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Tuesday Evening, December 24, 1946

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SO WE'RE TOLD
By Hal Johnson

PIONEER IN AVIATION

Forty three years ago, Dec. 17, 1903, the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, of Dayton, O., made the world's first successful mechanical airplane flight from Kill Devil Hill on the North Carolina sea cost, four miles south of Kitty Hawk.  They subsequently built a number of biplanes in 1906 and went to France, where on Dec. 31, 1908, Wilbur Wright won the Michelin prize by flying 95 miles in two hours and 18 minutes.

While the Wright brothers were conducting their early experiments at Kitty Hawk, Fred Wiseman of 1817 Oxford St., then in his early twenties, was fixing bicycles in Santa Rosa, and bike racing with the Bay Cities Wheelmen.  He recalls that the Luther Burbank, the plant wizard who originated the plumcot, white blackberry (which is red when it is green) and thornless cactus for desert travelers, couldn't line up the sprocket and chain it on his bike.  He let Fred do it.

In 1907 Fred Wiseman broke into auto racing and established a record of 25 hours and five minutes from San Francisco to Eureka in a little two-lung gas buggy.  The redwoods were there but no highway and Wiseman's gas crate was the first amphibion, because he forded streams with it, splashing across, then quickly wiping off the water to prevent short circuits.

A year later Wiseman raced at Tanforan, San Mateo County, in a 40-horsepower Stoddard-Dayton and beat such pioneer auto racers as Bill Dingley and Charles Howard.  That victory paved the way for Wiseman to go East for competition.  He drove on the Indianapolis Speedway in short races before that famous track had become a brick course.

The Wright brothers had returned home from France with medals and prize money.  Fred Wiseman met them in Dayton.  After a few minutes conversation with them he knew he, too, was going into aviation.  He returned to California and built his own plane, a sort of a Luther Burbank concoction – a cross between Glenn Curtiss and Henri Farman creations.

As Wiseman explained to us, his plane had all the faults of the Curtiss and Farman models with some of his own combined.  Before he could get his air crate off the ground he had to even the balance by adding several pounds of lead to one wing.  Wiseman's plane was acquired in 1912 by Okalnad's pioneer aviator, the late Weldon B. Cooke, and flown by him at a meet in Oakland that year.  The ship was damaged and never flown again because Cooke had completed one of his own manufacture.  It is one of the two early pusher-type airplanes which are on display at the Oakland Airport and is credited with being the first California-built ship to fly.

The other plane is the Diamond, first ship to fly over Oakland and Mt. Tamalpais and in 1912 International Aviation meet winner.  Capt. L. B. Maupin and the late Bernard P. Lanteri, then owner and operator of the Lanteri Shipyards at Pittsburg, built the plane, using sketches they made on the back of an envelope when they saw Glenn Curtiss fly at Tanforan in 1909.  Most remarkable thing about their plane was that it flew on the first attempt to get it off the ground.  Laneri was the pilot.

Fred Wiseman's first California-built plane cost $10,000.  He talked Col. Elbert J. Hall of the famed Berkeley firm of Hall-Scott Motor Co., which later built the Liberty motors for World War I "Jennies," into constructing a motor for the ship.  The late Ben Noon, Santa Rosa butcher, financed the Wiseman plane.

Those were the trial error days of aviation.  "Barnstorming" pilots drew great crowds which gathered first to see a plane fly and then to be there when a pilot crashed.  Fred Wiseman had his share of crashes but always managed to come out of wrecks in one piece.  He cracked up at the Cloverdale Citrus Fair, had a close call at the Salinas Big Week and gave spectators a thrill at the State Fair at Sacramento.

For six weeks he flew daily at Pismo Beach.  The Southern Pacific trains ran special trains there from Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Out of those original "aerial barnstormers" Wiseman told us that only Glenn Curtis, Walter Brookings and Orville Wright are still alive, as far as he knows.  Brookins broke the world's altitude record July 9, 1910, at Atlantic City, rising above the famous boardwalk to 6100 feet!

Remember Ralph Johnstone?  He made a biplane height record of 9714 feet on Oct. 31, 1910, at Belmont Park and then was killed at Denver 17 days later.  Fred Wiseman was the first pilot in the world to carry mail – he made a trip on Feb. 17, 1911, with letters from the postmaster of Santa Rosa to the postmaster of Petaluma.  That was eight months ahead of Earl Ovington's aerial mail carrying at Garden City on Sept. 23, 1911.

Fred Wiseman was born in Santa Rosa.  His late father, Alexander William Wiseman, and his mother, Mrs. America Charlotte Wiseman who will be 100 years old next April, came to California from Illinois on one of the first trains that crossed the continent.

In 1908 Fred Wiseman married Miss Alice Ferguson, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas H. Ferguson of San Francisco, in San Rafael.  They have one daughter, Mrs. Frederick Manners, who did undergraduate work at the University of California and received degree in art at UCLA in 1935.  She is a well known artist.  Her husband, John Manners, formerly with Boeing at Oakland Airport, is now an executive at LaGuardia Field, New York.  They live in New York.

Mrs. Wiseman's uncle, Thomas H. Ferguson, for many years was a real estate operator, developed part of Thousand Oaks and North Berkeley and large areas at Lake Tahoe.  Mr. and Mrs. Wiseman came back to Berkeley from San Diego just before United States entered the war, when he retired from the Standard Oil Co. after 20 years as automotive specialist which took him over eight Western States.

He quit flying in 1913 when aviation took a slump and "barn storming" pilots couldn't draw a crowd because the thrill of seeing someone in the air had gone.  It wasn't until World War I that aviation began to come into its own.  Wiseman with Miester & Son Co., Sacramento, which had an auto truck assembly plant there, subsequently joined Standard Oil.

Next month will be the 36th anniversary of the famed international air tourney at Tanforan in which the world's greatest airmen competed.  Fred Wiseman will remember that meet – he won the endurance race from such noted aerial racers at High Robertson and the great Lincoln Beachey, both flying for Glenn Curtiss.

Perhaps Col. Elbert Hall of the Hall-Scott Motor Co. will remember that race, too, Wiseman was using a borrowed Hall motor.  The planes circuled low over the grandstand in turning the pylons.  During the last laps Wiseman could see Col. Hall signalling for him to quit because the motor was burning up, but he made up his mind he would stay aloft as long as the engine would turn over.  That's how he won the race.
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Letters TO THE EDITOR

Communications presented here do not necessarily reflect the Gazette's views, but space is provided that democracy may be served.  Writers must give correct name and address, confine expressions to less than 300 words, and must refrain from using this column as a space for venting personal spleen.  The Gazette reserves the right to cut articles to meet space requirements.

Editor:  The recent letter protesting sky advertising appears to me timely and urgent.  It is trying enough to have planes zooming and roaring over our heads when this is necessary, but for man to presume to blazon his foolish wares in the timeless skys is impertinence gone too far.

Isn't it bad enough that, "our rocks and rills, our templed hills," are becoming little more than a background for garish appeals to buy, buy, buy.  Business, Getting On, Financial Success, Bigger and Better Factories, Things, these are our Gods, not beauty of the Earth or of Mind or of Character.  "Without vision the people perish," and there can be no vision where the childish toys that man has made blind us to enduring values.
Faithfully yours,
MYRTLE MARY ADAMS.

Mrs. John M. Adams,
2725 Hilgard,
Berkeley 9, California.
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