Day Of The Daredevil

FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE WERE at the marina on the edge of San Francisco Bay, staring up in rigid fascination as Lincoln Beachey, his plane horrifyingly shorn of it wings, fell like Icarus from the winter sky. Beachey would have enjoyed their sudden silence. He often said they only came to see him die.

Lincoln Beachey was the hottest flier and the biggest showoff in the world. He had floated around the Washington Monument in a wind-tossed dirigible, circled above a crowded bullring in Mexico City, and landed a fifty-two-foot cigar-shaped lemon-yellow “rubber cow” smack in the middle of Manhattan’s Battery Park during the Tuesday lunch hour, later impaling the explosive and foul-smelling gasbag on the spike of a harbor buoy in the East River. The self-same Lincoln Beachey, after learning to pilot heavier-than-air machines, had crash-landed his aircraft on parked cars, millponds, sand dunes, frozen rivers, and—most disastrously—a row of spectators perched on the ridge pole of a tent.

Beachey had flown (and crashed) inside an unfinished exhibition hall. He had flown (and crashed repeatedly) at Glenn Curtiss’s flying school in upstate New York. He had flown (and pretended he was going to crash) while wearing a blonde wig in imitation of Hélène Dutrieu, the “Girl Hawk of France.” He had raced around a cinder track ten feet above the helmeted head of Barney Oldfield, the auto driver. He had pitched baseballs from his plane to a catcher on the ground, had shot ducks and bagged his kill while skimming the surface of a lake, had touched his landing gear to the tops of cars in the Chicago Loop, and had skipped along the engine of a moving train. He had swooped through clouds of mist below Niagara Falls and had come up (barely) with moisture dripping from his fragile wings and a carburetor coughing water. He had been the first—or almost the first—to accomplish the perilous maneuver called looping the loop, and then had repeated the trick so many times that even his press agent lost count. No other flier generated such publicity. His performances at air meets, fairs, and races were boldly advertised: BEACHEY FLIES 3 P.M. RAIN, SHINE OR CYCLONE . He had flown, it was claimed, above the open mouths of seventeen million admirers in 126 cities in a single year.

The throng along the San Francisco shore that Sunday afternoon in March 1915 waited for almost an hour while a Navy diver from the battleship Oregon searched the murky bottom. When a winch finally brought the broken aircraft to the surface, everyone could see that Beachey was still belted into his seat. A sigh went through the crowd, and men took off their hats. To many it seemed to be the end not only of Lincoln Beachey’s giddy, glorious life but also of the lovely, carefree Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which had brought him home to die.

The Panama-Pacific aspired to be what Benjamin Ide Wheeler, the president of the University of California, called “a university of current information,” and it was the first world’s fair to deliberately exploit the entertainment value of aviation. At Chicago’s monumental Columbian Exposition in 1893 there had been an international conference on aerial navigation, but it was an indoor gathering of engineers and inventors, pondering the overwhelming problems of flight: how to get off the ground, how to propel a “plane” swiftly enough to remain aloft, how to maintain equilibrium while floating in the air. The distinguished delegates did not regale the public with scary fly-overs or horrifying crashes.

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION, IN ST. LOUIS in 1904, staged an “Aeronautical Competition” with $200,000 in prizes, most of which went to the builders of kites and gliders, dirigibles and balloons. Roy Knabenshue, a balloonist from Toledo, Ohio, and Thomas Scott Baldwin of San Francisco won medals for their “dirigibility.” Alexander Graham Bell showed off an enormous tetrahedral kite that could loft a grown man into the clouds; a pilot named William Avery took off in a new glider that was capable, if given a running start, of making an impressive flight; and Lincoln Beachey, who had just turned seventeen, was among a flock of adventurous kids who clambered onto wooden platforms dangling under the bellies of silken bubbles filled with gas and drifted across the Mississippi River into southern Illinois, seeking thrills and cash awards. Dozens of fanciful flying machines were on display, but most of them offered more promise than performance.

To the conservative San Francisco businessmen who were planning the Panama-Pacific Exposition a decade later, the idea of hiring a stunt flier to excite the customers sounded crass and dangerous. The point of the exposition, after all, was not to demonstrate the latest ways to kill yourself but to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal and the rebuilding of the city of San Francisco, which had been ravaged by earthquake and fire in 1906. The exhibits, in the grand tradition of previous world’s fairs, would glorify the accomplishments of Euro-American civilization—steam railroads, industrial machines, the exploration and capture of Africa, the colonization of Asia, the conquest of western America and the Pacific islands, the inventions of nitroglycerin, petroleum fuel, automobiles, telephones, pasteurized milk. The progressive, experimental science of aviation would have its own exhibit hall, filled with monoplanes, biplanes, and triplanes, wooden propellers, and translucent parchment wings. How could the antics of a braggart like Lincoln Beachey, somersaulting overhead in a noisy, fragile craft that resembled an enormous dragonfly, fit in with these educational and scientific intentions?

Given the condition of the world that year, with seventeen European nations hurling artillery shells at one another’s soldiers, the optimistic premises of the exposition had been severely shaken. Six months before the opening, Germany had invaded Belgium. When reporters asked the president of the exposition whether the show would be canceled, he gamely answered that the mission of the Panama-Pacific would be “to keep the torch of civilization burning.”

All the same, the mood of the Panama-Pacific was tinged with melancholy. Gone, or soon to be gone, were the splendid, magisterial confections of the nineteenth century, the pink and silver empires of Czar Nicholas, Queen Victoria, Emperor Franz Josef, and Sultan Abdul Hamid. Even the muscular young American republic, which had spread its blessings from sea to sea, seized Cuba and the Philippines, sent its navy around the globe, and built the unbuildable Panama Canal, seemed to be losing its sense of bouncy optimism and moral certainty. By no mischance, the most expressive structure at the Panama-Pacific was the Palace of Fine Arts, which the architect Bernard Maybeck had designed as a nostalgic evocation of antique magnificence, a vision of grandeur in decay.

Like most San Franciscans, however, the men in charge of the Panama-Pacific Exposition were disposed to frolic, not to mope. Let the palaces and courtyards of the dream city be suffused with wistful memories—but inside, let there be racy shows and boisterous dance halls, stylish clothing, spicy foods, and naughty paintings of underdressed young women. Let there be strong drinks, glittering parades, band concerts, and fast-car races. Above all, let there be heart-stopping aeronautical gymnastics. Let the arrogant, uncouth, and inappropriate Lincoln Beachey—who was, after all, a San Francisco boy, a local hero- be hired (at the staggering price of $1,500 a performance, six performances a week) to thrill and terrify the patrons. In any case, there was no stopping these mad aeronauts from showing off, nor curious crowds from watching them. As Beachey’s press agent, Bill Pickens, put it when they lifted Beachey’s shattered aircraft from the bay: “He was a professional daredevil. Professional daredevils never quit.”

Little more than a decade had passed since Orville and Wilbur Wright took wing at Kitty Hawk. The glories and hazards of aviation had captured the imagination of every American, although most had never seen an airplane in flight and practically no one had ever flown in one. In the early 1910s flying was thrilling and expensive, a sport for international playboys with peculiar names like Alberto Santos-Dumont, John B. Moisant, and Adolphe Pégoud. Rich people toyed with the game, lounging in wicker armchairs on the porches of exclusive little clubs in Deauville and on Long Island, watching the impetuous aeronauts at play. The Aero Club of America, in Mineola, New York, ran along the lines of a private racing stable. It numbered Vanderbilts and Mêlions among its members, excluded newspaper reporters and women, and screened out undesirables like the quarrelsome Wright brothers. For ordinary folk, aviation consisted of the occasional opportunity to watch some rash young fellow in a light-winged biplane flying above the wooden benches of a county fairground. Family newspapers relegated the activities of such lunatics as Lincoln Beachey to the sports pages.

“Aeronauts” were cranky and alarming, easy to worship and hard to understand. A few were somber, ambitious engineers, like Glenn Curtiss, who flew for time and distance records, worked compulsively to lower the weight of gasoline engines, and dressed unfashionably in fisherman’s waders, a leather jacket, and motorcycling goggles. Others were flashy butterflies like Harriet Quimby, who piloted her biplane costumed in a mauve one-piece satin harem suit, pearl necklaces, silk scarves, and a purple turban. For men the standard costume was a warm woolen suit topped off with a golfing cap, the bill turned backward. Wilbur Wright would simply reverse the visor of his cap, put on a pair of goggles, and close the collar of his coat with a large safety pin, while Hélène Dutrieu would climb into her Farman biplane attired in gray woolen slacks, leather gauntlets, and an angora wool skating cap. On festive occasions Lincoln Beachey affected a Homburg hat.

NO ONE HAD A CLEAR IMPRESSION OF WHAT SIZE, color, age, or sex an aeronaut should be. (It was not even settled what a female of the species should be called; some favored aviatrix , while others came down on the side of aviatrice .) For practical reasons most fliers, like jockeys, were small and thin. By similar logic most fliers also were mad. Their chances of dying within a few months after their first flight were said to be better (or worse) than nine out of ten, and they knew it. Most of them, while growing up, had been the kind of kids who frequently fall out of trees. Lincoln Beachey’s mentor, Tom Baldwin of dirigible fame, had grown up in a traveling circus, performed as an acrobat, wire walker, and parachute jumper, and in 1888, at age twenty-one, taken off from Denver in a hydrogen balloon of his own design with the object of riding the winds all the way to the Atlantic coast. As for Beachey, he was thirteen when he left home in San Francisco to apprentice himself to a balloon maker in Roy Knabenshue’s hometown of Toledo. He had flown his first dirigible from a picnic ground in Oakland at seventeen, and for the next five years had toured North America from the Caribbean to Canada, steering a succession of one-man blimps over the heads of squealing crowds.

“When you get into the air, you get the intoxication of flying,” a daring young flier named Ralph Johnstone told a reporter in Denver. “No man can help feeling it. Then he begins to flirt with it—tilt his plane into all sorts of dangerous angles, dips, and circles. This feeling is the trap it sets for us. The airplane of the future will be created from our crushed bodies.”

Three days later, at twenty-four, Johnstone contributed his own crushed body to the cause. His admirers swarmed the wreckage, tore away pieces of the shattered wings, and snipped tatters from the dying man’s clothing. One worshiper got hold of a splintered strut that had pierced Johnstone’s chest and ran off, waving his bloody trophy.

Johnstone was one of thirty-seven prominent fliers killed in 1910, a bacchanalian year for the intoxication of flying. That January a pair of enterprising Californians—an actor named Dick Ferris and Henry Huntington, the electricrailway magnate—sponsored the first international aviation meet ever held in the United States. Records were broken, fame was tasted, and glittering prizes were won. Roy Knabenshue and Lincoln Beachey achieved the unprecedented speed of sixteen and a half miles per hour in a dirigible race, but the meet was dominated by another pair of aeronauts flying heavier-than-air machines: gasoline-powered, propellerdriven, double-winged, one-man aeroplanes.

The fliers were Glenn Curtiss, of Hammondsport, New York, and Louis Paulhan, of France. Watching them, Lincoln Beachey realized that he had been chasing immortality in the wrong vehicle. He turned to Knabenshue, his partner in countless dirigible flights, and said, “Roy, our racket is dead.” After a few more exhibitions in his awkward, slowmoving blimp and an unsuccessful attempt to build his own airplane, Beachey signed on as a mechanic and camp follower in the touring aviation group that Curtiss had created to show off his flying machines. Now and then Curtiss would permit him to take off in a single-seater, although Beachey ended almost every flight with a bone-bruising, propellersnapping crash.

“No one could understand why Curtiss was allowing him to wreck so much equipment when he was so backward in learning to fly,” the aviation historian Harold E. Morehouse observes. The reason undoubtedly was that Beachey’s lack of common sense gave clear evidence that he suffered from the divine madness of a test pilot, and Curtiss needed more test pilots. Within a few months Beachey had mastered the art of landing most of the time without breaking anything, and he immediately became a leading performer in Curtiss’s exhibition team, demonstrating aircraft to skeptical Army commanders in Washington and flying one of Curtiss’s new biplanes in a well-publicized reenactment of the famous dirigible flight around the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument.

It was on the Curtiss exhibition circuit that Beachey made his celebrated dive through the mist of Niagara Falls and perfected his “scenic railway” stunt, a series of jackrabbit bounces over invisible hurdles in a Curtiss Pusher, a sort of winged bicycle with its engine and propeller in the rear. At the historic international air meet in Chicago in August 1911, only three months after he had qualified for his flier’s license, Beachey set a new altitude record of 11,642 feet by topping off his gasoline tank and flying up as steeply as possible for an hour and three-quarters until he ran out of fuel. The climax of his daily performance was a vertical drop from about 3,000 feet with his engine off. Spectators screamed and fainted. A few were overcome with nausea. At the conclusion of the nine-day meet Beachey collected more than $10,000 in prizes. By the end of the year he had made $65,000 for Curtiss, ample compensation for the several airplanes he had shattered.

As it must to all people of wealth and fame, public relations came to Lincoln Beachey. The Curtiss flying group employed a sports promoter named William Hickman Pickens, who had been hawking his own skills as a dirigible pilot until four of his ships ended up, in his words, “as Christmas ornaments on church steeples in widely distributed sections of America.” During his travels on the “pumpkin circuit” of country fairs, Pickens had learned every tactic of the game he called “accelerating sentiment.” To accelerate sentiment for Lincoln Beachey, Pickens created a tantalizing name for every stunt in Beachey’s repertoire: the Dutch Roll, the Ocean Roll, the Turkey Trot, the Figure Eight, the Dip of Death. He guided Beachey into noisy rivalries, death-defying tests of skill, and playful disturbances of the peace, and Beachey, with his naturally snarly disposition and his consuming yen for recognition, cooperated by buzzing crowded streets in the Chicago Loop, firing off open letters advising the government to put more money into aviation, and counseling other aviators not to risk their lives by trying to duplicate his tricks. He joined his fellow Californian Glenn Martin in a highly publicized bombing raid on a wooden fortress rigged with remote-controlled flash powder and sacks of flour that erupted into realistic smoke. In a daring experiment he deliberately threw his plane into a tailspin to prove his hunch that you could pull out of the fatal vortex by steering into the spin, as a skilled driver would when skidding on slippery pavement.

BEACHEY’S MOST IMPRESSIVE STROKE OF SENTIMENT acceleration was his Declaration of Premature Retirement, a gambit employed to good effect before and since by innumerable actresses, concert performers, and professional athletes. He first announced he was quitting in the winter of 1913. As spring came around and the public’s attention wandered, he reiterated his determination to quit every form of flying. He was consumed with remorse, he disclosed, for causing the deaths of brother aviators who had died “trying to out-Beachey Beachey.”

The Toronto Star , in a widely circulated article under Beachey’s by-line, explained the whole sad story. Tempted by an offer of a $100,000 contract to perform in Europe, Beachey said, he had chosen instead to give up flying because he could no longer bear to be “the servant of Death.”

“There was only on thing that drew [audiences] to my exhibitions,” Beachey wrote. “It was the desire to see something happen—meaning, of course, my death. The odds were always against my life, and I got big money from it. I made up my mind that if I did tumble from the air, I did not want my final bump to stamp me as a piker. I wanted to drop from thousands of feet. I wanted the grand stands and the grounds to be packed with a huge, cheering mob, and the band must be crashing out the latest rag. And when the ambulance, or worse, hauled me away, I wanted them all to say as they filed out the gates, ‘Well, Beachey was certainly flying some.’”

The article was illustrated with cuts of fatal crashes, diagrams of dangerous stunts, and a cartoon of Beachey, piloting a tiny monoplane, pursued by a skull-faced Reaper on the back of a giant bat.

That summer Beachey went on the vaudeville circuit, showing movies of his flights and delivering uninspiring lectures about flying. Aircraft magazine said it was high time the obnoxious fellow grounded himself: “Beachey and other circus performers of the air have been, to a large extent, the actual cause of the slow growth of aeronautic interest in this country… . With such reckless aviators as Beachey retired, the movement should make more substantial and rapid progress than ever before.”

Beachey’s retirement lasted less than half a year. Pickens spent the interlude designing and printing billboards that showed his client performing a fanciful midair somersault called a loop-the-loop, which was generally thought to be impossible because the engine would stall at the top. Glenn Curtiss, meanwhile, was Grafting a biplane especially suited to looping, while in Europe the French ace Adolphe Pégoud had achieved what he and his witnesses claimed was a perfect, first-time-ever loop-the-loop.

Pégoud had performed an outside loop: diving steeply, turning upside down at the bottom of the loop, gradually lifting the nose until the plane appeared to be standing on its tail, then continuing in a circular path until the plane was upright once more. Beachey would perform a different stunt, the inside loop, in which the plane is upright at the bottom and inverted at the top. Besides being easier on plane and pilot, the inside loop allowed Beachey to fly lower, making his performances even more hair-raising. No American would fly an outside loop until Jimmy Doolittle in 1927. Still, at a time when any sort of upside-down flying was scarcely to be believed, few people cared about such fine distinctions.

In October the servant of death began flying again at the Curtiss aviation school. His first exhibition in the new plane that Curtiss had designed for looping ended in a hideous accident. Beachey’s foot slipped off the control pedal, and the wheels of the aircraft grazed the ridge pole of a canvas hangar, where several spectators had perched to witness his demise. A woman of twenty-one named Ruth HiIdreth was killed, her sister was maimed, and two young naval officers who had been sitting with them were thrown to the ground and badly injured.

Beachey landed the plane roughly and limped away. Neither he nor the aircraft was lost to service. Six weeks later in San Diego, flying the rebuilt and redesigned Curtiss looper, Beachey made the first loop-the-loop in North America. Over the next several months, he looped the loop, spiraled, spun, and dived from 8,000 feet in exhibitions up and down California. While the ink was hot, so to speak, Bill Pickens sent telegrams over Beachey’s signature to Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy, and Lindley Garrison, the Secretary of War, offering Beachey’s services to explain what was wrong with the government’s aviation program.

On New Year’s Eve 1913, with the Panama-Pacific Exposition buildings under construction, Beachey taunted the morbid fears of his public by flying his Curtiss looper through the gaping doors of one of the exhibit halls and landing on the floor. The event was billed as the world’s first indoor flight. Like many of Beachey’s cutups, it ended in a crash when he skidded and hit the far wall. “Misgauged it,” Beachey called over his shoulder as he sauntered away.

DURING THE YEAR THAT FOLLOWED—THE YEAR before the exposition in San Francisco—Pickens accelerated the fortunes of his two most prominent clients, Beachey and Barney Oldfield, by pitting them in ground-air races on cinder tracks around the country. In Denver, where there were too many trees around Overland Park, Oldfield entertained by circling the track in a Fiat race car, making one-mile time trials and throwing up a great deal of dust. Beachey flew a few hundred feet above the crowd, turning midair loops. He did not knock anyone off the grandstand.

Several months before the exposition opened, Beachey went to San Francisco and got on the payroll. He brought along the indispensable Pickens and an experienced team of mechanics, including his older brother, Hillery; Arthur Mix, a brother of the future cowboy actor Tom Mix; and Warren Eaton, a nationally known aircraft designer. Eaton had built Beachey’s durable Little Looper , a clipped-wing Curtiss-style pusher equipped with a light, air-cooled Gnome rotary engine from France, which had replaced Beachey’s Curtiss-built looper in the spring of 1914.

The Little Looper , with Beachey at the controls, was as frisky as any biplane on earth. It even bested Barney Old-field’s race car at some of Bill Pickens’s theatrical competitions. But Beachey, as usual, was restless for a new challenge. He ordered Eaton to build another plane, this one on the lines of a notoriously undisciplined German monoplane called the Taube (dove). Fully fueled with a 21minute supply of gasoline, the Beachey-Eaton-Taube would weigh only 585 pounds. Its walnut propeller would be 8 feet in diameter, its wingspan 26 feet. At full throttle it would be capable of reaching 104 miles per hour—even more than that, perhaps, in a vertical dive. As for its having only a single plane, or wing, that was either a blessing or a curse, depending on your understanding of aeronautics. Louis Blériot, the French ace, had flown a monoplane across the English Channel six years before, yet some engineers still argued that a monoplane was intrinsically unstable, inherently unsafe.

ON FEBRUARY 21 BEACHEY’S LOOPER FLEW OVER the exposition grounds, trailing billows of creamy smoke and releasing a flock of white doves to spatter the official opening ceremonies. Meanwhile, he had begun secret trials of his monoplane at an airstrip owned by his close friend Silas Christofferson on the ocean beach southwest of the city. Christofferson, who had been the first pilot to fly nonstop between San Francisco and Los Angeles, was no better than Bill Pickens at keeping secrets. He hosted an “upside-down” dinner party in Beachey’s honor at a mansion on Van Ness Avenue. The guests were strapped into their chairs, and the courses were served in reverse order, nuts to soup.

Beachey decided to show off his new plane on Sunday, March 14. The exposition had scheduled a full program of free concerts by the Hawaiian Glee Club, the French Band, the Philippine Constabulary Band, and the official exposition organist and orchestra; at dusk there would be an illumination of the courtyards, followed by fireworks over the water and flickering fans of light from a mechanism called the Scintillator. But to most of the visitors Beachey’s midafternoon flight would be the climax of the day.

Thousands of admirers gathered to watch Beachey strap himself to the open seat behind the engine. He made two short flights, then landed to perform some minor adjustments on the engine. By three-forty, when he took off again, the crowd was almost hysterical. Holding their breath, they watched him climb directly to 6,000 feet. Over Alcatraz Island he dropped halfway to the water in a series of heart-stopping loops. Then, climbing back to 3,500 feet, he plunged at full engine into a 1,000-foot vertical dive. When he reached a speed estimated at upward of 200 miles an hour, he tilted the aircraft onto its back. Spectators standing on the marina could read the letters B E A C H E Y on the tops of the wings and fuselage. At 1,000 feet he began another vertical drop, and at 500 feet he jerked the control stick to return the aircraft to a horizontal position. There was a loud cracking sound as the left and then the right wings broke and flapped upward. The aircraft fell straight down.

Almost an hour passed before a diver found the monoplane. Word passed through the crowd: Beachey’s injuries were superficial. Had he not been belted to his seat, it was said, he might have thwarted death. Art Mix, Beachey’s mechanic, said officials of the exposition had persuaded him to stunt in the untried monoplane because they wanted to give him a medal celebrating his ten years of flight in progressively difficult aircraft. Beachey’s views were never known.

The funeral at the Elks Lodge on Powell Street occasioned elaborate public ceremonies, competing with the day’s attractions at the exposition. The mayor and the president of the exposition were honorary pallbearers. Flags flew at half-staff. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and mourners recalled that Lincoln Beachey had been scheduled to introduce a stunt called the Irish Tango Dip, which he would perform in an aircraft painted green while a five-hundredpiece band on the marina played an Irish jig.

Local kids composed a rhyme: “Lincoln Beachey/Bust ‘em green/Tryin’ to go to Heaven/In a green machine.”

The Aero Club of California appointed a committee of fliers and aeroplane builders to examine the wreckage and the films and question the designer. They concluded that the aircraft had been built to withstand a maximum speed of 150 miles per hour. A protective cowl around the cockpit had shielded Beachey from the rush of air that might have warned him he was diving too fast.

The publicity department of the exposition, like Bill Pickens, became uncommonly quiet. Newspaper editorials charged that callous officials of the fair had risked a human life to pander to the bloodlust of the crowd. The Tivoli Opera House alternated its regular performances of Sunshine Molly with movies of the Navy lifting Beachey’s body from the bay.

After two weeks of more or less silent anguish, the directors of the exposition decreed that the air show must go on. Despite grave misgivings, they retained their conviction that public stunt flying contributed to the advancement of science. To that worthy end they decided to employ another flier—a twenty-year-old named Art Smith, who was scarcely known outside the pumpkin circuit—to carry on Beachey’s scientific studies six times a week above the exposition park. Smith’s research, with which he had recently enlightened the people of New Orleans, involved turning loops at night with flaming torches on his wings. It was said that Smith, in pursuit of knowledge, had looped the loop on dozens of occasions, crashed more times than anyone could count, broken virtually every bone in his body, and made the world’s first elopement by airplane. In private Smith had agreed to risk his neck for half Beachey’s fee.

At a press conference in the hangar formerly occupied by Beachey’s monoplane, Art Smith’s manager, unforgettably named Billy Bastar, introduced the substitute hero. The reporters found Smith “a manly little chap” with the attributes that were thought to characterize an aviator: short stature and a “bird-like nose.”

Smith told the press that he especially relished flying after dark. “Daylight exhibitions are like a pink tea party by comparison,” he said, while the reporters scribbled avidly. “Of course, there are only a few of us now who feel at home in the air, really at home, knowing the air and its ways, so that we can roll about up there among the clouds like a kitten in a basket.”

All around the exposition grounds there were freshly posted billboards proclaiming Art Smith “The Birdboy of Aviation.” For those who found this a painful reminder of Beachey’s “Master Birdman,” the local papers offered alternative sobriquets: “The Human Comet” and “The Young Fox of the Air.”

Twenty days after Beachey’s death Smith made his first flight from the fairgrounds. It was eleven o’clock on a Saturday night in April, and a chilly wind was blowing in from the Pacific. The management, fearful of criticism and public apathy, had let it be known that the philanthropic purpose of the Birdboy’s first performance was to scatter 3,000 free tickets to the Hawaiian Village, the Incubator Babies, and the Bowls of Joy.

The crowd at flight time, accelerated by greed and morbid curiosity, was larger than ever before. Smith had been expecting to do his first performance by day and was ill prepared to be a Human Comet. The Roman candles that someone had hastily fastened to his plane turned out to be giant firecrackers, and they blew the tips off the wings. Smith quickly landed, pushed the aircraft to an unlighted edge of the marina, and covered it with a canvas to hide the damage. Scarcely anyone knew that there had almost been another fatal accident.

THE NEWSPAPERS DID THEIR PART IN GILDING THE new idol. Within a few days the San Francisco Bulletin began printing daily episodes in a sixweek autobiographical epic called “An Aviator’s Life Here Below,” ghostwritten by a reporter named Ernest Hopkins under the editorial guidance of Rose Wilder Lane, a Scheherazade-like manufacturer of serial romances. Mrs. Lane (whose mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, a visitor at the fair, would later write, with Rose’s help, the classic Little House on the Prairie ) knew how to hook a generation of readers nurtured on Edward Stratemeyer’s Tom Swift and Rover Boys novels. Day after day the Bulletin left Art Smith literally dangling in midair, his engine dead, his wings collapsing, a prayer escaping from his ashen lips. Every chapter was illustrated with photographs of the Birdboy, his trousers tucked into the tops of his boots, his cap turned backward, and his mouth frozen in a cocky grin. Resourceful cameramen discovered him atop a dromedary in the Fun Zone, consorting with hula dancers, fraternizing with a rodeo queen, encountering a walrus and an Eskimo. He allowed the Standard Oil Company of California to reveal that he insisted upon Zeroline motor lubricant in all his flights.

IN ESSENCE, SMITH’S LIFE STORY WAS BEACHEY’S STORY, stripped of Beachey’s abrasive egomania and his love affair with death. There was the same boyhood yearning to fly, the struggle to complete a homemade aircraft, the innumerable jarring crashes, the triumph at a major aeronautic meet, and finally the career as a stunt pilot.

“People are not interested in me,” Smith modestly averred through the medium of Ernest Hopkins. “They are interested in my flying.” In words that prefigured Neil Armstrong’s carefully prepared statement half a century later upon setting foot on the moon, he added: “My triumphs are not personal. They are new triumphs for all mankind.”

Readers of the Bulletin were invited to relive Smith’s impoverished boyhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to meet his doting mother and disabled father—an unemployed carpenter who was going blind from sunstroke—and his doggedly loyal girlfriend, Aimée Cour. They learned that Smith, like any normal kid of fifteen, had nagged his parents into mortgaging their house for $1,800 so that he could build an aircraft, and that Smith and a friend had worked on it secretly, night and day, for six exhausting months, in a drafty barn with whitewashed windowpanes. Smith’s father had sandpapered the wooden struts. His mother had sewn cloth coverings for the wings. And when Smith finally tested the plane, it shot straight up, plunged straight down, and broke to pieces in a frozen pasture. The family was left with fifteen dollars in cash and six months to go before the loan was due. (Don’t miss tomorrow’s episode!)

When the bank foreclosed on the mortgaged house, Smith’s mother moved in with a cousin, and his father bedded down in the barn. Aimee Cour’s father forbade her to see a boy who had such dismal prospects. Taking refuge in a tent on the grounds of the Buffalo Bill circus, Smith made do with cornbread and beans, worked on his plane, and practiced flying. “Every time I landed, I broke something,” he recalled.

People from Fort Wayne came out to watch him “trimming the daisies” in his low-flying plane. By charging 10 cents to look inside his tent, he raised $15.50 to replace a landing wheel; he passed the hat for an additional $2.50 to fill the gas tank. He still liked flying.

His final opportunity to restore the family fortune came at a benefit exhibition near Lake Michigan. A rough wind was buffeting the field, but the impatient crowd goaded Smith into ignoring the danger. Three hundred feet up a gust caught the left wing and flipped the aircraft on its side.

“I fell,” he told his readers, “sheer …” (To be continued tomorrow.)

Readers who were unable to endure the suspense could learn the outcome in the theaters of San Francisco, where Art Smith Night, with the Birdboy on stage and fuzzy movies on the screen, sold out the Orpheum, the Tivoli Opera House, and Sid Grauman’s Empress Cinema. Although Smith’s story lacked the power of Lincoln Beachey’s hubristic tragedy, it was an appealing American fable, the tale of a courageous boy who had survived the exhibition in his simple, homemade plane, had won the money to save his parents’ home, and had gone on to fame and fortune at county fairs and carnivals in Beauregard, Missouri; Corning, Iowa; and Middleburn, West Virginia. Triumphs followed at Table Rock, Nebraska, and Clifton, Kansas, and from every barnstorming stop along the circuit, Smith sent home a silver-plated souvenir spoon to Aimée Cour. He was that sort of boy.

Having paid off the family debt, Smith took a job with an exhibition flying group called Mills Aviators, which flew the skies of such urban centers as Bay City, Texas, and Sterling, Illinois. On almost every flight he had an accident. Most of his share of the gate receipts (sometimes as little as $15 or $20) went for repairs. He crashed in rough-mown grainfields and in pastures dotted with trees, surrounded by hillocks, ringed with sandpits, swept by errant winds. The chamber of commerce of an ambitious village in South Dakota paid him the huge sum of $750 for two flights on the Fourth of July, but to learn about the second flight—the one that almost killed him—newspaper readers had to wait an entire weekend.

Five weeks into his serial memoirs, and sixty accidents later, Smith’s courtship of Aimée Cour took a turn that would have done credit to Bill Pickens (and probably reflected the genius of Billy Bastar). Having reached the marrying age of nineteen, Smith determined to elope by air with Aimee, who was eighteen. In Smith’s version of the event, Aimee sneaked out to the Fort Wayne airstrip carrying a parcel wrapped in paper and told him that she had no objection to running away from her parents, but she insisted on bringing along a fresh blouse to wear at her wedding. Then, as he remembered it, he lifted her up to the “extra seat,” bundled her into one of his sweaters, fastened her skirts around her ankles with tire tape, started the engine, and took off for Hillsdale, Michigan, about sixty-five air miles away.

Six minutes later the engine began to skip. They landed in a meadow, Smith telephoned home from a farmhouse, and they lunched on bread and milk and apples under a tree while waiting for Smith’s “mechanician” to bring a new valve. Airborne again, they discovered outside Hillsdale that the stabilizer control was jammed. Trying to land, they flipped over and wound up in the local hospital, where, according to Smith, they were married while lying side by side.

OF SUCH FABRIC ARE LEG ends made; but Aero and Hydro magazine, which conceded that it was the first elopement by aeroplane, said that Smith had actually flown alone from Fort Wayne to a pasture southeast of Auburn, Indiana, where Aimee came to meet him “clandestinely by trolley.” Together they flew the rest of the way to Hillsdale. There, “awkward with cold,” Smith made a bad landing and flipped both of them out of the aircraft, although “neither was hurt.”

“Gee! It was grand and I can hardly wait for another chance to try my hand at aviating!” Aimee told the magazine in an exclusive interview shortly after her wedding. “I clung to the machine so tightly that my arms and hands ached, but I wanted to be sure that I would not tumble. It certainly was a thrilling experience, at that, and I am certain that I cannot forget it for some time.”

On his twenty-first birthday, after two more summers of barnstorming in the South and Midwest, Smith contracted to fly with the ghost of Lincoln Beachey at the PanamaPacific Exposition. He had mastered the loop-the-loop and perfected the art of flying with a Roman candle on each wing, and his view of the future of aviation coincided comfortably with that of the exhibition management. “People have the wrong view of fancy flyers,” Smith said. “They think we are merely circus performers, risking our lives for money until something goes wrong and we are killed. We are more than that: it is the fancy flyers who are demonstrating that aviation is practical.”

All that glorious summer, all that threatening fall, Smith demonstrated the practicality of aviation above the waters where Beachey had lost his life. On a Saturday night in early December he flew over the exposition grounds for the last time. A pattern of lights on the Tower of Jewels spelled out FINIS as Smith dragged fiery serpents through the sky.

No one would forget that moment. Years later, in a memoir of his time as a cub reporter in San Francisco, the newspaper editorialist Robert L. Duffus recalled: “As our train pulled out of the Third and Townsend Street station, bound for PaIo Alto, my wife, sitting by the window, pointed at the sky, above the loom of the city lights: there was Art Smith shooting off fireworks, leaving a trail of flame as he gyrated, prophesying the golden future of San Francisco and the world.

“The golden future. In spite of the war … it seemed to us then that we had on hand about all that was needed for it. Every time somebody invented a new machine—for instance, a flying machine—the world was that much richer. … What ii Beachey, spirit of the dawn, luminary in the night, died strapped in his plane? Art Smith took his place, and did not die.”

When the United States entered the war in Europe, Smith became a flight instructor and test pilot for the Army. After the armistice he returned to exhibition flying, became a pioneer of skywriting, and even tested an early helicopter prototype. In 1923 he joined the U.S. Air Mail Service, an occupation no less hazardous than the pumpkin circuit. On a winter night in 1926, less than eight months after the service had begun scheduled overnight flights between Chicago and New York, Smith’s plane lost altitude over Montpelier, Ohio, and rammed full speed into a tree. Obituary notices described him as a “veteran civilian pilot.” He was thirty-one.

But it was Beachey, the fallen Icarus, who left the deeper mark on the history of flying and whose image is enshrined in the little pantheon of California, Beachey whose month-long demonstration of incredible daring, arrogant manners, death-defying experiments, upsidedown dinners, and heart-stopping stunts would be recounted over and over through the years by the newspaper columnists and magazine writers of San Francisco’s prolific nostalgia factory. Art Smith, who had outlived the ephemeral exposition, matured prosaically into a “veteran civilian pilot.” Lincoln Beachey, sealed in beauteous death, remained eternally boyish, impudent, foolish, heart-lifting—a spiritual son of Daedalus upon whose wings a generation had swept recklessly among the pillars of a palace, roared heavenward above the bay, hung suspended in a breathless loop between earth and sky, and finally plunged without a whimper into eternity.