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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 – caricature of a man wearing glasses and a suit and tie, tapping at a 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 the dwelling place on a hillside overlooking the mud flats, the day, 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 Traut 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
[[missing text]]
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 the job offer made by Lou Unger, superintendent at Holtzwasser'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 "Dock backspace" 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 tried 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?]]
[[missing text]]
[[motor?]] torn loose from it moorings and which bounced hither 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
Kinloch field in 1911 Kearney's mount was a creaky crate of a plane which should come into his possession from some unknown source and this he was trying to tuneup 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 that in there he undertook to give a private exhibition to win the plaudits of those Missouri belles. He got the machine off the ground, missing mortar and all, but he could not lift the sagging playing over a fence that blocked one end of the field. The undercarriage caught the fence and somersaulted plain, motor and pilot into an almost unassortable tangle.

But to get back to North Island in the winter of 1912-1913. 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 [[text missing]]

BUD MORRISS LEAVES BENOIST TO PUBLISH AERO AND HYDRO
[[image – man in suit and tie poses in front of a biplane with the name Benoist on it]]

Morriss at Kinloch Field
ST. LOUIS, Sept. 1, 1915 (E. B.) — P. G. B. (Bud) Morriss, 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 see him go."
The new publisher of Aero and Hydro, who supercedes E. Percy Noel, the founder of the publication, is said to have begun 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, 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 the 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 on, he found, was having financial difficulties, and so he entered the employee 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