The Sage of Cornelius: The Remarkable Story of Les Long

For fifteen years I lived near Long Road. I never gave it much thought, other than perhaps noting that it is not all that long of a road. About a year ago, while researching another story, I stumbled upon an old photograph of one of Les Long’s airplanes. Curious, I spent more hours than I care to admit digging up information and learning about the man. I came to admire him deeply. I have watched movies and read books that were not half the story of Les Long’s life. I hope you enjoy learning about him too.

The Farm and the Family

The Long family came to Cornelius, Oregon in 1887 and settled on a two hundred acre farm a couple of miles north of town, where Long Road is located today. Les was the first of the Long children born on the farm, in 1889, followed by two sisters and three brothers. As a boy he liked to hunt and fish and was a keen student of nature. Unlike his school friends, he was rarely seen in town. He was either in the woods or studying at home. Although he completed only the eighth grade, his mind bordered on that of a genius. Les Long’s own words may describe him best: “I like to fool with things that require exactness.”

Brain Fever and the Years of Confinement

Les had an interest in aviation from early on, reading everything he could find on the subject while still of school age. He wrote his first how-to-build article for Popular Mechanics in 1908, and at the age of twenty-one built his first glider in 1910. Shortly thereafter, Les was tragically struck by an illness described at the time as brain fever, which was likely encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. The illness lasted six years and left him with a heightened nervous condition and agoraphobia, a fear of leaving his home, that confined him to an area within several hundred feet of his house for the remainder of his life. The illness also left him in frail health and incapable of engaging in strenuous labor, so he looked for other sources of income and activity to help his brothers and sisters on the family farm. What he found would change the face of aviation.

Long Radio Works

In 1912, Les constructed the first transmitting radio set in the state of Oregon. He also constructed and sold variometers, and formed Long Radio Works, building and selling his first commercial radio set at the age of twenty-three. During World War I, Les picked up messages from and tried to trace a German transmitter believed to be located in the nearby hills. Unfortunately he was unable to decipher the code, which was an endless series of numbers. A man confined to within several hundred feet of his farm, tracking enemy transmissions from the Oregon Coast Range. That is Les Long in a single image.

In 1920, Long went into commercial radio production full-time at the family farm. By then his brother George had joined him, and due to his reputation for being able to fix anything wrong with a radio set, George became known as the radio repairman, with sets brought in for repair from as far away as Portland. At one time the two brothers received offers from well-known radio manufacturers in the East to design radio circuits for them. The residents of Cornelius took immense pride in pointing to their radio sets made by the Longs. While Les and George ran the radio business, brothers Carl and William operated the two hundred acre farm, raising corn and grain.

The Plane Lands

Things changed one day in 1927 when an aviator landed his plane next to the Long family home. Les Long decided he had to build an airplane. He started that same night.

The Aviation Years

The first plane, completed in October 1929, was named the Longster. It featured a 25-horsepower motor, a top speed of 90 miles per hour, and could fly 35 miles on a gallon of fuel. Long believed he could manufacture and sell it for $1,200. It flew well but had what he described as irritating habits, and was eventually dismantled. Over the next ten years, Les and George Long designed seven new airplanes and built eleven. The planes at first were a sideline to the radio business, but the Longs soon became more famous for their aircraft designs, which they published in the Flying and Gliding Manual, bringing aviation to the backyard builder across the country.

The next design was the mid-wing Anzani Longster. Hundreds of sets of plans were sold for this aircraft and dozens were built, including two models in England and one in Germany. It flew so well that Long was asked to write about it for Modern Mechanix and Inventions magazine, with technical information, construction tips and detailed drawings complete enough to allow an experimenter to build one from scratch. Long was asked to write about his next version as well, the Henderson Longster, a high-wing adaptation.

His best-known design may have been the low-wing Wimpy. Over 300 sets of blueprints were sent out and a dozen or more were constructed in this country. Long’s innovative low-wing design can be seen in many low-wing sport aircraft today.

Maiden flights must have been nerve-racking affairs. Whenever one of his planes was being flown for the first time, Long would go to his bedroom and pull the blankets over his head. The man who designed aircraft that were built in England and Germany, whose influence on sport aviation endures to this day, never once flew in an airplane himself.

The Harlequin Motor

In 1931, frustrated by the lack of good and affordable light plane powerplants, Les conceived the Harlequin Motor. The Long-Harlequin engine was built using 1929 Harley Davidson cylinders, connecting rods from a Durant Star automobile, and a custom crankcase and shaft that Long often cast at his own foundry on the farm. About a dozen were built in his shop and between forty and fifty were built throughout the world.

In Long’s own words: “When we began building experimental light planes a few years ago, we at once ran into this engine problem. The kind we wanted were too expensive and the kind we could afford were not what we wanted. So it was that while building our fourth light ship, we decided to build an engine to go with it. Four weeks after the sketches were started, the engine was running on the stand, and a week later it was flying. This ought to be some kind of a record.”

The Propeller Shop

In the early 1930s Les started building propellers for light planes. His plant at the farm became the only federally approved and licensed propeller shop west of the Mississippi River, and output ran well into the thousands. Les adapted his propeller designs to work as industrial fans for fruit dryers, necessary to eliminate pests like vinegar flies, and industrial fans outsold airplane propellers ten to one, becoming the primary product of the Long family business. Les Long refused numerous offers to go into larger scale production because he always considered himself a craftsman, preferring to carve propellers by hand. A man who could have built an industry chose instead to build things well.

The Depression and the Flight School

The Long Brothers airplane business faced a decline in the late 1930s. Les blamed the downturn on the Great Depression and big business competition aided by government regulations, which made it so difficult to construct planes at home that, as he put it, “Thousands of young men who, instead of being down in the basement constructing planes, are out nightclubbing and driving on the roads trying to wrap dad’s sedan around a telegraph pole.”

The Long Brothers attempted to adapt by expanding into air service and flight instruction. By 1935, Long Air Service had four planes in service including a Taylor Cub, available for student instruction and charter trips anywhere on short notice. The Oregon coast became a popular destination, only fifty minutes from Cornelius by air. The great hope for the future of aviation, according to Les, were the students of his Long School of Flying and the plane helpers who came to the Long farm in droves to aid in welding and painting. But it was difficult to turn a profit during the Depression, and in 1937 Ed Ball took over the flight school.

Long Radio Works was still in business in late 1939 but ended manufacturing when the government shut down all civilian radio production at the start of World War II. With a surplus of leftover radio parts on hand, Les and George invented their last product, a type of electric fence controller. The design continues to be manufactured today and according to a report from Oregon State University remains the top design on the market. A man who never left his farm invented something that farmers across the world are still using today, without any idea where it came from.

The Sage of Cornelius

One might think that with all Les had going on he would have had no spare time. But when he did, Les ground telescope lenses, made his own blueprints, processed his own photographs, and studied astronomy. A true renaissance man, he wrote and sold fiction and poetry, and gave music lessons. Among the things Les was most proud of were his eye for symmetry and his flair for writing.

From 1932 to 1935, Les was named chairman of several national light plane associations. He authored many articles in support of these associations in Popular Aviation, Sportsman Aviation and other magazines, and was an influential voice for the amateur plane builders of this country.

In January 1945, Les Long passed away peacefully at the family farm where he had been born fifty-five years before. He left behind a wife, daughter, son, stepdaughter, his mother, a sister and three brothers. Triple A Flyer magazine referred to him as the Sage of Cornelius and wrote that his death was a great loss to the world of amateur aircraft builders. His younger brother and partner George passed away in 1953 at the age of fifty-four.

Les Long was inducted into the Experimental Aircraft Association Hall of Fame in Wisconsin in 2000, where a bust of him is displayed at the museum. In 2011 he was inducted into the Oregon Aviation Hall of Fame. Several of his plane designs are featured in aviation museums. While he is not well remembered in his hometown of Cornelius, his influence lives on quietly in the aviation world.

The Farm Today

The three Long family homes were located in a grove of oak trees about a quarter mile east of Cornelius-Schefflin Road on Long Road. In earlier days, Cornelius-Schefflin Road was known as Centerville Road. The original farmstead stood on the north side of Long Road, with two additional homes where Long brothers lived on the south side. The airstrip ran just west of the homes on the south side, extending south for about a thousand feet.

The Long homes are gone now, replaced by newer houses. The original barn burned just a couple of years ago and only an outbuilding remains on the property of the homestead on the north side of Long Road. An aerial photograph from 1951 shows the farm and airstrip as they were, a tangible record of what once occupied that quiet stretch of road.

Long Road is still there. It is not, as I once thought, all that unremarkable a road after all.