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Let us suppose that a man is flying a plane and something goes wrong, how does he get down from up there?" 

Glenn Curtiss was not noted for his sense of humor.  There were fliers in thos days who claimed he had none at all.  I don't buy that idea.  His humor was right off the Calvin Coolidge vine, rare, dry and quite succinct.  He smiled and then replied with all the courtesy of a cavalier, :

"  You must understand, my dear lady, that flying and the men associated with it are still struggling very hard with many of the problems that occur in the developmental stage of any art or industry.  Getting the pilot and his plane down in situations such as you mention is one of the problems that is giving us the gravest concerns.  As a matter of fact, we have a man up there now, he's been up there for three days and we're afraid he'll starve before we can figure out some way to get him down."

Nassau wasn't just a handout for the wealthy. It had another side that few people knew about and fewer cared a fat damn.  These were the dedicated fanatics.  Aside from the Wrights, the Curtiss"s and a few others--at the most half a dozen...who were able to get some kind of financing, there were many young men, equally dedicated who just couldn't promote enough money to carry out their ideas, or to build the planes they had designed.  At that particular moment many of their ideas seemed impractical and quite radical. These men lived for these ideas.  They deprived themselves and their families to try to prove a point.  Many of them risked and lost their lives in their attempts.

We had such a case at Nassau.  The exact amount of the hangar rent I've forgotten but it wasn't much.  To some of these men, no matter how small the amount was, it was still high.  In this particular case the individual was married and had two children.  The entire family lived or rather subsistedf in a hangar with a dirt floor.

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