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SEPTEMBER 1, 1936 THE MOUNTAIN EMPIRE BULLETIN PAGE SEVEN THE MOUNTAIN EMPIRE BULLETIN JACUMBA, CALIFORNIA JOHN HETTICH ..... Editor-Publisher C. G. ROWAN ..... Associate Editor TEN CENTS PER COPY–ONE DOLLAR AND A HALF PER YEAR Advertising Rates Upon Request PUBLISHED EVERY OTHER WEEK ON TUESDAY ---Checking Up On Things--- [[image - cartoon drawing of man at typewriter]] By John HETTICH (Reprinted by Courtesy of the San Diego Union) When, in the winter of 1911, my parents elected to move to San Diego to escape the rigor of another midwest winter I was extremely well satisfied with their first choice of a dwelling place on a hillside overlooking the mudflats, the bay, and with an unobstructed view of the airplanes circling in early morning practice flights above North Island. For already, back in Missouri from whence we had moved, I had become one of the first crop of youthful aviation enthusiasts who built models and gliders, and sometimes attempted flight, in emulation of the few famous pilots of the day, by such strange devices as leaping from a barn loft while clutching the handle of an opened parasol. And so great indeed had been my enthusiasm for things aeronautical that I had in 1910 trod 12 miles over a country road from Bowling Green, then our home, to Louisiana to see Tom Benoist attempt a Fourth of July exhibition flight at an Elk's picnic held just outside that river town. And I had earlier in 1911, before we came west, wheedled permission out of my father to attend an early aviation meet held at Fairgrounds Park, St. Louis. Now in San Diego almost from the first day that we moved into that house on the hillside I was up early in the morning long before any one else had arisen and parked immediately on the window seat looking eagerly out through the baywindow towards North island to see what I could see. It follows also as a matter of record that, after I had duly been enrolled in San Diego High, that the tempting suggestion of two unregenerate youths of about my age a few days later that we ditch school, and row over to the island to see the planes, was at once acted upon. There was then at the island an [[?old]]-type hyro-aeroplane, forerunner of the flying boat, and a couple of Curtiss planes used solely for training. These were of the type in which the elevator was affixed to bamboo outriggers jutting out in front and with a stationary stabilizing plane similarily carried in the rear. They Earned Their Wings J. W. McClaskey, a gruff-spoken, slightly deaf retired marine officer, was the instructor of the Curtiss school and it was evident from the start that McClaskey was not going to be very responsible to the [[?rowlings]] and queries of youthful enthusiasts. He was busy enough keeping the flying equipment in shape without having to put up with intruders and answer all sorts of insane questions. McClaskey, it was easy to see, because of his training as an officer of marines and because of his deafness, was accustomed to having people listen to him and to act upon his orders, and I rather suspect that the handful of students under his instruction in that 1911-12 winter class really earned their wings. This I say without malice because the ex-marine was certain-up one of the capable fliers of his day. Certainly I had no business at the island and Mac would have been justified in running me off every time I showed up after that first visit. Instead, he simply ignored me and I kept coming back time after time until finally I got into trouble with the high school authorities, further trouble at home and was forced with parental severity to accept a job offered me by Lou Unger, superintendent at Holzwasser's. When Cooper came out from Hammondsport to take charge of the 1912-13 winter class my presence then at the field was somewhat more justified by the fact I was now the "aviation correspondent" of the Coronado Strand, a post created on my mother's paper by myself. Cooper was a friendly, easy-going sort of fellow, about 40, of slender build and approaching baldness. When I mentioned the St. Louis meet to him I was "set." "Specs, here," Cooper told a student group composed of "Doc" Bell, the Japanese, Nakamura, Haldeman von Figglemessy, and a fellow by the name of Stroud, who were loafing around the sheds after the wind came up one day, "saw me fly that old Pine biplane I was telling you fellows about." The instructor was only partly right. I had seen him try to fly it. Three attempts with in-between sessions of mechanical endeavor and strong language had failed, if I remember rightly, to get that crate off the ground. I did not mention this to Cooper, however. He was my friend and I did not want to embarrass him. Surely sometime or other he must actually have flown the Pine, or Glenn Curtiss would not have selected him for his handpicked organization. I let it go as he told it. Looking back at the St. Louis meet, Cooper was not alone in failure at Fairgrounds Park that day. Walter Brookins, a famous Wright pilot of that era, had not been able to go through with a much advertised attempt to carry a bag of mail from Kinloch field, a few miles away, to an improvised postal station on the grounds; and Hillery Beachey, a brother of the great Lincoln Beachey, had made only a half circuit of the course before his fragile Heineman biplane, a hybrid copy of Curtiss and Farman machines, had crashed into a cluster of sheds. It was evident as the Heineman rose that its engine was acting up, but the trouble seemed to have ended when Beachey at an elevation of about 50 feet made a left turn to come back along the south side of the course. Trees and houses were flashing underneath but all seemed to be going smoothly until a series of choking splutters broke into the roar of the power plant. The startled spectators beheld a sudden descent and heard a rending crash. They were thrilled for a moment and perhaps forgot about it the next day. That crash, however, plus a motor torn loose from its moorings and which bounced higher and yon over the aviator's anatomy, caused Beachey considerable agony for weeks thereafter and kept him confined for many days in a hospital. Another crash, which had occurred at Kinloch field about a week previously, and which also was due partly to a recalcitrant motor, and partly to the devil-may-care attitude of one of the era's most reckless flyers, put Horace Kearney on the shelf for some time with one leg so badly fractured that months afterwards he wore a steel brace to reinforce the knitting bone fragments. There should be many who still remember Kearney's San Diego appearances some years ago. Flying a Curtiss-type biplane he took part in an air meet at Coronado, stunted over North Island, and trolled for fish from his ship in the waters of San Diego bay. Kearney at least said he was trolling for fish and that in itself was good for some press comment. Later he lost his life in an over-water flight which was to have been from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Pilot Is Injured At Kinloch field in 1911 Kearney's mount was a creaky crate of a plane which had come into his posession from some unknown source and this he was trying to tune up for the approaching meet when a group of fair young things came to the field one evening and began to twitter about wanting to see someone really fly. Kearney was never one to disappoint, so then and there he undertook to give a private exhibition to win the plaudits of those Missouri belles. He got the machine off the ground, missing motor and all, but he could not lift the sagging plane over a fence that blocked one end of the field. The undercarriage caught the fence and somersaulted plane, motor and pilot into an almost unassortable tangle. But to get back to North Island in the winter of 1912-13. While I have by this time forgotten many of the names of students in that group the impression remains that they were the original "quiet birdmen." Motors had improved and so had design and construction of the ships they were to fly when and if they could get a ship when they finished the course. Yet there would be no practical income producing work for them to do when the last figure eight of the Aero club test had been flown and they were on their own again. They were no doubt doomed, excepting those with substantial private incomes, to barnstorming "exhibition flights" when and wherever a booking was possible. And drumming up trade for their brief appearances, press agents would yammer "John Soandso, death-defying, fearless, superman of the air. See him do the death dip, the death roll, the death this and death that." In apparent unawareness of the ballyhoo that must surely come, these students were reserved, attentive to instruction, serious as to the future of aviation and obviously sincere in a belief it was their destiny to fly. It was cash or glory they were seeking, it was flight. Tells of Stolen Hop There is one of the group I remember well enough. Haldeman von Figglemessy, reputed to be the scion of Austrian nobility, a school-teacherish appearing individual who was one of Cooper's most apt pupils, is the one. "Specs," Figglemessy asked me one day, "can you come over early in the morning before any of the others get here?" "Sure," I replied. "What's up?" The reputed scion of Austrian nobility took me into his confidence. "I want to fly that new plane," he told me. "Cooper's going to San Diego for the night and I'm to be caretaker. It'll be a good chance." The new plane he spoke of was the latest Curtiss model, recently received and assembled from the shipping crates in which it had arrived from Hammondsport. It had a list price of $10,000 and was not intended for student use. "Doc" Bell, who had just passed the Aero club tests, was getting the money together to buy it. Any real flier would have itched to take that plane up and somehow I sense how Figglemessy felt. So to my discredit it was my hand that twisted the propeller the next morning to send him roaring down the field for a 15-minute stolen hop which was completed long before Cooper arrived back at the island. Not until after the landing was accomplished did the full sense of my guilt dawn on me. "My God," I thought all of a sudden, "what if the Dutchman had wrecked that plane?" It had not occurred to me before that chance might bring that ending. BUD MORRISS LEAVES BENIOST TO PUBLISH AERO AND HYDRO [[image - photograph of man beside a plane]] Morriss at Kinloch Field ST. LOUIS, Sept. 1, 1915 (E.B.)–P. G. B. (Bud) Morris, the pioneer aviator who has been actively associated with the Benoist Aircraft company, of this city, for four years has severed his connection and will publish Aero and Hydro, the aeronautical trade journal, Tom Benoist announced today. "Morriss came into my organization in the fall of 1911, along with Tony Jannus," Benoist said. "He is a man of great ability and high integrity, and I am sorry to se him go." The new publisher of Aero and Hydro, who supercedes E. Percy Noel, the founder of the publication, is said to have began his flying career on a genuine Bleriot monoplane, at Brooklyn, N. Y., in the spring of 1910. He taught himself to fly the malhine, it is said. In addition to aviation Morriss has also been active in the field of wireless telegraphy. On March 10, 1911, while assistant engineer if the Marconi Wireless Telepraph Company of America, he received the first wireless signals ever to be received by an aeroplane in flight, and established the first two-way aerial communication. The machine, in which the bests were made, was a standard, single seated Curtiss, with a single plane front elevator control. It was piloted in flight by J. A. D. McCurdy of the Curtiss exhibition company. The equipment consisted of a Fleming 2-element valve detector of the type used by the Marconi company. Four or five flights were made from West Palm Beach, Fla., during which messages were received in the air from the Key West Naval Station, and the Marconi station at Palm Beach, and signals were sent from the aeroplane and received at the Marconi station. Three types of antennae were used during the experiments–a trailing wire, a wire from each of the wing tips to the rudder post, and a cage on the upper surface. Morriss carried the detector in his lap on the flights. He sat on a board stretched between two struts and operated the wireless key with his teeth. Later in the year Morriss left Florida, where he intended to join J. W. Curzon's troupe of aviators. Curzon, he found, was having financial difficulties, and so he entered the employ of Benoist instead. Jannus had arrived in St. Louis, at about the same time, from Washington, D. C. The two men met in a coffee shop outside of Kinloch field and planned a campaign to interest Benoist in their services. Jannus, also, recently left the Benoist company and is at present an instructor at the Canadian Royal Air Force School, at Toronto. His record with the Benoist company is said to have been a brilliant one, including spectacular flights with both land and over-water flying equipment. On March 1, 1912, in a Benoist headless miplane, Jannus piloted Captain Albert Berry aloft when the latter made the first parachute jump from an aeroplane. In the summer of 1912 he piloted a Benoist hydroaeroplane on a 1,500 mile flight from Omaha, Neb., to New Orleans, La. At the outset of the flight Jannus flew the 471 miles between Kansas City and St. Louis in 9 hours and 23 minutes, bettering the time of the fastest express train service between the two points. The remainder of the journey from St. Louis to New Orleans was made in easy jumps and required several weeks. The actual flying time from St. Louis to New Orleans was only 31 hours and 43 minutes, however, October 13, 1913, was an unlucky day for Jannus. On that date, in a 75 horsepower Benoist biplane, he trailed W. S. Luckey (Curtiss), Frank Niles (Curtiss) and Guy Gilpatric (Sloane), across the finish line in the 60 mile around Manhattan Derby. On Jan. 1, 1914 Jannus piloted a Benoist flying boat on the opening run of a St. Petersburg, Tampa, Fla., air pass [[?]]
