I taxied up to a fence corner alongside of a small house and proceeded to tie down for the night. I had gained considerable respect for the wind in Kansas and Nebraska, so after turning off the gasoline and letting the motor stop by running the carburetor dry, (a safety expedient to keep the ever-present person who stands directly under the propeller while he wiggles it up and down, from becoming an aeronautical fatality) I pushed the nose of the plane up to a fence and after blocking the wheels securely, tied each wing tip to a fence post and covered the motor and cockpit with a canvas in case of rain.
By this time the usual barnstorming crowd had gathered and I spent the remaining daylight explaining that the hole in the radiator was for the propeller shaft to go through; that the wings were not made of catgut, tin, or cast iron, but of wood framework covered with cotton or linen shrunk to drum tightness by acetate and nitrate dope; that the only way to find out how it feels to fly was to try it for five dollars; that it was not as serious for the engine to stop as for a wing to fall off; and the thousand other questions which can only be conceived in such a gathering.
As night came on and the visibility decreased the crowd departed, leaving me alone with a handful of small boys who always remain to the last and can only be induced to depart by being allowed to follow the aviator from the field.
I accepted an invitation to spend the night in the small house beside the field.
The next morning I telephoned for a gas truck to come out to the field and spent the time before the truck arrived in the task of cleaning the distributor head, draining the carburetor jet wells and oiling the rocker arms on the engine.
While I was working, one of the local inhabitants came up and volunteered the information that he had been a pilot during the war but had not flown since and “wouldn’t mind takin’ a ride again.” I assured him that much as I would enjoy taking him up, flying was very expensive and that I did not have a large fund available to buy gasoline. I added that if he would pay operating costs, which would be five dollars for a short ride, I would be glad to accommodate him. He produced a five dollar bill and after warming up the motor I put him in the cockpit and taxied through the mud to the farthest corner of the field. This was to be my first passenger.
The field was soft and the man was heavy; we stalled over the fence by three feet and the nearest tree by five. I found myself heading up a thickly wooded slope, which was sloping upward at least as fast as I was climbing in that direction and for three minutes my Jenny and the slope fought it out over the fifteen feet of air between them. Eventually, however, in the true Jenny style we skimmed over the hilltop and obtained a little reserve altitude. I had passed through one of those almost-but-not-quite accidents for which Jennies are so famous and which so greatly retarded the growth of commercial flying during the post-war period.
© Wide World Photos
ST. LOUIS, MO.—FINANCIAL BACKERS OF THE NON-STOP NEW YORK TO PARIS FLIGHT
UPPER ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: HAROLD M. BIXBY, HARRY HALL KNIGHT, HARRY F. KNIGHT, MAJOR A. B. LAMBERT
LOWER ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: J. D. WOOSTER LAMBERT, MAJOR WILLIAM B. ROBERTSON, E. LANSING RAY, EARL C. THOMPSON