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56

landing.  I had a wonderful summer.  The excitement and pleasure of these barnstorming exhibitions is something that [[strikethrough]] furnishes [[/strikethrough]] provides recurrently pleasant memories. Not only does the exhibition effort recurr but the highlights of the sideshows and the color and excitement of the busy barkers live again in [[strikethrough]] morony [[/strikethrough]] memory.

Stupidly I never kept a diary of those busy and momentous days but in and out of the corridors of my memory walk many [[strikethrough]] intersesting [[/strikethrough]] interesting and exciting people.  True many of them were truly 'Characters' by our standars but exciting, yes!  There also existed a fine feeling of [[strikethrough]] comardship [[/strikethrough]] comradship [[sic]] among the aviators. Like any tightly knit group we were accused of 'clannishness' and dammit we were!  We bet our lives on every performance and exchanged knowledge and experience simply because we knew that this knowledge and exchange might keep one of our [[strikethrough]] brther [[/strikethrough]] brother flyers alive for one more flight. I felt pleased and humble that the male fliers accepted me as one of them. They recognized the taint...we were all a little mad. It could be that Forrest Davis in a Saturday Evening Post article said it best when he wrote of Glenn Martin...:
:Hippodroming with as hellbending a flock of adventurers as ever trouped from Country Fair to Carnival to Amusement Park. Together they convinced a skeptical but wide=eyed [[strikethrough]] crowd [[/strikethrough]] public that man could fly and, [[strikethrough]] morover [[/strikethrough]] moreover, cut some breathtaking didos with his noisy fearsome toy. Early 'pinfeathered' birdmen they were, and only a few survived the flimsy crates which they so recklessly looped over a thousand County Fairgrounds. There were great names amongst them...Lincoln Beachey;  J.C. "Bud Mars'  Earl Ovington, who first carried the United States Mail by air; Blanche [[strikethrough]] Sutart [[/strikethrough]] Stuart Scott, The "Tomboy of the Air", and Katherine Stinson--names as familiar to the pre war generation as Lindberg's, Frank Hawk's and Amelia Earhart's became later." 

Transcription Notes:
Reviewed - removed the [[sic]] - no comment on formatting, errors etc required