The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
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Mom
In 1925, flying over North Highlands, with his mother, Ida, on board, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, negotiated a crash landing after the motor driving his de Havilland choked. Descending from two thousand feet, he expertly voplaned his craft to earth. Neither was injured. It was the second such emergency landing he survived with his mother who later said: “I looked at Art and touched his shoulder. When he smiled at me, I knew I was with my boy and I was safe.” Days later, his airplane repaired, Smith took to the sky again to commemorate the event. His mother, safely on the ground this time, blew kisses into the air from her gloved hands.
Observed that day from further west, Art Smith’s homage to his mother read as an exclamation. A farmer harrowing a field off Bass Road, his attention drawn by the pesky buzz of the airplane overhead, called for his wife to come see as the letters appeared there, punctuated by the blotting clouds. A year later, after the crash he would not survive, Art Smith would be laid to rest at the nearby Lindenwood Cemetery. During the interment there, a flight of de Havilland airships would bomb the gravesite with a dusting of flower petals. Ida, it is said, held up her hand as if to receive a homing pigeon. Or a hawk.
Further Writing
One of Art Smith’s earliest aerial attempts pays homage to the inventors of heavier-than-air controlled powered flight. It was composed over the open ocean of North Carolina’s Outer Banks near Kill Devil Hills in 1915 after several trial runs spelled out with a stick upon the sand dunes. Back in 1910, Smith had traveled from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis to see the brothers demonstrate their craft. Returning home, an inspired Art Smith breathed out upon the window of the interurban whisking him north and in the fog now clouding the car’s glass he spelled out, with a trembling finger, the name of the creators and in so doing prefigured his own invention of the skywriting in the rapidly approaching future.
During the 1916 barnstorming tour of the upper Midwest, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, wrote this over the town of Wahpeton, North Dakota. The meaning of the message was unclear. One interpretation has it that Smith was asserting his “right” to land his craft on the one paved municipal street below, the citizens of Wahpeton being notorious for their dislike of the many stunt fliers now crisscrossing the region. The other theory holds that this was a signal to Smith’s ground chase crew that he would be turning “right” and heading to the more welcoming town of Breckenridge, Minnesota, on the eastern bank of the northern flowing Red River.
On November 18th, 1925, the Scottish Rite Cathedral opened in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Art Smith flew above the ceremonies, inscribing this message along the corridor of Fairfield Avenue. The Valley of Fort Wayne Ancient and Accepted Order of the Scottish Rite, a growing order of the Masons, sought, at the time, to expand. Max Irmscher & Sons began construction in April of 1924 with 200 masons, mostly local, taking a year and a half to complete the project costing over $1 million. Two steam shovels took six weeks to excavate the ballroom. Over 350,000 bricks were used in the construction, adding to the building’s reputation as the most “fire-proof” in the city. Art Smith had longed to be “tapped” by the secret fraternal organization. He often thought of his skywriting as a kind of masonry. The smoke might be like grouting, or the words concocted out of that vapor a signifier of “wall.” But his contribution to that glorious occasion proved inconsequential, the writing disappearing almost as soon as it was written, and goes unremarked in the printed commemorative program.
Not long before his untimely death in February of 1926, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, affixed the above above an open field straddling the Indiana-Ohio border near Paulding. At the time, Smith served as a pilot for the recently formed Air Service of the United States Post Office flying the routes between New York and Chicago. He would often modify his Curtiss Carrier Pigeon aircraft with his skywriting apparatus, several times advertising over the large metropolitan regions to Write Home or Write Mother via the PO. It is harder to explain this message affixed over the open and desolate pastureland of western Ohio. Smith left no notes in this regard. Who was the intended audience for this swiftly dissipating and somewhat lyrical missive?
When
The Indianapolis department store,* When, commissioned Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, to address the sky above the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May of 1920, the year the famous race instituted the 4 lap qualification test that became known as “time trials,” conducted over the several preceding weekends leading up to the 500-mile main event. After applying his craft, Art Smith would circle above the racetrack as the lone automobile completed the timed circuit and the vapor of the original message, exhausted, dissipated. If his fuel allowed, the aviator would commence to reapply the commercial message in the freshening Indiana spring air, tracing the washed-out shadows of the previous attempt.
And L. Strauss & Co.:
As well as L. S. Ayres & Co., famously misspelling it:
Correcting it immediately, Smith improvised an impromptu flyby, drafting the dot above the i into the long articulated armature of the Y in his wake:
* The promotion was so successful that other Indianapolis department stores hired Art Smith to skywrite over the Circle City. These included Wm. H. Block Co.:
The Tragic Elopement
Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, attempting to elope with his fiancée, Aimee Cour, escaping from Fort Wayne to Hillsdale, Michigan, where he believed they could be married quickly, crashed his home-built biplane, in which they were flying together, tried to land in a field of soft sand south of town that fouled the gear and flipped the machine over short of their destination. Wrapped in bandages from head to foot, they were married days later in a hotel where they were recuperating, there being no hospitals in Hillsdale, both fainting several times during the hastily arranged ceremony. Art recalled later he remembered little of the event as several times the doctors in attendance administered the hypodermic. Art sustained several deep bruises but escaped, his doctors told him, a serious concussion of the brain. Aimee, more acutely injured, convalesced from what was diagnosed as severe back and spinal damage, the pain of which would plague her for the rest of her life. Art, now ambulatory though still being treated for pain, repaired the machine as Aimee rested in her room. Very soon, Aimee heard the sound of its Eldridge engine aloft outside the hotel, the machine itself a mere speck in the blue. Even in his weakened state, Art Smith sought to announce what he often said was the best thing that ever happened to him on God’s green earth.
If
The letters “i” and “f” appeared in the clear blue sky over Fort Wayne, Indiana, during the fall of 1921, inscribed there by Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, using his patented device to generate the fog for skywriting. Smith often commented that he wished he could find a way to produce the messages he wrote in the sky instantaneously instead of the slow sequences produced, one after the other, as his machine, flying a kind of aerial ballet, moved from point A to point B through time and space. While Art Smith was able to solve many physical problems presented by the invention of flight, he was unable to overcome the linear constraints seemingly built into the act of writing in this manner. In this case the “i” appeared first in the sky followed then by the “f” creating, with every pitch change and sputter of the engine’s report, a kind of suspense suspended above the literate observers down below. And then…
In the summer of 1921, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, read for the first time the writings of the mathematician Daniel Bernoulli as he convalesced after his crash into a cornfield near Lima, Ohio. He had been flying and crashing now for more than a dozen years, doing so, as it appeared to him, with only the instinct of the avian species and the tinkerer’s knack for having a go, never fully realizing the physical laws of nature that he and other pioneers of flying were employing in, what seemed to be, the miracle of heavier than air powered flight as well as their death-defying stunts and maneuvers. Only a week before writing “lift” above, A
rt Smith was moved to inscribe the equation
over Lake Wawasee near Syracuse, Indiana, its waters congested by the Labor Day boating populace mystified by the formula floating overhead.
“The duration of space in space” was how Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, described it, the punctuation of the fading letters accentuating the empty empty distance between those letters that remained temporarily suspended in the cold cold stratosphere. After completing another composition, Art Smith would often cut the power to his noisy engine, and he and his aircraft would descend, gliding earthward on the wings of a welcome silence. A silence composed of the static frequency of the wind flowing over all the surfaces of his body as he waded into the altitudes of denser air and the solid grasp of invisible gravity.
The Unknown
In October of 1921, nearly three years after the Armistice, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, sails to France to attend the selection of the American Unknown. On Sunday the 23rd, the ceremony is conducted at the Hotel de Ville in Châlons-sur-Marne with four caskets of unknown American soldiers disinterred from cemeteries at Aisne-Marne, Meuse-Argonne, Somme, and St. Mihiel converging on the city from four different directions. At that moment, Art Smith (flying a borrowed French SPAD VII specially modified to accommodate his aerial writing mechanism) applies the series (shown above) of evocative exclamations marks (designed to commemorate the moment of the cessation of hostilities and punctuate, in relative silence, the solemn proceedings going on below) in the sky over the city of Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy, an error (!) as the cities are often confused by those unfamiliar with the many Departments of France.
Chalon-sur-Saône, while not the actual venue for the selection of America’s Unknown Soldier, is thought to be the birthplace of photography, and its museum contains the Pyréolophore, the world’s first internal combustion engine. Art Smith, aloft, has no way of knowing that this history is preserved below while, he believes, another kind of history is being made. Now, nearly one hundred years after Nicéphore Niépce invented the technology of photography, Art Smith throttles up the Renault V8 powering his SPAD and turns toward Paris where, above the Eiffel Tower, he inscribes this curling cloud captured on film. He does so partly as an homage to Santos-Dumont’s feat of 1901, steering his Dirigible #6 around the structure to win the Deutsch Prize, but also as his tribute to the Unknown whose casket, draped in the Stars and Stripes and still sporting the dozen white roses Sergeant Edward Younger used to indicate his selection, is making its way to the capital city by dedicated train.
Captain Fred Zinn, a Michigander, who flew for the French Aéronautique Militaire and was the first to successfully deploy photographic combat reconnaissance from an airplane, introduces Art Smith to Gertrude Stein, the American expatriate art collector and author, that fall in Paris during the ceremonies surrounding the Unknown’s repatriation. At the writer’s atelier, 27 rue de Fleurus, Art Smith admires the walls of paintings he finds hanging there, noting how so many seem so flat to him, swaths of color similar to the way the land appears from the air, scored and divided into fields and pastures by roads and hedges. Captain Zinn then produces several prints of his wartime reconnoitering to confirm Smith’s insight, pointing out how the landscape grid had been disrupted by the asymmetry of the trench works, bombardment, and bastions. They talk of the theory of camouflage, of ground and foil, and the heroic convoy of Parisian taxicabs turning the Battle of the Marne. Miss Stein recalls watching the aerial dogfights in the late afternoons, the frenzied brushstrokes of smoke, the fiery streaks of fire. An observation balloon burning, its occupants buoyed by their tethered canopies of silk as they fell earthward. The disappearance of all birdlife from the campagne for seasons after the Armistice. She is, of course, intrigued with Smith’s skywriting, and the following day he demonstrates with this display over the Left Bank’s arrondissements, mapping in the air a woven net of clouds that seem, as the time passes and the exhausted smoke settles toward the ground, to expand and ensnare the whole city in a soft mesh of whitish ash.
At Le Havre, the cruiser USS Olympia departs for America with the casket of the Unknown. Art Smith circles the port in his SPAD, observing the ceremonies proceeding below. The French destroyers beyond the breakwater deliver a precise seventeen-gun salute that the Olympia, making way through the harbor, answers with its own salvo. The ship, escorted by a flotilla of torpedo boats, gathers steam. The crowds on the quay below disperse—the bands and battalions of soldiers, the school children and boy scouts, the fire brigade and gendarmerie. Lost in thought, he banks, a hard rudder, coming about one last time heading inland to land at Le Bourget Aerodrome. Behind him would be the Unknown on the voyage home and this periodic trail, like wreaths in the water, crumbs of clouds, an ellipsis, holding open a space, growing smaller in the distance, and falling, always falling, always falling short.
String
Early in 1911, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, traveled the Midwest, his aeroplane shipped via rail from venue to venue, on what would become a tour of disasters, a series of malfunctions and crashes in Sterling and Mattoon, Illinois, and in Muncie, Indiana. Most often to blame for the catastrophes were the conditions of the landing fields of the various events. The local sponsors, having never before witnessed heavier-than-air flight, could not begin to imagine the proper conditions for a successful takeoff and landing. They failed to take into consideration and neglected to clear scrub and shrubbery, brush and bush, even whole mature trees obstructing a runway, if one could call it a runway at all, and Art Smith certainly did not. His paltry percentages of the gates at these fiascos barely began to pay for his costly repairs and his spartan accommodations of transportation to the next unscripted debacle.
Little did he know but at the same time in San Francisco a pilot named Eugene Ely successfully landed, for the first time in history, a plane on a ship at sea. His Curtiss pusher aircraft touched down on a teakwood platform built atop the hull of the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania anchored in the middle of the bay. Hugh Robinson, a circus performer, concocted the apparatus that allowed an aeroplane to be trapped and arrested on such a short landing strip. A long metal hook, deployed from the plane’s keel, grappled a cable spread on the deck. The cable ends, threaded through a block and tackle and counterweighted with a carefully calibrated cluster of sandbags, stopped the craft over a few stretched yards. The Navy reported the event with much fanfare, calling it a Controlled Crash.
It was at this time too that Art Smith observed while en route, flying to yet another show, this time in Adrian, Michigan, the optical illusion created by the decreasing density of the air at altitude and the deflection of light in the thinning atmosphere that caused the apparent warping of the earth as one rose up above 4,000 feet. At those giddy heights and perhaps under the influence of several severe concussions, he hallucinated, feeling the physics of flight fall away from him and the band of gravity reassert itself, no longer invisible but there hauling his plane earthward as if on a leash. In the clouds, he said later, he saw a gigantic scaffolding of articulated springs and stays, struts and wires, a massive trapeze of suspended cirrus clouds descending from heaven onto which an aviator could affix, swinging from one vine to the next, a kind of aeronautic brachiation.
Over the years, after he invented the device to “skywrite,” Art Smith found as he fell, in a lazy corkscrew spin, that he had fallen into the habit of writing a kind of vertical signature or more accurately a ligature tethering certain descents, coupling the realms through which he navigated. Smoky stair steps, a wispy ladder.
Today, a full-scale replica of Art Smith’s early Flyer is displayed, suspended from the ceiling by means of a web of cables above the security checkpoint at the Fort Wayne International Airport. The fidelity of the model’s construction is exacting, right down to the greased cotter pins in the landing gear, and the viewer is reminded just how fragile and fraught the early aircraft were, rigged with piano wire and waxed leather stitching. The exacting attentio
n to detail is obvious. There, one can see the baling twine or thongs of rawhide used in the hasty repairs long ago, splinting a strut, splicing a guy line through a grommet. The plane seems to float above the conveyors below, feeding the x-ray machines with the carry-on luggage and the pairs of shoes. If observed closely the aeroplane does seem to sway, the wires flexing, perhaps twisting in some ghost turbulence above the milling crowds waiting to board their own flights to somewhere else.