The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
Page 2
Hell
After the Great War, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, remained in the United States Army Air Service as a test pilot flying the experimental craft first imagined during the recently concluded hostilities and now realized in Ohio. One such vehicle was a quadrotor named the de Bothezat Helicopter but known to the flight crews at Dayton’s McCook Field, as “The Flying Octopus.” As its nomenclature implied, the airframe supported four six-bladed rotors, that provided the lift, deployed on sweeping arms of cantilevered girders reinforced by a system of guy wires and turnbuckle stays. In flight, the helicopter very much resembled a roofed railroad truss bridge dislodged by a tornado. Maneuvering was achieved through another twin set of vertical props that the designer George de Bothezat named “steerable airscrews.” Two more fans mounted above the underpowered Le Rhone engine (soon to be replaced by a Bentley in a rotary configuration) were meant to provide additional airflow and cool the power plant.
Art Smith was one of only two men, the other being Major T. H. Bane, qualified to take the contraption aloft. The controls and instruments were particularly complicated. The aircraft mounted dual spoked wheels for banking, a yoke for the whole aircraft’s pitch and trim which was wired with six toggles to adjust each rotor’s variable pitch setting, a half dozen throttles, one regulated with one’s knees, and a set of foot pedals for yaw. The flap-like air brakes were engaged via an umbilical belt attached to the pilot’s waist and activated with a rotary motion of his hips during the landing. Though the airplane itself was scrapped in 1924, the control array is on display at the Smithsonian Institution.
Surprisingly, the airplane flew. Or more accurately, on 18 December 1922, the helicopter hovered two meters above the ground. The contraption proved to be a remarkably stable platform, due, perhaps, to its many angled lift rotors canted toward the center of gravity. In its year of testing, the craft successfully lifted off over one hundred times, eventually attaining a sustained altitude above twenty meters, and was able to carry up to four passengers to that height.
The early test flights demonstrated the craft’s ability to do little more than vertical takeoff and landing. Its lateral motion was dictated by the prevailing wind that would push the craft hither and yon in an uncontrolled fashion. Art Smith, in later flights, attempted to address the craft’s directional deficiency, going so far as to attach his skywriting mechanism with its panel of instruments to map the vectoring he sought to achieve. Pictured here, the result of his experimentation that fall, are the unstable remnants of erratic and abrupt course correction. An abandoned “HELICOPTER,” perhaps, or an aborted “HELLO” graced the sky over Dayton for a moment as the Octopus, generating fog from all of its many spans and booms, left a telltale tracing of its seemingly stable and steady and sustained flight.
The Ampersand
In 1916, in the air over his native city, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, attempted to skywrite an ampersand in support of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s election to a second term. In creating the symbol, Smith wrote later, he also wanted to persuade the President and Congress to take America into the Great War, allied with Great Britain and France, where the use of the airplane in aerial combat had commenced and expanded in thrilling new tactics and aerobatics. Smith believed that the ampersand’s tracing replicated the tortured maneuverings of airplanes while “dogfighting” in the skies over Europe. It was only later, upon reflection, Art Smith saw, in its curlicues and crossovers, that the smoke-generated ampersand over Fort Wayne outlined, in a swift gesture, the character of a proudly perched bird. This insight spurred him to adopt the logogram as his personal symbol and to commission its pattern on several devices of jewelry and to have it embroidered as his insignia upon his flying attire and upon the flanks of the fuselages of his future flying machines.
Benday
In early September of 1916 while recovering in Indiana from the surgery on his broken leg, the injury he sustained in the crash at Sapporo ending his first tour of Japan, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, received word that Benjamin Henry Day, Jr. had died in Summit, New Jersey. Smith was introduced to Day, the son of the founder of the New York Sun, five years before when Smith was engaged by the editor of the Hillsdale, Michigan, newspaper, The Hillsdale Daily Standard Herald, to deliver the paper to the nearby towns of Camden, Jonesville, Litchfield, Pittsford, and Reading. While not writing any words in the sky, Art instead dropped words upon the towns, the newspapers bundled with jute hay baling twine. He circled as the bundle descended, waiting as the recipients below gathered up the packages and waved to him in gratitude. The arrangement anticipated the more complicated logistics the United States Post Office would soon inaugurate for delivering its mail and in whose service Art Smith would give his life a decade hence. Occasionally, while making such deliveries for the Daily Standard Herald, Art Smith would spill his cargo over acres of Michigan, the knots in the twine giving way and a squall of newspaper broadsheets raining down upon the citizens below. There was nothing to be done as the unbound sheaves shifted and spun to the ground. Aloft, Art Smith, conscious that the prop wash of his plane stirred further the thermal meanderings of his spilled cargo, delighted in the notion that all these letters were like motes of dust descending. And though the scored pages flapped like birds, they did not fly or soar but covered the countryside below in shoals and drifts in the open fields and along the fencerows. He watched from above while those below gleaned the litter from the landscape. It was like following the bouncing ball in the new movie cartoon sing-alongs. He had seen one recently animating the song “Come Josephine in My Flying Machine.” Art drifted away from the chaotic commotion below, his memory drifting too. He had met Josephine Magner, the song’s romantic subject, who also performed on the demonstration circuit, parachuting from dirigibles, the blooming silk of her bobbing chute, another oscillating orb through the air…
But we have drifted ourselves here. This entry was to annotate the elliptical pattern Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, produced over Summit, New Jersey, in the fall of 1916, out of respect for the recently deceased Ben Day. Ben Day invented the printing process that bears his name, benday, composed of fields of equally sized and distributed dots of ink that created, when arrayed on newsprint, the illusion of depth on flat photos and allowed for the expansion of color in the Sunday funnies of the nation’s newspapers. The sky that day was cloudless, a perfect canvas for his skywriting. To replicate and apply the benday’s precise rigorous pattern Art Smith summoned all his powers and skills of aviation. The break healing in his aching bone was being painfully knitted back together. Through the throbbing pain, he bore down hard on his plane’s rudder. Afterwards as he flew above the field of clouds he had created, he looked earthward and through the stippled screen of rings, marveling at the illusion of depth, the disruption of space, the perforation of the sky the stencil of dots brought about, the dappled nature of the dimpled shadows cast upon the ground below. The Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh…! He found himself repeating as the sieve of smoke imprinted itself upon his memory and, bit by bit, a dot at a time, upon this empty photographic plate now exposed to this one moment’s moment.
A Father’s Vision
In 1911, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, created, with his new skywriting apparatus, this letter E over Driving Park (later to be renamed Memorial Park, the site of Smith’s own memorial after his fatal crash in 1926) during a celebratory exhibition of his flying skills concluding his first successful tour of the Midwest. Only days before, in Beresford, South Dakota, his prowess in his home-built craft had garnered him $750, enough money for Smith to take a Pullman sleeper home to Fort Wayne. There was more than enough left over to schedule an appointment with the world famous oculist in Chicago. Art Smith’s father, James, had been, for years, going blind, and Art had promised him a visit to the highly regarded specialist in hopes of slowing, if not reversing, his father’s degenerating vision the moment after his flying provided sufficient funds to do so. And
now that time had come. But first, Art Smith led his father out into the meadow of Driving Park and invited him to lie down and gaze with clouded eyes upon the cloudless skies over Fort Wayne. The crowd that had gathered to witness the full program of aerial acrobatics Smith demonstrated now also gazed aloft as the bold letter took shape overhead. Mr. Smith, supine, when asked by a reporter from The Journal Gazette if he could read the writing in the sky that his son in his distant flying machine was still laboring to complete replied, “No. No. It is all blank, empty, a sheet of white paper.”
The crowd gathered that day on the east side of Fort Wayne easily saw the panoramic E, recognized instantly the initial letter of visual acuity floating above them in the way it was also suspended, gigantic, over the tapering column of other declining letters (C, D, F, L, N, O, P, T, Z) found upon the eye charts in the offices of their own, less famous, oculists of the city. The Dutch ophthalmologist, Hermann Snellen, devised his optotypes in 1862 and eye care professionals stateside had long utilized his charts. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, continued his patient calligraphy. His father, spread-eagle on the grassy floor of the park, fixed his apparently unfixable eyes upon the blank slate of sky over his head. His son would say later that he believed his father’s condition was brought on by the sun’s incessant glare, his father working out-of-doors as a carpenter’s assistant, his vision screwed down to mark the fine guide lines of the sawing. Perhaps the oculist in Chicago would suggest some kind of exercises for the eye. Art Smith imagined performing complicated feats of aerial dexterity, inscribing cursive trails of smoke that his father would follow from below, strengthening the subtle optic muscles’ ability to track, the lenses to focus and magnify, to shutter and flood the retinal nerve with informative light. The crowd gathered that day grew fatigued with the seeing, craning their necks to see through the tidal sheets of light. Now, in the corners of their eyes, shadows, perhaps after-images of their staring, appeared. A flock of turkey buzzards, Cathartes aura, circled, circling above them, homing in on the invisible scent of something dying or dead nearby. The citizens of Fort Wayne as they stared at the drifting black birds, floating punctuation to the now new second and even larger letter that eclipsed the disappearing original E, shielded their eyes against the sun.
The third letter appeared to stretch for miles in all directions, curving gently at its far reaches, the fluid vapor seemingly draining over the horizons. Art Smith’s father remained stretched out upon the lawn of Driving Park continuing to report, “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.” And again, “Nothing.” The crowd gathered there (The Journal Gazette had estimated several hundred) now joined the elder Smith on the ground, dropping down in groups of threes or fours, families, clubs, whole curious church congregations. They were weary from the sustained awkward wrenching of their necks from the hours of watching Art zoom back and forth over their heads, composing the expanding E’s one after the other. The field was blanketed with bodies, arrayed like patches on a crazy quilt. Those sighted could see clearly, of course, the long seemingly endless strokes of the letters’ various linear runs. It appeared almost like the sky above them was being plowed, turned over to reveal furrows of clouds. Or perhaps the sky itself seemed to be imprisoned, barred behind the paralleling matrix, a confinement of space captured in smaller squares of space. The sun set beyond the city to the west. And as their collective eyes followed the blooming line heading in that direction, caught there too in the joint peripheral vision of the masses, a clutch of subtle sun dogs flared up, north and south, lodged in the teary corners of thousands of eyes. The optic phenomenon parenthetically haloed the light with more light. These spectaculars were lost, of course, on the blind eyes of Art Smith’s father who, the next day, left with his son for the appointment in Chicago there to meet with the world famous oculist. In a skyscraper office building within the Loop, the Smiths learned, sadly, there was nothing to be done. Later, the finality of the news sinking in, they, father and son, gazed out the window of their room at The Palmer House, out through the slim fissure between the crowded buildings to the sliver of severely clear sky apparent over Lake Michigan, and both imagined for a moment the brilliant future of Art’s life in the opulent and unoccluded air.
A Field Guide to the Birds of Indiana
Although there is no way to say for sure that Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, read much more than the literature provided by the various publishing ventures of the Church of Christ, Scientist, this skywriting (produced with the oily black soot of his initial formulations of smoke) which appeared over the rapidly disappearing Limberlost of Adams and Jay counties in northeastern Indiana, suggests he was familiar with the writings of Gene Stratton-Porter. In order to complete this stunt, he would have flown south from Fort Wayne to circle above the small town of Geneva. This would have been in the fall of 1913 or the spring of 1914. By that time the great 13,000-acre wooded swamp was nearly drained, primordial Lake Engle siphoned off and lowered, leveled into a series of muddy puddles, the forest logged for barrels and shipbuilding. With the vast wetlands vanished, the sky above would have been empty of most native avian species and its migratory fowl diverted further west to the Mississippi Valley flyways. The carrion raptors, however, would have been busy still, scouring the cloudless sky.
Art, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Smith, returned in 1915 to the drained and now cultivated tableland that had once been the Limberlost. The agricultural tiling of the retired swamp was extensive and quite successful, the air that day seems to have been saturated with a thick particulate dust kicked up by the moldboard plowing proceeding below. He would have had ample opportunity to observe the ambitious plotting of township section roads and the platting of the future farm fields that create the telltale signature of Midwestern agriculture. The cardinal, a common bird with extraordinary scarlet plumage and of a species that does not flock, would become the state bird of Indiana in 1933. It would have adapted readily to the now cleared fields studded with the thinned copses of second growth woodlot left to stand, spreading out to the distant hazy horizon. It is thought that this was Art Smith’s first attempt to tint a work of skywriting, reflecting, in the opaque fog, the coloring of its vibrant subject.
During the 1933 debate in the legislature that resulted in the election of the cardinal as the state bird an amendment was offered that nominated the firefly as the Indiana state insect. During the summer barnstorming seasons, his performances concluded in the dusk, Art Smith piloted his acrobatic aeroplane low over the flat Indiana farm fields that once had been the bed of a shallow inland sea. Fireflies in the millions, it seemed to him, sparked off of the tasseled tops of the cornstalks. The swarms of flashing insects glimmered as they rose up in pulsing clouds, twisting drafts of strobing light. The leading edges of his craft’s canvas wings became coated with the light as he struck through the buggy nebula, the light still throbbing in what seemed to him to be some kind of coded message, a blinkered telegraphy. On the ground, the barns backlit by the sunset, he is said to have loved watching the squadrons of swallows juke through the shadows, jinking in and out of the loft doors, swooping up around the silo, strafing the feathering windmill, stalling, then, executing emergency landings into the muddy nests daubed in evening eaves. All around, fireflies mimicked the distant stuttering heat lightning.
The cleared land attracted great flocks of the invasive subspecies of starling. Returning from Indianapolis, flying north over the vast open expanse between Geneva and Berne, Art Smith startled one such flock with the persistent buzz of his new Lawrance J-1 engine. The birds rose up from the gleaned fields below in one great roiling scarf, the massive murmuration wrapping around his craft and then billowing away from it only to react and regroup to form a trailing banner replicating the exhausted compositions of Smith’s own cloudy skywriting, but now in a much more fluid cursive style that, then, blotted, ran, and smeared before stretching out into a sublime serif scattering of contorted and convulsive alphabets. In that cloud of agitated blackbirds,
he answered, writing back in the patient deliberate block printing that the meandering school of birds, in its frenzy, disturbed, stirred up, and ultimately erased, draining the salutation down into a series of mesmerizing vortices.
In 1924, the year of Gene Stratton-Porter’s death in Los Angles, her limousine demolished by a streetcar, Art Smith ventured to Rome City, Indiana, to affix this message above the pristine Sylvan Lake. Stratton-Porter’s second cabin, known as Wildflower Woods, stands on the shore of the lake. She wrote a dozen novels including Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost. Making a silent film version of the Limberlost books brought her to California and to her untimely demise. Wings was her last nature book published when she was alive. Her natural histories of the vanished wetlands of Indiana contain extensive inventories of the dispersed and the devastated flora and fauna of the region. She avidly spoke out against predatory millinery practices and refused to wear a hat. Her photographs of various birds in flight are thought to be the first such exposures taken from the vantage of an airplane. There is no evidence that Art Smith had ever met Gene Stratton-Porter or read any of her many books even though the number in print is thought to be in excess of 50 million. Perhaps there is nothing more to it but that it was spring when this affixation appeared over Noble County, the time when the solidary red-breasted robin, a thrush, separates itself from the northward bearing migratory flocks to establish breeding territories it defends vigorously with its beautifully melodious and memorable song.