The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
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the H appearing as a kind of pentimento, a hashed out H from the initial T. The image appeared all feathery, like the tail of the badminton cock. To the doctors present, the cylindrical shaped dashes and slashes of the manufactured clouds eerily reminded them of their microscopic viewing of the cultured bacillus, M. tuberculosis, glimpsed in its limpid laziness, stained red in the sputum on the pathological slides. The setting sun lit up the skywriting, embossing the letters to create an illusion of depth. The exhibit was greeted by a smattering of applause and the routine static of expectorate coughing from the excited residential patients.
Only months before, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, had been contracted by the Parker Brothers game company to advertise their acquisition in 1925 of the license and the right to use the name “Ping-Pong,” the trademark of the J. Jaques & Sons Ltd company of Great Britain, for their line of table tennis equipment. Earlier that Fourth of July day, Smith replicated what might have been the first ever Legal Notice posted via skywriting when he discovered the many table tennis tables available to the patients of the Irene Byron Sanatorium. What he did not know was the celluloid Ping-Pong balls, whether Parker Brothers brand or not (I do not know), were also used therapeutically in the treatment of tuberculosis itself at the hospital. The pneumothorax technique allowed for the collapsing of the infected lung, allowing the infected tissue to “rest” by means of plombage. The collapse of the lung was created by inserting a bag filled with Ping-Pong balls into a cavity created beneath the upper ribs. I am unable to ascertain if the balls themselves were the same ones used in the matches ambulatory patients played on the grounds.
Although not officially recognized as the legal symbol for registered trademark until the Trademark Act of 1946, the ® was in informal use long before that. Smith enjoyed creating it while skywriting. Sometimes he would make the circle first and then ricochet around inside the boundary creating the capital R. Other times, he would reverse the maneuver, sketching out the letter and then enclosing it, trying to come as close as he could to the floating ligatures of thinning smoke. The ideograph, now that I think of it, might have represented the plombage, the cavity packed with an autonomic and organic sack of balls. Or was it the ball itself, a kind of plastic alveolus, its thin branded skin enveloping a vacuum. It didn’t matter. He enjoyed the challenge of it, loved creating it, even considered registering the ® as a registered trademark of his own so that as he finished one giant mark in the sky he would conclude with a smaller one orbiting the first like a moon. And that made him think of the © and there, backlit by the first Fourth of July fireworks display of Fort Wayne, Indiana, dodging the flak clouds in the after-dark of the explosions of glittering light going on all around him, Art Smith, Fort Wayne’s native son, copy-wrote this waxing crescent moon hanging over the suburban Fort Wayne near the village known as Huntertown.
The Border
In 1913, Gideon Sundback, working as head designer for the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Company in Meadville, Pennsylvania, invented the modern zipper. The name “zipper,” however, was trademarked by B. F. Goodrich Company, which coined the term when it added the fastener to its rubber galoshes in 1923. Seven years before that, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, stitched this advertising message onto the clear blue skies over Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. In 1916, the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Company, having changed its name to Talon, was now aggressively marketing the device, and commissioned our skywriter to cryptically affix this tattoo over larger cities—especially those with military installations, armories, and quartermaster depots. Talon’s thinking was (what with war raging in Europe and with the America’s intervention there seeming inevitable) the expeditionary forces would need new modern efficient closures for their kits and caboodle. Art Smith designed the display himself having been mesmerized by the new, yet unnamed “zipper” now installed over his heart on a slash pocket of his double-breasted leather flying jacket for safe storing of his folded oilcloth maps. He pulled at the pull tab, running the slider up and down, admiring the sound of the contraption—its controlled tear, it rasp and ratchet—knitting and unknotting, a miracle, each tooth fitting into its diastema, a suture, laced fingers. He worried the design like a prayer and sewed up the sky in smoke.
Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was also known as The Crash Kid. There had been many crashes leading up to this afternoon spent knotting up the sky over El Paso. Not that he felt in any way in any peril that day. The aeronautics were relatively benign—the lazy figure 8 with the smoke extinguished through the radii of the wide banking turns. And his airplane that day, the reliable Curtiss JN-3, was an infinitely more stable platform than his homebuilt spit and baling wire Pushers. They had, more often than not, stuttered and stalled and slammed into the corn-stubbled ground or a canopy of unforgiving trees, a litany of being let down. He’d regain consciousness after a crash, the smoldering bamboo and balsa just beginning to catch and burn, and see his personal catastrophes—the gashes, the slick lacerations, the protruding tibia or fibula, looking to him, in shock, like the control sticks of his splintered aircraft. Ha! It would be something if the skin came equipped with such cunning little fasteners, slide the slice right up. A part of him wanted desperately to fly in the impending war, take off into the leading edge of experimental flight. Dogfights! Immelmanns! Tailslides! Hammerheads! But the fix was already in. The shattering and resettings of his legs and arms, his back, his fingers, his toes in all those crashes would wash him out of the Air Service when the time came. His feet would be unable to reach the pedals on the “Tommy” trainer. His arthritic hands would be unable to grasp the throttle on the Avro. But, in 1916, another war was knocking on the door—the Mexican Revolution across the border. In his landing approaches, he would swing out and around effortlessly through that alien airspace, banking over Juarez as the Revolution was entering its final phases below. And here he was on the border advertising new fangled notions for notions in an unraveling world.
It hadn’t been that long, a little over a year, that his companion in the celebrated aerial elopement and marriage, the love of his life, Aimee Cour, had left him in California and returned to the Midwest. Now, here on this extreme border, still smarting from that crash, he sought solace on the outer edges of what had been his known world. This was Art Smith’s, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne’s, migration to mitigate those nagging injuries. He thought of his assignment here as a kind of banishment, forty days of wandering alone in the wilderness, the desert—the deserted desert itself and the wide deserted sky that seemed even wider than usual, endlessly cloudless, ever expanding, empty even of empty. After his daily skywriting, introducing to the quartermasters of Fort Bliss below the modern mechanism of closure, Art Smith would set a course along the international boundary, expending the last of his calligraphic fuel, tracing the sovereign demarcation, making visible, in his mind, an “us” and a “them,” hoping to purse up all those feelings that constantly percolated within him. Oh, but even as he drew the drawstrings closed, irrational geography, he knew. He wasn’t fooling himself. He knew he was not of one place or the other but constantly between, in between the between. Heaven and Hell. America and Mexico. Day and Night. Flying and Falling. He left in his wake, always, a stuttering and impermanent imaginary geometry, a porous border made up of tenuous threads of fleeting gossamer, the gauziest of insubstantial clouds.
Eighty miles due west from El Paso, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, flew along the border to Columbus, New Mexico. It was March 19th. Ten days before, Pancho Villa and the remnants of his failing Army of the North had crossed the border, raiding Columbus, burning the train station and other buildings, killing seventeen Americans. Now, Columbus would become the rallying point for the Army’s 1st Aero Squadron, eight JN-2s and eleven pilots, as they kicked off the Punitive Expedition in support of General Pershing’s force of 6,600 already deep into Mexico searching for Villa. The planes, unarmed and underpowered for the high desert, were ord
ered to rendezvous with the ground forces in Casas Grandes 90 miles south into Mexico. Art Smith in his skywriting Jenny, circled, watching as the Army’s airplanes lumbered into the air, too late in the day, into the gathering dusty darkness. They would be gone a year, looking for Villa and his raiders. Smith by then would be long gone, back up north, would hear of the spectacular failures of the aeroplanes and airmen—the wooden propellers delaminating in the dry heat, the crash landings in shifting sand, the radiator explosions spewing blood red water into the open cockpits. In Chihuahua City, Lt. Drague would be fired upon by four Mexican policemen with Winchester rifles, the first recorded attack on a U.S. military plane. But all of this would be forgotten. All of it eclipsed. The War in Europe would intervene in this intervention, calling Pershing and his troops over there instead. The Mexican Revolution would end in amnesty for Villa and his men. Villa himself would be assassinated years later driving home in his Dodge touring car to the hacienda in Canutillo by a pumpkinseed seller shouting “Viva Villa!” But all of that was from a different country, the undiscovered country of the Future. The next morning in Columbus, New Mexico, after the 1st Aero Squadron had disappeared into old Mexico, Art Smith headed back along the invisible border to El Paso, landing at Fort Bliss to share the news of the Expedition’s incursion. Along the way he closed the door behind him, so to speak, posting something like a fence wire warning along the way, a patriotic gesture, he believed then, adorned with a few menacing X’s, barbing the line in the sky. They were, he hoped, of such scale, such majesty, he imagined, no one would ever want to cross this way again, now or in that unknown future.
A B C
By 1922, in Indianapolis, the letters A B C no longer stood for “American Brewing Company” but now brought to the minds of the Circle City’s citizenry the appellation of the town’s famous Negro National League baseball team, originally sponsored by the brewery at its founding in 1913, now its own eponymous eponym. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, applied the alphabetic advertisement that summer’s season circling above the Washington Baseball Grounds, just west of the White River, the field they shared with the Indianapolis Indians of the American Association. As he composed the gigantic quilt of letters, stitching each white abraded thread to the blue field of the sky, he sang the children’s alphabet song—A B C D E F G…—partially to pass the time but also to keep time, the duration of the verse and its rests a kind of rally point, a sing-song metronome of time-keeping until the next turn or bank. He knew too that the melody was also the one used in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and above him he could see, beyond the thinning veil of the atmosphere, mostly made pale in the bright sunlight, the quavering stars and twitching planets, maybe even the ethereal ghost of a gibbous washed-out membrane of the moon. The song too was the line on which was hung the lyric of “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and, as he left wondering about the location of the little star, he turned effortlessly to the number of bags of black wool the black sheep had for the master, the dame, and, descending, the little boy in the lane. Flying low now over the dusty diamond below he caught the teams hustling between innings, his plane seeming to herd the flock of wool-flanneled baseball players off the field, annotated with lullabies and nursery rhymes. Olivia Taylor, C. I. Taylor’s widow, was now the owner of the ABCs, and the season would be a turnaround year. In the bleachers on the third-base side, she shielded her eyes with her gloved hand and inspected the elemental instructions and monumental inscription she had commissioned in the sky overhead.
It was Henry Chadwick, The Father of Baseball, who, once he had devised the box score for the game, suggested the letter “K” to designate a strikeout, arguing that “K” was the “most prominent” of the letters in the word “struck” and had a harmonic relationship with the boxing abbreviation “K.O.” for “knockout.” The “K” stuck. It continues to be used today as an indication of an out made by striking out. Purists will still reverse the letter to indicate that the strikeout was a result of a called strike instead of a swing and miss. This “K” captured over the Washington Baseball Grounds during another Indianapolis ABCs’ game that year was a kind of swing and a miss. Mrs. Taylor had been so pleased with the earlier skywriting that she had commissioned Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, to keep score in the sky. But this experiment seems to have been a disaster what with the measured pace of the game, the rudimentary communication from the field below, and the shifting wind all making for an illegible hodgepodge of drifting symbols, cyphers, and figures. And, finally, it did not seem to illuminate, in any significant way, or increase meaningfully the enjoyment of the game or the appreciation of the ABCs’ play on the field that day against the Chicago American Giants.
One might imagine that the skywriting pictured above from the summer of 1922 was part of the failed sky scoring aloft during the Indianapolis ABCs’ home game at the Washington Baseball Grounds. Of course, the official annotation for a walk is a “W” or the preferred “BB,” standing for “Base on Balls,” so it was curious that the more cumbersome W A L K would have been spelled during the disastrous attempt to record the competition below. Additional research has revealed that this W A L K, while applied above the bleachers during an ABCs game, was photographed in this incomplete state and captures only a partial rendering on its way to becoming a complete advertisement for the near west side enterprise of Madam C. J. Walker. The E and the R are yet to be generated. The C. J. Walker Company factory, at 640 North West Street, was a nearby neighbor. The company was the leading manufacturer of hair care products and cosmetic creams, shampoos, pomades, and irons. There also, it trained Madam Walker’s “beauty culturists” in “The Walker System.” Madam Walker herself had died in New York City three years before, the year of The Red Summer, 1919, but her legacy continued in Indianapolis, the company run by her daughter, A’Lelia, who also would continue her mother’s philanthropy, political activism and patronage of the arts in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. When A’Lelia died in 1931, she was buried next to her mother in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. At the interment, Hubert Julian, The Black Eagle, circled above in his modified Curtiss Jenny, dropping red gladiolas and dahlias on the mourners below. But years before that, in 1922, the very same summer Art Smith was writing in the skies over Indianapolis, Hubert Julian, The Black Eagle, was making his first flight over Harlem during the Universal Negro Improvement Association Convention, affixing to the sky various UNIA slogans. That year too, The Black Eagle had patented his “airplane safety appliance,” a parachute combined with a rudimentary propeller. It is not known, and highly unlikely, if Art Smith was equipped that day with such a device. We can now, from the distance of this future time, see that this W A L K affixed over the ABC game in 1922 was also a kind of historic annotation as the Great Migration of African-Americans from the southern United States to the north was reaching its zenith. At the same time, the rural American population, of all colors, was moving into America’s expanding cities. People were on the move and beginning to close distances and distort, though the inventions of speedy transport—cars, trains, and now, airplanes—time itself. Perhaps here is where the myth of baseball as a pastoral pastime set in the frenetic urban space began. Not the machine in the garden so much as the garden inside the furious infernal machine. In any case, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, circled, applying a kind of cosmetic adornment to the ordinary sky about the application of cosmetic adornment for the crowds below watching boys play a game in summer. It is said that beauty is only skin deep and that a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a picture of one word seems to have been worth about a thousand more.
Allow me to return for a moment to that brooding K floating over Indianapolis in the summer of 1922 referred to above. As the reader knows or can, at least, intuit, Franz Kafka, a contemporary of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was writing in Prague at this time, though not in the sky there. That year Kafka began work on a novel that would later, after his death in 1924, be pu
blished as Das Schloss (The Castle) whose featured character, named K. Kafka, too, was swept up in the zeitgeist of that era. It should come as no surprise that Kafka, in 1909, was in attendance at the famous Air Show at Brescia, Italy, publishing, that same year, the story fragment “Die Aeroplane in Brescia” in the newspaper Bohemia. It is said to be the first description of powered flight in the German language and its literature. In 1913, Kafka traveled with friends to Vienna, and there sat for the only photograph extant that pictures this important writer smiling.
I have searched through Kafka’s published work to see if there is a reference to baseball. There is none that I could ascertain though in the incomplete finale of fantastic fragments in Amerika and its “Nature Theatre of Oklahoma,” I did find something. There, the protagonist, Karl, in the almost limitless vastness of the valleys and hills, a pastoral paradise, adopts, strangely, the new name, “Negro.”
On March 9th, 1915, at Daytona Beach, Florida, the famous pioneer aviatrix Ruth Law was to drop a baseball from 500 feet into the waiting catcher’s mitt of future Hall of Famer, Wilbert Robinson. The story goes that Law left without the baseball and instead launched a grapefruit earthward, which then burst apart as it hit Robinson’s glove. The red pulp, the stinging acid of the citrus fruit, led the catcher to believe that the baseball he thought was heading his way had injured him badly, blinding and bloodying him. Six years later, Art Smith, acquainted with his fellow flier, Ruth Law, who was the first to do the loop-to-loop, proposed to the ABCs’ front office a similar stunt that summer. He would launch from above while circling over the Washington Baseball Grounds not one, not two, but three baseballs that would plummet into the waiting grasp of the team’s outfielders below. By 1922, the art of aerial bombardment had been advanced immeasurably by the crucible of The Great War. Art Smith jettisoned the baseballs from an altitude of 500 feet, and they descended through the baffle of capital K’s he had previously etched on the otherwise cloudless daylight skies over Indianapolis. The balls accelerated, propelled by the constant attraction of gravity at thirty-two feet per second per second. Though there is an inevitability to this descent—one can imagine the spheroids approaching from the point-of-view of waiting targets growing larger and larger, backlit and looming as they drew closer—and the irresistibility time provides, the historic photographic record here creates the illusion of levitation and the paradox of an infinite regression. There! Did you catch it? Those motes, the minuscule specks of black suspended in midair? Are those the captured shadows of the plummeting balls? No, perhaps only a period-sized dot of dust that intervened between the negative and the fixing agent, a bubble in the emulsion. In any case, nothing else remains as evidence of that event. It was after all a stunt performed during a Negro Leagues doubleheader in a minor league town, during a time when acrobatic and barnstorming flight with all its wonders was just reaching its height, only a few summers from the stall, initiating its own parabolic descent, and the novelty turning toward endurance records and the competitions for altitude, speed, and the rewriting of history.*