by The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne (retail) (epub)
* It should be noted that, simultaneously to the events recorded above, the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, led by the notorious D. C. Stephenson was reaching its ascendancy that summer. The Indiana General Assembly passed legislation to create Klan Day at the Indiana State Fair, which included a nighttime cross burning. And on July 4th of the next year, there would be a rally of more than 100,000 in Kokomo.
Metro Day
July 15th, 1915, was Metro Day at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, honoring the contributions the Metro Pictures Corporation had made to the fair. Francis X. Bushman, president of the company, led the Metro delegation through the throngs on the Avenue of Palms to the Court of the Universe where officials of the Exposition received them. Speeches were given and tokens exchanged. Edward A. McManus, general manager of the Hearst-Selig News Pictorial service, said, “The one striking new feature of modern life is the wider and wider diffusion of information. The press hitherto has been a great instrument of this beneficent work. With the supreme inventive genius of modern men the press has been supplemented by the moving picture, which not only gives the same wide presentation of the subject, but which visualizes it in presenting it pictorially, and which has established itself a new and vital educational force in the modern civilized community.” The party then proceeded to Filmland on the Zone, the Exposition’s entertainment area, where a beauty contest was in progress. Twenty-five aspirants posed for the camera. The evening was completed when Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, mounted his illuminated aeroplane and, in the still evening sky, climbed to 3,000 feet only then to descend in a crazed looping spiral corkscrewing dive with the fusees on his wing sparking and flashing as if indicating the foreshadowing of a fiery and fatal crash. Thousands below watched in amazement. Thousands more watched from San Francisco’s surrounding hills. But all witnessed finally a carefully designed but thrilling aerobatic stunt. When safely on the ground, Smith was presented with a gold medal by Francis X. Bushman, the head of Metro Pictures. The presentation was not filmed. Later, the negative plates were developed. The overexposed still photography record of his recent flight, that seemingly aborted night flight, was developed. The message in the madness could finally be read. There, in a cursively connected script of flare and fire, was the salutation, M E T R O, etched in bright white light into the black night, enveloping the whole wide San Francisco Bay and the cities and towns on its shores and even in the hills and valleys beyond.
It is said that in one year when the population of the United States was 90 million, 17 million saw Lincoln Beachey, The Man Who Owns the Sky, fly. A San Franciscan, Lincoln Beachey, The Master Birdman, was the obvious first choice to be the featured stunt aviator at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. He opened the fair with an amazing feat, taking off inside the Machinery Palace on the exposition grounds, flying his Curtiss Pusher at 60 miles per hour, and landing it, all within the confines of the hall. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, assisted Beachey’s performances, an understudy of sorts, who in his midget race car would chase the low flying master along the Avenue of the Palms. On March 14th, Beachey launched out over the Bay in his new monoplane to perform his famous maneuver, a series of inside loops. But the overpowered airplane’s controls could not handle the torque and the strain. The plane crumpled and fell into the water between two Navy ships. He survived the crash, the autopsy later revealed, but was unable to escape the harness. He drowned. Art Smith took his place, flying the daily demonstrations and the nightly skywriting shows spotlit by the General Electric Scintillator emanating from the Tower of Jewels. But before that, he needed to practice, to attempt to reach the skill of his recently deceased mentor and friend, Lincoln Beachey. “An aeroplane in the hands of Lincoln Beachey,” Orville Wright had said, “was poetry.” Smith needed a place to learn to write in the sky. He needed a place, too, to steady the nerves, tamp down the tide of rising fears, to be alone with his machine in the air and the dynamic physics of not falling even as you fall. He discovered, twenty miles south of San Francisco, the necropolis of Colma, California. Colma, the city of cemeteries. After the earthquake, the city of San Francisco had closed the cemeteries in the city and evicted the dead. Beachey had been buried somewhere down there. The fields were a patchwork of tombs, mausoleums, ossuaries. Art Smith bombed the fields with flowers. Then with the wings of his aeroplane outfitted with small smudge pots, railroad flares, roman candles, Art Smith wrote for the dead. Again and again, he wrote, writing, always beginning in a profound dive, mimicking an out-of-control tailspin to make his gyrations look erratic, but, in reality, he was spelling out, in the exhaust, little prayers, letter to letter to letter, each ligature a bridge, a reprieve, each serif another breath caught and another, a stair-stepping signature. He wanted to feel the weightlessness as he fell, sense the levitation of the smoke as it rose up behind him and was propelled upward by the rising heat of the highlands below. Somewhere down there was what was left of Beachey and up above were the streamers of smoke, the trail of sparks, braiding together like wraiths, like ghosts, like stars, the rising residue of colmacolmacolma.
Terre Haute
On Christmas, 1921, President Warren G. Harding commuted the sentence of Socialist Eugene V. Debs who had been imprisoned since 1919 in Atlanta for sedition. Debs arrived home in Terre Haute, Indiana, three days later and was met at the rail depot by thousands of cheering Terre Hauteans. At that moment, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was aloft, over the city known as The Crossroads of America, the intersection of highways 40 and 41, affixing the number 9 6 5 3 in frigid pristine Indiana air. This is not an estimate of attendance or of the crowd size gathered on the ground, but the number given to the famous agitator and pacifist (now speaking animatedly from the open vestibule platform of the observation car below) by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. As Convict #9653, Debs had run for President of the United States, again, his fifth attempt, the year before, garnering nearly a million votes while behind bars. Art Smith had heard of Debs, but had not voted for him. In fact, there appears to be no record of his having voted for anyone at all. He had been and would be in the future on the move, never establishing a permanent residence really. And, as he was often perched high overhead, flying over precincts and wards, more often than not, he felt detached from the earthbound goings on beneath him. Even though he allowed the epithet of “The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne” to remain connected to his name, trailing Art Smith like the new advertising banners he had begun to deploy behind his aircraft to augment his skywriting, he no longer felt attached to that place as he once did. A Bird Boy, yes, but of Fort Wayne, less and less. Politics and the voting that accompanied it, he understood, was attached to place. No, it had dawned on him a while ago that he was now, more and more, a citizen of the sky. Debs had been sentenced to ten years hard labor, and he had been disenfranchised for life for his seditious speech at Canton, Ohio, during the Great War. In many ways, Debs too was as disconnected from the world as Smith was now. Even bound he had been unbound, not local but global. Rootless.
The Root Glass Company had originally lured Art Smith to The Crossroads of America. In 1915, the company entered a contest to design and exclusively manufacture a new proprietary bottle for the Coca-Cola Company. Their design, inspired by the ribbed and ellipsoid contour of the cocoa plant seedpod, shown here,
won the competition handily and their “hobble-skirt” bottle, cast in the distinctive German Green glass, was an instant success, and the container remains connected to what it contains even today a century later. In 1921, the patent for the product was about to expire. Coca-Cola and Root embarked on a campaign, the first of its kind, to have not just the name or slogan or text about a product trademarked but also its actual package. Its vessel would speak the protected name. A shape would be a brand. To that end the companies hired a semi-ridged dirigible, similar to the one shown here,
to hover over The Crossroads of America and, through an act of subliminal free association,
have the public below connect the shape of the blimp to the bottle to the seedpod to the product. Art Smith contributed to the effort circling the oblong balloon and skywriting the company’s name in such a manner as its oblong O’s seemed to effervesce, floating, making a halo of haloes around the airship.
The skies over Terre Haute, The Crossroads of America, bustled in the closing days of 1921. Eugene V. Debs had been released from prison and been welcomed home a hero. The Root Glass Company had captured lightning in a bottle and the bottle itself had become a kind of lightning. Hulman & Company also was headquartered in Terre Haute, a wholesale grocery and manufactory of leavening agents. Now as the company wished to expand into the retail market, they considered a rebranding as well. Art Smith experimented with his new idea of a more permanent form of “skywriting.” He would write his message in bold letters printed on giant panels of silk. The message? The chemical formula for the company’s signature product, baking soda. The streaming silk banner unfurling and flapping in Art Smith’s wake dictated that he create, in the face of the banner’s new and unique aerodynamics, whole new techniques and tweaks for steering and stirring the aircraft for sustaining controlled flight. The buffeting was an amplification of the popping and puckering of the scarf he wore around his neck that would slap him, wrapping around his head and blinding him during gravitational gyrations caused by his acrobatic maneuverings. The tail of letters had a life of its own in the slipstream. But flying with a banner was in no way as challenging as the actual production of letters out of thin air. He easily set his stick and throttle to a kind of automatic course, a slow broad circle over The Crossroads of America with the actual crossroads below serving as a kind of center on which he pivoted. It wasn’t challenging to fly this way simply hauling the letters, letters that seemed nonsensical to him, lugging them through the lower thicker air. And he could continue to display the advertisement even into clouds, clots that rose into lofts of white wispy loafs, that accumulated and expanded into billowing banks and bluffs in which he would disappear only to reappear, his trailing message intact like a ticker tape threading itself through gloved fingers. There was that. He didn’t need an empty sky to promote this leavening agent. Hulman & Company would rename the baking soda Clabber Girl in the New Year. And he would be back with another banner calibrated to the new name, churning and chugging through an undulating cloudscape, a curdled buttermilk sky.
Ohio
A year before his own death, Art Smith, found himself in western Ohio at the service of First National Pictures, advertising with his skywriting the company’s new moving picture, The Lost World. His mission brought him over the Little Miami River valley to The Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches, a farming region settled by immigrant German Catholics who still spoke a Westphalian, Oldenburgian, and Lower Saxonic dialect, an isogloss, centered around the Grand Lake St. Mary. Minster, Fort Loramie, St. Rose, Montezuma, St. Henry, Sebastian, Cassella, Chickasaw, and Maria Stein, all these towns featured 19th-century red brick Gothic Catholic churches with their steeples topped with crosses. Art Smith could navigate the valley by means of steeple, using the spires as a kind of slalom pylon, banking, vectoring back and forth over the rich grid of quilted farmland spread out between the towns. He was flying a new WACO 7 biplane, shaking down the prototype for the Advance Aircraft Company, the manufacturer, headquartered just a few miles north in Troy. The Lost World, a silent movie, was adapted from a book written by Arthur Conan Doyle who appeared in the front piece of the film as himself, introducing the trailing adventure. The movie concerned a scientific expedition to a lost and forgotten plateau in Venezuela of intimidating geology, ancient flora, and prehistoric beasts, dinosaurs of all kinds. Smith had been told by the accounts office at First Republic that Doyle himself, without revealing the source as a Hollywood movie, had taken test reels showing the various dinosaurs fighting and grazing and flying to a meeting of the Society of American Magicians. The audience, which included Houdini, was astonished by the extraordinary lifelike visuals concocted by the trick photography. The stop-action animation effects were created by Willis O’Brien who years later would place an articulated puppet, King Kong, on a model Empire State Building attacked by a swarm of live split-screen projected Naval Reserve Curtiss O2C-2 biplanes. Art Smith would not live to see that monster’s death, but now he sat stone still, amazed in the darkened theater in Celina, Ohio, by the sight of the rampaging allosaurus attacking a family of terrified triceratops. He could, if he thought about it and if he looked very closely, see the slight twitch in the joints and limbs of the models as they moved, skipping from one frame of film to the next, but it was mostly seamless, this illusion of movement, how the eyes and the brain smoothed things over in the dark, skipping stone to stone, like his plane’s invisible ligature from one inanimate and monstrous letter to the next until it made sense.
Art Smith thought that, from a distance, the holey, moth-eaten exhausted strokes of his message looked a lot like the slivers of bone, splinters of wood, shards of marble, threads of fabric, locks of hair, or crumbs of cartilage on display at The Shrine of the Holy Relics in the town of Maria Stein. He had a whole week in The Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches, writing each day on the erased and refreshed vault of heaven overhead, a rosary of quirky quickly decaying letters commanding the volk below to attend this strange new movie. By the time he landed his WACO in a pasture or gleaned field—this was northwestern Ohio after all, full of flatness, that had been, at one time, the vast flat floor to an ancient inland sea after having been scraped flat by an eon of sanding by tidal waves of ice age glaciers—to visit the towns he daily flew over, he could regard his melting handiwork, gauge the remnants of his writing in the sky, now shattered fragments, scratches, smears. On one such landing he poked his head into The Shrine with its colorful and ornately carved side altars and reliquaries. Several Sisters of the Most Precious Blood knelt in a continuous vigil of veneration, murmuring prayers toward a forest of host-encumbered monstrances and ostensoria. There were the displayed relics but also everywhere else, in the aisles and the alcoves, there were cartons and crates of relics, shipped to The Shrine for safety as the Great War in Europe bloomed and churches there were consumed in the bombardments and conflagrations. Now, in 1925, there were no churches to return the bones to and The Shrine was becoming a parody of archeology, buried in artifacts with no spoil at all.
After finishing that day’s application of L O S T W O R L D, Art Smith glided smoothly downward, landing in a vast field outside of the town of Maria Stein that he soon discovered was the test track for the New Idea agricultural implement factory. As he descended, Smith saw several teams hauling the New Idea manure spreaders, their ground driven gears and axles rotating the flails and paddles at the rear of the wagons that launched the chaff of agitated chopped manure and broadcast it in wide arches in their wakes. He landed into the wind, of course, and through the layers of rich ripe and ripening smells, skipping over the slick, wet treated furrows below and jinking around and over the lifting roiled columns of steaming clouds of dust to find solid ground off in a far corner of the field. On the ground he looked back over to where the machines were working, the dung eruptions’ acrobatic percolations, amused by this other kind of terrestrial “writing” spewing from another tail end. The “new idea” had been another use for the wing, the winglike paddles set at odd angles that aerated, scooped, and threw the wide-ranging shit.