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[[Image]]
Turn on your flight power, Santa...
your special day is near. Head for Thal's special gift collection of goods...they'll help you with your selection, then gift wrap all your gifts without charge. Phone the Personal Shopper, 228-6191 or hurry in to thal's, 17 south main.

Mr. Aerial Photographer continued

aged to lift the plane a short distance from the ground. 

But it wasn't enough. A wing tip caught the top of the fence and the plane twisted over and down. Nobody was hurt, but the plane was damaged beyond repair. 

The incident failed to daunt the adventuresome trio. They went to Huntington, bought another plane and started out again.

It was a hot August day as they approached Zanesville, Ohio, in their new airplane.

The motor stopped.

"What's wrong?" Mayfield shouted.

"Motor's too hot." Turner yelled.

"We'll have to glide down!"

The plane soared toward the earth, too rapidly for comfort. It was headed toward a group of farm buildings. The wheels touched the ground and the plane rolled toward the buildings. It halted with the idle propeller resting against a small outbuilding.

"We had to wait for the motor to cool," Mayfield said. 
"Then we pulled the plane toward a larger field, lifted it over the fence and took off again."

The trio had no planned itinerary. They visited towns that looked good from a business standpiont.

Before the tour was over, they had covered eight states and cities such as Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Huntington, Memphis, Louisville, and Wheeling.

"The airplane was still a novelty," said Mayfield. "We were mobbed by the curious wherever we went. The only real airfields in those days were at Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati."

"It was easy to sell aerial photographs. Not because they were so superior, but simply because they were taken from an airplane."

Gregory was advance man for the trio.

He moved ahead, surveyed the towns and took what orders he could get for aerial pictures. If he got enough, he sent for Mayfield, Turner and the airplane.

Once they had an order for pictures, hey had to make sure the photographs were good before Mayfield returned to Dayton to print them.

"We had to develop some of the films in a hotel bathtub," Colonel Turner said.

"We made these particular photographs on a very cold day. To make sure they were all right," he added, "we blacked out all the light in the bathroom, put the necessary development material in the bathtub, put the film in the tub and developed it."

Mayfield speaks of the old days in a sentimental tone. 

"You really knew you were flying in those days," he said. "You could feel it in an open cockpit plane."

"Today, in the closed planes, it's just like riding on the ground in an automobile. You don't get the exhilaration of flying like you once did."

Mayfield told about another experience. Turner, Mayfield and Gregory were driving from an airport into a village when Gregory spotted a greenhouse.

"I'll bet I could even sell him an aerial picture," Gregory boasted.

"Bet you $25 you can't do it in half an hour," Mayfield told him. 

They halted the auto and Gregory disappeared inside the greenhouse office. Five minutes later he was back, waving the completed order form.

"Let's go get the plane," Gregory said.

"We took the pictures of the greenhouse," Mayfield concluded, "and it turned out to be one of our best orders. The proprietor ordered hundreds of copies. He used them for advertising."

"A short while ago, I visited the greenhouse again. After more than 24 years, our aerial picture was still hanging framed in the greenhouse office."

The barnstorming tour was a success. When the three men counted at the end of the year, they found they had taken in $10,000.

The year's expenses took $4,000. 

That left them 2,000 apiece.

Mayfield and Gregory combined their funds and set themselves up, permanently equipped, to take aerial photographs.

This was 40 years ago. Today, his staff numbers 9 and his experiences are countless.

Mayfield has photographed many firsts and one recent re-creation of a first. The Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce reenacted the first air express shipment in November, 1960. All conditions of the first flight were the same, including the frigid day, except that a helicopter was used instead of the Wright biplane.

On the first flight, Phil O. Parmalee, the pilot, took five bolts of silk, weighing 47 pounds, from the Rike-Kumler Company and flew them to Morehouse Martens, a Columbus store (now More-house-Fashion) at a mile a minute. The charge for the original flight was $5,000. It was the beginning of the air freight and express business which now amounts to millions of dollars in shipment each year.

Other history-making events have added to his priceless collection of negatives, but that first flight by Dayton men determined the course of his photographic career. Files filled with aerial photographs reveal Bill Mayfields's life for 45 years. [Red Square]