Lt. Fitzwilliam Dalrymple Jr.
Fitzwilliam Dalrymple Jr. was born on 4 January 1893 in New Rochelle, New York. His father, Dr. Fitzwilliam Dalrymple, was an Irish-born physician who had moved his practice from New York City to New Rochelle about two years earlier. His grandfather, James Dalrymple, had been a Scottish landscape architect. His mother, Lillian, was a Pennsylvanian; his parents had married at Pittsburgh on 7 September 1891.
In August 1899, when he was six, his father left him on a float in Echo Bay with a toy sailboat while he swam. A gust took the boat, the boy cried, and the doctor swam after it so far that he could not get back against the tide; two men in a skiff pulled him out as he was going under. The paper did not name the boy, but the doctor's only son in 1922 was Fitzwilliam. In 1905 the state census found him at home in New Rochelle with both parents.
On 14 April 1917, eight days after the United States declared war on Germany, he enlisted in the Navy. He served in the U.S. Naval Reserve Flying Corps, the reserve arm that trained the Navy's aviators in the First World War. He began as a carpenter's mate third class, a petty officer rating for skilled woodworkers. He rose to ensign, the lowest commissioned rank, and then to lieutenant (junior grade), the rank between ensign and lieutenant.
By the winter of 1918 he was flying from the U.S. Naval Air Station at Miami, Florida. He was one of six fliers entered for the Aero Club of America's trophy for 1918, a contest for the longest flight of the year, flying an H.S. 2 Curtiss flying boat with Liberty motors. The trophy went to a Marine, Lieutenant Thomas C. Rodman, who covered over 900 miles at Pensacola. On 23 January 1919 Ensign Dalrymple took off from Miami at 8:10 in the morning with a mechanic and stayed in the air until 5:31 in the afternoon. He flew to Key West and back twice. The Associated Press called the nine hours and twenty-one minutes "a new naval aerial endurance record," twenty minutes better than the known mark. A month later the New-York Tribune cited it as the best American naval endurance record in an article on the coming attempt to fly the Atlantic. New Rochelle put his name on its roll of the men who served in the Great War.
He was honorably discharged on 8 March 1922 and re-enlisted on 25 April 1922. That autumn, when his father died, the New-York Tribune called him "a lieutenant in the United States Naval Aviation Corps," and a second notice named him as "Lieut. Fitz William Dalrymple, Jr." He was the doctor's only surviving son. In 1932 he was retired to the reserve list, and he held the rank of lieutenant (junior grade) until his death.
He married Beatrice Dassler at Greenwich, Connecticut, probably on 20 July 1921. She was twenty-two, the daughter of Henry W. Dassler of New Rochelle. They had four daughters: Beatrice Elizabeth in 1923, Joan about 1925, Patricia in 1926 and Joy in 1928. In 1923 "Captain Fitzwilliam Dalrymple, Jr." commanded one of the flights of seaplanes over the parade route at the Silver Jubilee of Greater New York.
In July 1927 he organized Atlantic Airways, Inc., a seaplane business. It had a landing field on Wilmot Road in New Rochelle, seaplane bases at Rye and College Point, and an office at 55 West 16th Street in Manhattan. It sold Alexander Eaglerock biplanes in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey on time payments, thirty per cent down and the rest in ten installments. It ran a flying school and an air taxi. In the spring of 1928 he was its president and general manager and the chief pilot of its seaplane section, flying Eaglerocks on Edo pontoons. That summer he was general chairman of aviation for the first seaplane and motorboat race meet at Playland, the new Westchester County amusement park at Rye.
By 1929 he was president of Coastal Airways, Inc., a Delaware company formed to control Atlantic Airways. It became the New York distributor for Fairchild airplanes and contracted for thirty of them. It leased a North River pier for a daily seaplane service to Albany, with Lake George and Montreal planned beyond. Its ground school taught dual-control seaplane flying at Hunts Point, Rye and Coney Island, and more than a quarter of its winter students that year were women. What became of the company after 1929 is not known.
By 1930 Beatrice and the younger girls were living in her father's house, and Fitzwilliam was not with them.
He died on 2 January 1940, two days short of his forty-seventh birthday. He was buried at Kensico Cemetery, at Valhalla near White Plains. On 18 January American Legion Post 8 of New Rochelle applied for a government headstone for the unmarked grave of a veteran. W. C. Wood, the post's funeral and graves chairman, signed the application. The stone was to be shipped to the post at 18 Church Street, New Rochelle. The upright marker was ordered from a stone company at West Rutland, Vermont, on 27 February and shipped on 8 March 1940.
His grandson Bob, born seven years after his death, told the family's story of how he died. By that account he caught pneumonia after a knife fight on the Bowery, the Manhattan street of cheap lodging houses and saloons, and was found in the snow. The record agrees on the season. It does not agree on the year Bob gave, and the cause of death is not known.
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Cite: Heirology, "Lt. Fitzwilliam Dalrymple Jr. (1893-1940)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/lt-fitzwilliam-dalrymple-jr-1893-1940-9b7801.