In 1963, Steve McQueen brought to life the character of the Cooler King in the film The Great Escape, which retold the account of a mass escape from Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Germany, 20 years earlier. The Cooler King, an accomplished forger and escape artist, was based on Hot Springs native Irven Granger McDaniel.
“It’s the greatest story ever told,” said Diana Hampo, McDaniel’s daughter. “It’s one of those stories that has its place and time in history, and it shouldn’t be forgotten.”
McDaniel, who was best known in Hot Springs for his architecture, designed, with his father, the Vapors, Belvedere Country Club, First United Methodist Church, City Hall, Horner Hall and the Greater Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce, “just to name a few.”
“I joke a lot of times that they designed everything in town,” Hampo said. “My dad and my grandfather both have buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, which is really cool for a father and son.”
But to understand his architecture, she said, one has to know the full story of the war hero.
In the early 1940s, before U.S. involvement in World War II, McDaniel was a student at Hot Springs High School and taking flying lessons. He was 17 years old.
“Even though America wasn’t involved yet, he decided he needed to save the world,” Hampo said. “And with that, he forged his birth certificate and went to Canada to enlist in the effort. They needed pilots, so they sent him to England to the Royal Air Force.”
McDaniel enlisted in the Royal Air Force on July 4, 1941, just five months before Pearl Harbor, and was a captain of a Short Stirling Bomber, a four-engine plane with a crewof nine, including himself.
“Keep in mind, he’s 17,” she said. “That just amazes me.”
According to an article in The Sentinel-Record in 1942, after several successful flights, McDaniel was “cited with other members of his crew by King George of England for his courage and skill in carrying out raids across the channel.”
A week later, Hampo said, her father’s story took a turn for the worse.
“His plane was shot down over Germany, but he was sure that he could make it home,” she said. “But when he realized he couldn’t, he had to crash in the North Sea. He was thrown through the windshield and was able to get two of his crew out.”
McDaniel later recounted the story of the crash in an interview with The Sentinel-Record, saying six of the crew were killed by a German Messerschmitt.
“The front gunner, mid-upper gunner and I were the only of our crew to succeed in getting into the dinghy,” McDaniel said in the article, explaining that they floated for four days and nights “subsisting on one malt tablet a day and a very small amount of water, before being picked up by a Danish fisherman.”
The fisherman could not take the men to England for fear of putting his family in jeopardy, so McDaniel and his men were turned over to the Germans in Denmark.
“He had written a letter to his mother on Whittington Avenue, and the one thing he asked the fisherman to do after turning him over to the Nazis was to make sure that letter got to his mother,” she said.
The letter says that he thought he could take his crew home on three engines and tried to get his crew to crash positions before the plane went down.
“Honest mom, I want you all to know I tried to save my crew,” he wrote.
Not being able to save more of his crew was something that always tormented McDaniel.
“He told her he was going to be ‘just fine’ in POW camp and that he was planning to use the time to learn architecture,” she said. “Where he got the idea that he would be able to learn architecture in [a] POW camp, I’ll never know.”
The letter arrived at the home on Whittington two weeks later with no postmark and no stamp. By some work of “the underground,” his letter made it to his mother, Hampo said.
On Aug. 17, 1942, he was imprisoned by the Germans.
“Because he’s a man of good faith, he was somehow put in the camp with an architecture professor from the University of Warsaw,” she said.
Over the course of McDaniel’s time in the camps, Hampo said, he escaped several times.
“His job was to escape, and every time they would catch him, they put him in the cooler - or solitary confinement,” she said. “It was a small, concrete cell with no lights. He was there so many times; that’s where he got the nickname the Cooler King. For fans of Steve McQueen, this is their favorite part of the story.”
In his attempts to escape,McDaniel worked in the forgery department, forging documents and paperwork that those escaping would need to get past guards, Hampo said.
In four of his escape attempts, he made it outside the camp. In 1943, he finally escaped and made his way to the Russian border.
“He came home to Hot Springs after that, and when he got here, he sat for his architecture licensure, and without his high school diploma, he made the highest score in the state’s history,” Hampo said.
For McDaniel, his experiences in WWII were his inspiration for some of his most famous buildings in Hot Springs - he looked for details people wouldn’t normally consider.
“Take the old field house at Hot Springs High School with its near-perfect acoustics,” she said. “That field house was designed after a French airplane hangar, and it looks like it.”
When Hampo’s father died in the mid-1970s, her mother, Ann Stell McDaniel, was passionate about offering original artwork, drawing plans and letters to the actual building owners as part of their architectural legacy, a tradition her daughter has carried on.
“When we can’t find the owners or they don’t really want them, we have placed drawings and blueprints at the [Garland County] Historical Society,” she said. “Architecture can have a tremendous impact on a community. My father’s work was so strong and elegant; I’m proud every time I get to talk to folks about his work.”
Arkansas, Pages 19 on 02/16/2014