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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 and 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 responsive to the prowlings 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 [[end of column 1]]

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ity to accept a job offered me by Lou Unger, superintendent at Holzwasser's.

When Cooper came out form 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.  Copper 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 by underneath but all seemed to be going smoothly until a series of choking splutters broke into the roar of the power plant. The started 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 mo
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[[start of column 3]] 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 saggin 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 winder 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 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 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 not 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 schoolteacherish 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 
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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 sensed 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. [[end of column]]
____
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 has 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 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 tests 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 [[line across column]]
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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, 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 passenger service.

Transcription Notes:
In Column 1 -Presumably a typo in the original, should be hydro-aeroplane? [for searchability]