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At age fifty plus, some people started telling Captain Baldwin that he should have sense enough to stay on terra firma. He couldn't care less for that type of advice. He decided that planes were the coming thing. [[strikethrough]] and that [[/strikethrough]] If they had a future, dammit, he had a future with them. Very well. He learned to fly.  He built himself the first all metal [[strikethrough]] matrix [[/strikethrough]] plane ever seen in the U.S....He confounded the experts with such a masterpiece of heresy as metal wings. True, he had a Helluva of an idea. Years and years ahead of the times. Unfortunately stabilizers hadn't been invented and doing a balancing act with his aptly named, "Red Devil" truthfully gave the pilot one Helluva time.

Mineola Field became my established home base. All my exhibition flights were booked out of there.  Between performances, I, as did other aviators spent as much time as possible polishing flying skills. Many famous flyers based there. [[strikethrough]] and [[/strikethrough]] I was very proud and humble that I was their associate and friend.

At that time, Doctor Henry Walden, a dentist of New York City built the first Monoplane in America. He hangered at Mineola and operated out of there.  The good Doctor also had ideas about planes. These ideas, while many of them were later to be proven both sound and practical, at that early pioneering stage were close to one way tickets to oblivion.  He'd try anything...almost!  The results, on most occasions were somewhat hilarious. I got involved with him and the dark wings of disaster brushed so close that the humor of the situation completely eluded me.

It was customary, in those simple days of early flying, to maintain an altitude of two or three hundred feet. As anyone knows this is a distance that is dangerously close to the ground. There is no maneuver space [[strikethrough]] and [[/strikethrough]]  If anything goes wrong the clouds to run to and hide in just aren't available. But back to the Doctor.