“Tim’s up against a tough proposition,” said Hunter as they strolled toward the office. “He wants to run a daily column of aviation in his paper and only today convinced his managing editor that it ought to be given a trial. As a result, Tim has to have a column of material ready early tomorrow morning. On top of that, he’s going to do this aviation column on his own time. He wants it to go over big and become a permanent part of the paper and so do I. Down here at the field we think it would be a fine thing and when we saw you were coming in for an over-night stop, we figured you might be able to give Tim some material that would be mighty readable.”
“I don’t think I’ve done anything very remarkable or anything that would make good newspaper reading,” laughed Winslow, “but if you’re willing to have dinner with me up town, Murphy, we’ll see what we can dig up.”
Tim was pleased at the invitation and accepted it at once. He was having even better luck than he had dared dream, and he felt that given enough time with Winslow, the famous pilot would loosen up and tell him some of the experiences he had had in his eighteen years of flying.
Hunter excused himself, saying that he had work at the field which required his attention, and Tim and Winslow got into the car Tim had brought to the field, and started for town.
They talked of the recent developments in aviation and of the great increase in the number of air mail lines, but it was not until they were at dinner that Winslow really started to unburden himself in answer to Tim’s questions.
“When did I start to fly?” mused the veteran of the skyways. “Why that’s so long ago I’ve almost forgotten the date. You young fellows think of flying as a development since the war, but I started flying back in 1912 in the days before we had ailerons on the wing tips and used to warp the wings of our planes to control them.”
“You’ve flown more than anyone else, haven’t you?” queried Tim.
“I believe I have,” was Winslow’s quiet reply. “My record book shows more than 12,000 hours in the air for a little better than 1,400,000 miles. That would be a long time and a long ways if it were a continuous flight,” he smiled.
Tim liked Winslow when he smiled. There was nothing of the boaster in this man who was the king of the air. His brown hair looked a little faded from exposure in thousands of hours of sun and wind and storm, and there were decided wrinkles on his face, but his eyes were a clear brown that invited confidence in their owner.
When Tim mentioned the air mail, he struck an especially responsive chord in Winslow’s mind, whose life, for the last ten years, had been a part of the mail. He had flown the first mail plane from New York to Washington and later had been one of the pioneer flyers on the transcontinental.