re: #113 Dr Lizardo

I remember my dad musing that he’d heard through the L.A. grapevine that Hughes went a little funny in the head after a plane crash into Lake Mead in 1943.

Apparently he suffered a pretty significant cranial injury as a result. Needless to say, my dad wasn’t surprised that much when details about Hughes’ eccentricities in his later life emerged after Hughes died in 1976.

I read once in a biography of Hughes that the main changer was his 1946 crash in the prototype YF-11 reconnaissance plane. The engines drove two counter-rotating propellers each, and the gearing failed on one of them, sending the plane, and Howard, crashing to the ground in Beverly Hills (I know the spot, it was near where my parents lived).