The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone Read online

  The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone

  the

  COMPLETE WRITINGS OF

  Art smith

  THE BIRD BOY OF FORT WAYNE

  Edited by Michael Martone

  Michael Martone

  Illustrations by Brian Oliu

  AMERICAN READER SERIES, NO. 35

  BOA EDITIONS, LTD.  ROCHESTER, NY  2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Michael Martone

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  20 21 22 23 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; the LGBT Fund of Greater Rochester; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon for special individual acknowledgments.

  Cover Design: Sandy Knight

  Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  BOA Editions books are available electronically through BookShare, an online distributor offering Large-Print, Braille, Multimedia Audio Book, and Dyslexic formats, as well as through e-readers that feature text to speech capabilities.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Martone, Michael, author. | Smith, Art, 1890-1926. | Oliu, Brian, illustrator.

  Title: The complete writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne / edited by Michael Martone ; [historical commentary and biographical information by] Michael Martone ; illustrations by Brian Oliu.

  Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020. | Series: American reader series ; no. 35 | Includes fictional pictures of skywritings with accounts based on events in Smith’s life. | Summary: “Fictitious biographical snippets that celebrate the sky-written words of early aviation and the life of the man behind them”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020020152 (print) | LCCN 2020020153 (ebook) | ISBN 9781950774210 (paperback) | ISBN 9781950774227 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Smith, Art, 1890-1926—Anecdotes. | Air pilots—United States—Biography. | Aeronautics—United States—History—20th century—Sources. | Skywriting—Pictorial works.

  Classification: LCC TL540.S6 M37 2020 (print) | LCC TL540.S6 (ebook) | DDC 629.13092—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020152

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020153

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

  250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

  Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

  For

  Lynn Cullen, B.J. Hollars, Deborah Kennedy, Megan Paonessa:

  Birds of a Feather

  Contents

  Some Early Ephemera

  Postcards with Captions,

  Undated Photography with Notes

  Panama

  Hell

  The Ampersand

  Benday

  A Father’s Vision

  A Field Guide to the Birds of Indiana

  Mom

  Further Writing

  When

  The Tragic Elopement

  If

  The Unknown

  String

  WOWO

  Scale

  Word Cross

  Instructions in War Time

  Iced Air

  Influenza

  Still

  Mayday, Mayday, Mayday

  O

  Thin

  Birth

  Nothing

  Roses

  The Moon

  Lucky

  The Falling Leaf

  Gas City

  Rest

  The Border

  A B C

  Metro Day

  Terre Haute

  Ohio

  French Lick

  Good Night

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Colophon

  Some Early Ephemera Postcards with Captions, Undated Photography with Notes

  Thought to be the only surviving photograph (photographer unknown) of the first “skywriting,” the word “CLOUD” appeared in the blue cloudless sky above Fort Wayne, Indiana, on the morning of 3 April 1911. The caption on the reverse reads: “Concocted by aviation pioneer and Fort Wayne native, Art ‘The Bird Boy’ Smith (seen here as the period, there, dotting the terminal D) and deployed in his home-built aeroplane, its engine barely audible, the artificial cloudlike cloud remaining decipherable for upwards of a minute before it dissipated, dispersed by the high altitude zephyr.”

  A limited edition of this hand-tinted postal card was commissioned to commemorate Art Smith’s inaugural airmail flight between his home city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the terminus at Toledo, Ohio. The photograph depicts Smith’s signature “skywriting” technique there aloft above his hometown, apparently misspelling the name of his former wife, “Aimme.” Smith insisted that the smoke should be read as a motto for the new communication enterprise, mainly, “Aim Me!” Though rare, examples of this postcard may be found with the airmail stamp hand-canceled by the Postmaster of Fort Wayne himself, Harry Baals.

  The caption on the reverse of this photograph reads: “Photographed over Lake Wawasee near Syracuse, Indiana, on a summer’s sunset in 1916, this ‘skywriting’ was accomplished by the originator of the technique and, at the time, its sole practitioner, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne. It was said that the smoke generating apparatus for the stunt is attached to the frame of Smith’s homemade aeroplane and manipulated by one’s feet. This particular manifestation serves as both artifact and its artist’s signature. The smoke is said to be harmless, benign as the vapors that arise each dusk from the lake below.”

  Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, and the inventor of “skywriting” is captured (in this undated photograph) in the midst of transcribing the final letter of the word “LOOK” to the azure firmament over Ohio, when interrupted by a flight of migrating Canada geese. Notes handwritten on the reverse read: “Captain Art Smith, a veteran of the Great War, reported he took evasive maneuvers when startled by the determined and fast-moving flock in formation, avoiding what would have been certain disaster in the vicinity of Van Wert.”

  Panama

  In July of 1915, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, became an overnight sensation at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco. He performed acrobatic demonstrations several times each day and closed the fair every night with a pyrophoric display generated by flares attached to the wings of his airplane, their flames tracing the spiraling descent of his falling leaf maneuver through clouds of aerial fireworks. The exposition was timed to celebrate the
opening of the Panama Canal, but the city also wished to showcase its recovery from the devastating earthquake of 1906. His celebrity brokered many meetings with visiting dignitaries who witnessed his flying, including Buffalo Bill Cody who gave the young pilot a nugget of gold made into a stick pin and the former Presidents Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, who consented to a short ride in Smith’s biplane over the Marina District. Upon landing, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne and the Bull Moose spoke privately of the Great White Fleet, the Yellow Fever in Panama, and the use of aircraft in war. Smith and the former President had flown over the USS Birmingham, at anchor in the bay. Earlier in the year, the cruiser had carried the commissioners of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to the canal and back, but it was also distinguished as the ship that had first launched an airplane, a Curtiss Model D, five years before. Art Smith and the former President circled the famous ship several times, unable to converse in the roar of the engine, but they agreed, after they landed, how vulnerable it all seemed from above.

  Also at anchor in San Francisco Bay that day was the armored cruiser USS Pittsburgh newly arrived from patrol of the eastern Pacific, scouting, in cooperation with the British, in an effort to deter hostile German raiders. Art Smith would have known the recently rechristened ship, originally named the USS Pennsylvania, was also connected to Eugene Ely, the pilot who first launched a shipboard airplane. Two months after the excursion in Norfolk where Ely took off from the foredeck of the USS Birmingham, he completed the circuit by landing on the afterdeck of the USS Pennsylvania at anchor in the same San Francisco Bay in January of 1911, the first shipboard recovery of an airplane. The feat was accomplished by means of a hook apparatus connected to the tail of his Curtiss Pusher aircraft that captured a cable tethered to the deck. Several months later, in October, during an exhibition in Macon, Georgia, Ely would be killed when he failed to pull out of a dive and crashed. He leapt from the wreckage, seemingly another miraculous survival, only to die seconds later, his spine severed. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was often enmeshed in his own thoughts of wires and wiring. He thought of wires and cables as he rigged the struts and frets of his own home-built airships, turning the turnbuckles and hauling blocks and tackles, and threading the dead-eyes, drawing tight or lightening the load on all the wires and cables threading through the craft, feeling for the tolerances, weaving the wings together, webs of tension and torque, to the point they would snap or sag with slack. “Tuning the rig,” you called it. You tuned, tuning the airplane’s wires like the strings of a musical instrument so that, in the right air, at the perfect wind speed, the ship would sing, riding the harmonic of a glide, a vibrato in a stall. He thought of his own wiring, how the thought of his thought thinking about thinking ran up and down in the beam of his own flesh fuselage, how nervously his nerves transmitted the tiny calibrations he was constantly making as he considered pitch, roll, and yaw. He is flying. Flying. Until. Like that, a snap. And then he is not. Below him now, the City by the Bay, San Francisco, which was hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to celebrate the opening of the Canal, yes, but to also boast upon the city’s recovery after the earthquake and fire in 1906. From above it was easy to see the scars still of the wreckage and the progress of the rebuilding, the grid spread anew on the fill and the altered hills. Easy to see too from there overhead the fault running like a wire up the peninsula. No, more like an incision, a backbone filleted from the folds of meat in the rumbled hills and valleys. He thought again as he climbed of Eugene Ely who stepped out of the wreckage of his plane, thinking, thinking he had survived only to be already dead.

  Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, would often use the still visible ruins of the old Wabash & Erie Canal to navigate a flight through the heart of his home state of Indiana. As he dipped and banked his craft on its southwesterly trajectory, he’d visually leapfrog from the one flash of light to the next flash, sunlight reflecting up from the stagnant waters of the various reservoirs and holding ponds, feeder lines and troughs of the actual boat basins, a necklace of spilled pearls on the green breast of the old prairie. Fort Wayne, his home, was also known as the Summit City (still is) as it occupies the highest elevation on the now derelict waterway running from Toledo on Lake Erie to the north and then to Evansville on the Wabash and the Ohio Rivers to the south. Fort Wayne is situated at the summit of a continental divide. Not as grand as the one further west, this divide separates the watersheds of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. The strategic location guarded the ancient portage between the two, necessitating all the forts built there before the railroads, turnpikes, and, now, highways. Art Smith would be invited home to circle the city as it celebrated, long after the infrastructure’s demise, Canal Days in Fort Wayne, mapping overhead the letters A C A N A L above the confluence of the Saint Joseph and Saint Mary Rivers, the headwaters of the Maumee. The bed of the old canal was the right of way for the Nickel Plate Road and the smoke from its numerous engines always seemed to wash out the day’s lofty calligraphy as it rose up from the grid of streets below. The canal as it grew bankrupt and obsolete sparked many “Reservoir Wars,” where local residents, plagued now by clouds of mosquitoes emanating from the abandoned and stagnating waters of the canal’s remnants, cut the dikes and dams, draining away what was left of the water. After the skywriting, Art Smith would continue the exhibition, diving down into the city, skimming through its streets just above its buildings and tallest trees, enthralling the earthbound crowd celebrating the rapid evolution of transportation, transported, even while fixed at that one spot, by the ease in which Art Smith, their Bird Boy, disappeared, like that, in this new coursing contraption, beyond their imagining.

  Art Smith, years later, was in New York City skywriting. Hired by the Dobbs Hat Company of Fifth Avenue to advertise that fall’s Felt Hat Day, the date on which men switch from their summer weight straws to the felts and furs of fall. For many years prior, the city’s haberdashers and hatters had hired boys to go about the streets on September 15th knocking the straw hats from the heads of neglectful men and crushing them with their feet. Dobbs commissioned a reminder that the time drew near.

  H A T D A Y and D O B B S

  graced the city’s skies that September of 1922, the year of the Great Straw Hat Day Riot. The advertisement posted a few days before the date, September 15th, might have confused the pranksters who began destroying hats on the 13th instead and were met with resistance initially by factory workers near Mulberry Bend in Manhattan. The brawl continued for days. Art Smith had no way of knowing this would be in the future when, seven years before, he flew the former President, Theodore Roosevelt, over the gleaming new grounds of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. The President had left his chinstrapless hat on the ground that day, the Panama Straw made famous by Roosevelt when he was photographed in another machine, this time a steam shovel, excavating a canal lock in Panama. The picture inspired the adoption of the new style hat, displacing the traditional boater and giving it the name of the place, Panama, even though the hat was made (and still is) in Ecuador. Neither the pilot nor passenger could that day foresee also that Roosevelt’s son, Quentin, a pursuit pilot in the 95th Aero Squadron, would be shot down over France on Bastille Day, 1918, his grave marked by a basswood cross fashioned by the Germans from the struts of Lieutenant Roosevelt’s Nieuport. Upon hearing that news, Art Smith would remember the flight he took with Quentin’s father, the former President, and try to recall if he had ever met the young aviator when he was in training and when Smith was instructing. It was unlikely. Quentin’s 95th Squadron’s insignia pictured a Kicking Mule. Not the 94th, they sported the more famous insignia of The-Hat-in-the-Ring whose SPADs Smith remembered. Flying low over the landing field of the exposition, Art Smith used the former President’s Panama as a kind of target, a beacon, his aid in navigating the space, the field lined by throngs of fairgoers all furiously waving their various styles of hats at the aeroplane as it sped back an
d forth above them.

  My research indicates that there is a consensus about who first conceived of the famous palindrome—A Man. A Plan. A Canal. Panama. Leigh Mercer published the sequence in the November 13, 1948 Notes & Queries. Since then, others—Guy Jacobson is suggested—have added words—a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat—to the middle, extending the word play further after the original. Another Guy, Guy Steele, brought the total up to 49 words. And in 1984, Dan Hoey programed a computer to generate a 540-word palindrome anchored by the original. Still, 1948 seems late for the original invention. Puzzle Masters point out that the original palindrome almost writes itself and that there was a veritable renaissance of word games flourishing in America during the period of the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915. The annotations attached to the several feet of celluloid film, a frame of which is shown here, indicate only that Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, flying a Vought VE-7, created, the notes insist, this barely legible message over the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal on the occasion of the canal’s purchase by the federal government and its incorporation into the new “Intra-Coastal Waterway.” It must have been, I imagine, the most difficult skywriting the aviator ever attempted, not merely for its length and duration (it is remarkable that the individual letters remained intact for so long) but also for keeping in mind the oscillating sequence of the composition, its repetitions and symmetries. From the earliest instance of flight and flying, the pilots’ experience was marked not by distance traveled, but time in the air, the hours aloft. Airplanes, it seems, were always time machines, suspending not just gravity, but sequence itself. The loops and rolls then were not just a creation in three dimensions, but also even this fourth one. In the air there was or could be—even as there was economic pressure to make flight a trip, a journey, a vector—no beginning, middle, or end. It is an illusion, perhaps, to be able to go back and forth through Time. But isn’t it about this time that theories of relativity are being hatched and the elasticity of something so vigorously linear and real as Time was being tested by metaphoric trains and the many phases and shifts one perceives of the experience? And later still, Time itself stalls and stutters, demonstrated by clocks recording two distinct measurements of intervals taken by airplanes circling in opposite directions around and around the globe. The film footage here would have been recorded only a few years before Art Smith would crash in the Ohio farmyard. And yet here these ghostly letters are constructed in such a way as to allow light falling through the frames to reignite, moment after moment, the moment in the past of that past, his past, animating the inanimate, and by reversing the film’s direction, back and forth, erase or reconstruct the letters as they bloom and wilt there above the tidal estuary.