LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Howard Hughes: Planes
built 230 days ago
As a young man, Hughes evidently contracted syphilis, and in his later years he was plagued with neurosyphilis, which is marked by a degeneration of brain cells that can lead to paranoia and other symptoms. In addition, as a test pilot Hughes was involved in numerous plane crashes that some researchers presume resulted in brain injury. The most serious accident occurred in 1946 when an XF-11 reconnaissance plane he was testing for the Air Force crashed, leaving him with massive injuries that caused him pain for the rest of his life. Hughes, who eschewed alcohol and tobacco, was forced to take medications to alleviate his pain. An addiction to codeine, a prescribed painkiller made from opium, began at this time and continued for the remainder of his life.
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Hughes ... employed Larry O'Brien to protect his interests in Washington. O'Brien was also chairman of the Democratic National Committee. On 20th March, 1972 Frederick LaRue and John Mitchell of the Nixon's re-election committee decided to plant electronic devices in O'Brien's Democratic campaign offices in an apartment block called Watergate. Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard L. Barker and E.Howard Hunt were later arrested and imprisoned for this crime.
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Hughes meets starlet Jean Peters at a party in Newport Beach, California. He invites the 19-year-old and her date, war hero/actor Audie Murphy, to fly with him to Catalina Island aboard his private plane. According to some accounts, Hughes and Peters immediately embark on an unpublicised romance and are rumoured to have become engaged before splitting in the mid-1950s. There are ... persistent rumours that Hughes and Peters had an illegitimate child in 1954.
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From about 1944, Hughes began exhibiting alarming behavior and a phobia of germs, which led to a mental breakdown. His fear of germs was made worse by a drug habit that included both Codeine and Valium; the codeine had first been prescribed to alleviate pain from injuries incurred in the XF-11 plane crash years earlier. The germ obsession began in his youth (due in large part to an overly protective mother) and steadily heightened throughout his adulthood.
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Hughes suffered a nervous breakdown in 1944 and was critically injured in the crash of his experimental military plane in 1946, but he recovered and flew the huge seaplane the next year. As a result of these aviation activities, Hughes became a popular public figure because his image represented the traditional American qualities of individuality, daring, and imagination. He was named to the Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973.
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[I]n 1973, Hughes cleaned up and went off painkillers briefly so that he could take up flying again in London, England. Hemade four flights in a twin-engine propeller plane, including one over the English Channel to Belgium, and his spirits were high. However, after suffering a fall in his hotel room in London later that year, doctors put him back on painkillers, and his addiction resumed.
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