solo haul was a record-setting “first.” The splash of attention also might remind Oregonians who’ve been around awhile that another Portlander had a well-publicized -- and perilous -- trip to Antarctica more than 60 years before O’Brady.

Rolla J. Crick, a longtime reporter at the now-defunct Oregon Journal, was on that Antarctica-bound plane looking through the pockets of his “Mae West” for shark repellent. Fortunately for everyone on board the military-transport aircraft in October 1957, the Douglas Globemaster flew the entire 2,230 miles of its trip without ditching, landing safely at McMurdo Sound.

Antarctica at that time was no longer the great unknown, but it was still little-known. Indeed, when Crick was arriving on the continent at the beginning of the season that allowed for regular flights, legendary explorer Sir Edmund Hillary was in the midst of his overland trudge to the South Pole, an expedition that would net Hillary the coveted Polar Medal.

Crick wasn’t there to catch up to Hillary. Instead, he had been tasked with shadowing Portland Zoo director Jack Marks as Marks and his team tried to capture penguins for the Rose City’s growing menagerie.

The reporter quickly learned that Marks might not realize what a penguin hunt entailed in Antarctica.

“It will be no easy task, even though hundreds of the primitive creatures are potentially available,” Crick wrote shortly after arriving on the continent. “The journey into the Emperor penguin rookery at Cape Crozier, some 50 miles from this U.S. naval air facility at McMurdo Sound, will be over perilous terrain where a misstep can be fatal.”

A 1957 image of the U.S. station at the South Pole, part of the late Portland reporter Rolla J. Crick's personal collection. (Courtesy of Eleanor Crick)

Crick had barely deplaned at McMurdo Sound when he saw first-hand that Antarctica was a tough place to live and work. The “first order of business” was loading a clutch of wounded men onto the Globemaster for the return flight. This included Navy personnel who had suffered broken bones and severe burns in a helicopter crash -- three months earlier.

There would be other tragedies to report as well. One example: 57 huskies that drove sleds and worked in search-and-rescue parties were going to be shot to death after their work in the Antarctic was done, Crick wrote, because New Zealand officials would not allow them back into the country.

The polar researchers who had raised the huskies from puppydom said there was no other choice, for the dogs were considered “unsuitable” as pets in the civilized world.

“They’re friendly enough here in the Antarctic to the men who feed them,” said one of the soldiers who cared for them, “but back home they would kill every dog and cat for 20 miles around.”

One day, Crick, a World War II veteran, joined a “side trip” via plane that was supposed to result in half an hour at the South Pole. But after the group landed at the bottom of the earth, mechanical problems kept them from getting airborne again. The men ended up spending 22 days at the small station there. (As a result, Crick missed Marks’ mission and would leave Antarctica without even glimpsing a penguin.) The stranded pole-sitters survived their ordeal through repeated viewings of the 1942 movie “The Man Who Came to Dinner” -- a comedy of manners about an overbearing celebrity who’s marooned at a stranger’s house over Christmas -- and air drops of food, tools and spare parts.

Oregon Journal reporter Rolla J. Crick at the South Pole 1957. (Oregonian archive)LC-

Throughout his time at the South Pole, Crick, who died in 2013 at 95, prepared reports for the Journal and communicated with the outside world via ham radio. In one dispatch, he reported on the pole’s axis of rotation, or, as he called it, the “spin pole,” writing that everything from heavy snow in Oregon to weekend traffic in New York City “slightly unbalance the Earth and this can be detected at the station maintained by the U.S. at the South Pole. As the Earth wobbles about, the path of the spin pole wanders in erratic circles from 10 to 60 feet in diameter.”

Crick’s editors at The Journal, for their part, were happy to have their intrepid reporter write about whatever he wanted. The important thing, in their view, was that they had bested The Oregonian, their rival, and every other newspaper in the world.

“Again … The Journal Scores Another First!” the newspaper heralded in full-page house ads, claiming that Crick had set “a new world record -- that of being the first working newspaperman ever to land at the South Pole.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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