By Jen Otterson,Staff Writer

PARIS – A Florida man is spending his summer in a “Lyon hunt” on Paris Hill, and he’s looking for help.

For the past five years, Ed Lyon, who summers in Jay, has spent as much time as he can in Paris searching for information on his relative Harry Lyon, a former resident of Paris Hill and the navigator on the first trans-Pacific flight in 1928.

“There’s still a lot left to learn,” Lyon said. Although he has crates stuffed with notebooks full of newspaper clippings, Lyon is looking for someone who knew his distant cousin and can tell him what kind of man he was.

From what he’s learned, Lyon feels certain of one thing: Harry Lyon was a daredevil. He has found newspaper articles that say Harry Lyon was a gun-runner and smuggled rum out of Mexico. Once, he said, Lyon was sentenced to death in a Mexican jail when he was arrested during the Mexican Revolution.

Even after he was chosen for the crew of the first trans-Pacific flight, the accomplished naval navigator didn’t give up his wild ways. To prepare for the flight of the Southern Cross from Oakland, California to Brisbane, Australia, Lyon tested the newest navigational equipment in the back seat of pilot Charles Kingsford Smith’s car while Smith drove as fast as he could.

“They finally decided that was getting too costly,” Ed Lyon said. “They were getting speeding tickets.”

The four-man crew of the Southern Cross made their celebrated flight in 10 days. The small, fabric-covered plane left Oakland on May 31, 1928, and arrived in Brisbane on June 9, stopping in Hawaii and Fiji. Harry Lyon had other adventures, but eventually retired to his father’s house on Paris Hill, known to locals as the Lyon’s Den.

Ed Lyon grew up with an interest in aviation, and even tried twice to become a pilot only to be turned down because he failed an eye test, but he didn’t know about his family’s place in aviation history until 1995. He was waiting for a plane at the Portland Jetport, and noticed a picture on the wall of a Fokker monoplane and its crew. Lyon was interested to read in the caption that the navigator shared his last name. He didn’t discover that they were related, though, until he found Harry Lyon’s name in his geneology a few years later.

Since then, Lyon has tracked down many relatives and former friends of Harry Lyon, who died in 1963, as he can. It is becoming harder for Lyon to learn first-hand about his relative. “So many people who knew Harry Lyon are in their nineties,” he said. Many who knew Harry Lyon personally, like former Paris Hill Librarian Schuyler Mott, have died in recent years.

Lyon hopes to use what he has learned about Harry Lyon to write a book about him. He would like anyone who knew Lyon personally to contact him in Jay at 654-2143.