The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
Page 9
The first prehistoric beast seen by the explorers in the movie The Lost World is the flying reptile pteranodon. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, on the last day of skywriting advertisements for the film above the villages of western Ohio spelled out the name (from the Greek for toothless wing) of the soaring dinosaur. The pteranodon circles above the Venezuelan plateau of The Lost World, working the invisible thermals, Smith knew, with its voluminous ribbed wings spanning over twenty feet, half the length of wingspan of his own WACO 7. Its sleek head looked like a missile, the long sharpened beak blending back into the narrow skull topped with tapering dorsal crest of some kind, like the vertical rudder on a plane. How strange it all was. Smith concentrated on the spelling. He had made several mistaken efforts already. The fourth and final effort is shown here. The name was strange. Foreign. From another world itself. All vowels and a bizarre unknown digraph. And what was stranger, Smith asked himself, the haunting image captured on film or knowing that the articulated model of the beast represented a long lost reality of the fossil record? The pteranodon had once soared using the same convection and physics that were second nature to him in the air over Ohio.
Later that year, The Lost World would become the first movie to be shown to passengers on a regularly scheduled airliner. Imperial Airways, flying from London to Paris, presented the nine passengers on a Handley-Page O/400 the fantasy film of forgotten time. The plane, a converted bomber constructed of canvas and wood, was a dangerous setting to show the movie with its highly flammable nitrate film stock. A few months before, Art Smith, leaving The Land of Cross-Tipped Churches, devised one last signature to affix above the Maumee River Valley, the M O V E being torpedoed by a dive-bombing “i.” The print of The Lost World, having been a hit with its multiple showings in Celina, was now being transported by another WACO plane, the brand new WACO 8, the company’s first cabin craft, a big biplane seating six, to Toledo, the big city to the north on Lake Erie. Art Smith, The Bird Boy, escorted the ungainly 8 in its early evening departure, having already inscribed his cryptic farewell to the towns below. Later that year, upon hearing of the news from Europe that they had shown The Lost World movie in a moving airplane, he remembered his own flight that night, starboard and slightly trailing the bumbling big transport as it made its jerking lurches and inarticulate stuttering stalls to altitude. He remembered the flickering of illumination, the flashes of light he caught sight of through the big cabin windows of the 8 and the dark silhouettes inside, transfixed, staring dead ahead, spellbound, lost.
French Lick
In 1917, the bottler of Pluto Water, the trademark of the natural mineral spring sourced in French Lick, Indiana, needed over 450 boxcars to ship that year’s output to America. The water, naturally carbonated and salted with sodium and magnesium sulfate, was a very popular product, strongly laxative. The prehistoric spring had been tapped by humans for a long time and was always regarded as medicinal and restorative. That year, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was commissioned by former U.S. Senator Thomas Taggart, owner of the grand resort, The French Lick Springs Hotel, to affix “America’s Laxative,” Pluto Water’s other motto, “When Nature Won’t Pluto Will,” over the pristine karst region that generated the refreshing cure. It took a long time to construct the slogan above the resort, and its articulation could be read as well by the clients situated in rocking chairs and chaise longues on the grand portico of the other deluxe hotel rival at nearby West Baden Springs. Pluto Water’s published advertisement guaranteed effective relief within a half-hour to two hours after ingestion. And it did take Art Smith the better part of the morning to complete the task, the zigzagging double-ues being particularly tricky. Pluto Water remained profitable for many years after, growing in popularity until the operation was shuttered in the seventies when lithium, which was found in trace amounts in the water, was deemed a controlled substance by the federal government and hence no longer legal to purvey.
That same year, on a Tuesday, in 1917, world famous chef, Louis Perrin, began to prepare breakfast for the guests of the French Lick Springs Hotel only to discover the kitchen had run out of orange juice and oranges to create more. Improvising, he began to squeeze tomatoes, of which he had bushels, combining the acidic juice with sugar and his special sauce that, to this day, remains secret, and served the new drink in the resort’s dining rooms. The concoction was an instant success, and its fame quickly spread by means of departing conventioneers, spa vacationers, and the gambling gangsters and bootleggers who would park their private rail parlor cars on special sidings at the front door of the hotel. Management had extended Art Smith’s skywriting contract, and, after a heated discussion with Chef Perrin on what to call the new beverage, settled on what was then a startling appellation—Tomato Juice. It is interesting to think that Art Smith was there at the moment of inception for so many innovations and inventions. And just as interesting, no one at the time, at those times, knew how it would all turn out, how things would unfold, how history would express itself at long last. And Art Smith, it seemed, would be there to mark so many of these occasions with his skywriting even though that writing was not indelible and the content of each message soon forgotten whilst the grandness and surprise of the gesture would remain fixed only in the consciousness of the witnesses of each temporary, transitory display. Art took to the air, creating a kind of a palimpsest of smoke and vapor, overwriting that day’s tribute to Pluto Water in the sky above the tiny village of French Lick, now barely remembered as the original source of these two important digestive aperitifs.
Good Night
From late March to December 4th of 1915, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, closed the day’s festivities at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco with an inspiring display of aerial acrobatics. It was in those night performances over the brightly illuminated fair grounds that the “skywriting” he invented transcended even the transcendent miracle of simple unannotated flight. A dozen years after Kill Devil Hill, at the dawn of the aviation era, the fairgoers on the ground were still startled when the air above them became crowded with these new winged machines. And then this, Art Smith, The Bird Boy, with his darting back and forth, rustles the abstract clouds together, into these floating advertisements of their own wonder. Each night, Art Smith would construct out of thin air, it seemed, first the word G O O D that, more often than not, was misread as G O D, invisible in the dark, the persistent hum and the changing pitch as the letters bloomed. By the end of the Exposition’s run, Smith said he could create the words with his eyes closed, string them together in his sleep as if they were a notation of a dream.
That last night, that last G O O D N I G H T, floating in the sky over the Bay, Smith opened his eyes to see the hundreds of spotlights of the fair below blink out one by one, the search lights, too, that lit the Tower of Jewels and all the jewels that refracted and reflected the light flickered and went dark, the light bathing the halls and palaces damped and smothered, the strings of lights outlining the turrets and funnels and masts of the battleships and cruisers below him went black, the ships sank into darkness. With every other source of light extinguished, snuffed out, the word N I G H T itself alone, arching over the blackout city below, seemed to retain its own internal phosphorescence, a cooling ember as it dimmed. Maybe it was a mirage of some kind, an afterimage on the back of his eyelids. Everyone’s eyes had been changed by the Exposition. Not just what they had seen but how now they would see. Even in the now black black night, N I G H T lingered. Art Smith flew back over the cloud-shrouded mountain range of letters, looking for the “i” to dot—a swoop, a scallop, a wing. And then he flew out into the endless darkness of the opaque Pacific.
Acknowledgments
Airplane Reading: “J n 2 T m A R r e D,” “W H E N”;
Always Crashing: “B O O M,” “x”;
American Short Fiction: “A M A N”;
Bennington Review: “BENDAY,” “L U C K Y,” “N O T H I N G”;
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Big Other: “French Lick”;
Brooklyn Rail: “i f,” “w r I g h t”;
The Collagist: “!!!!”;
Economy: “m a y d a y”;
Gargoyle: “B I R T H,” “GOOD NIGHT,” “M E T R O”;
Ghost Town: “WordCross”;
Golden Handcuffs Review: “G O”;
Guest House: “m o o n,” “R E S T,” “t h i n,” “SPIRAL”;
Iowa Review: “E,” “W O W O”;
Literari Quarterly: “R A I S E”;
Ocean State: “l a r k”;
Passages North: “T H E S U N,” “leadlead,” “Blimp”;
Pleiades: “s c a l e”;
Postcard Press: “AIM ME”;
Prompt Press: “S T I L L”;
Salt Hill: “HELL”;
Seneca Review: “string”;
Split Lip: “SIGHT”;
Story: “LOST”;
Tammy: “A B C”;
Thin Air: “M O M,” “W O W”;
Unstuck: “&”;
Upstreet: “F L E W,” “Star dusting,” “i c e d”;
Waxwing: “9653”;
Western Humanities Review: “A Ai,” “ART” “CLOUD,” “l o o l.”
Rachel Sherwood Roberts’s book Art Smith: Pioneer Aviator, published by McFarland & Company in 2003, was the wind beneath my wings. Thank you for this history even more unbelievable than my small fictions.
Wingman: Brian Oliu, the severely clear visuals are all his. Twelve o’clock high and higher.
Altimeter; Compass; Attitude, Heading, Turn, Airspeed Indicators at Squadron BOA.
An Alabama Murmuration: Robin Behn, Wendy Rawlings, Joel Brouwer, Kellie Wells, Heidi Lynn Staples, Hali Felt, L. Lamar Wilson, John Estes, Fred Whiting, Deborah Weiss, Heather White, Emily Wittman, Yolanda Manora, Albert Pionke, William Ulmer, Patti White, Karen Gardiner, Nathan Parker, Tasha Coryell, Kevin Waltman, Jessica Kidd, Eric Parker, Trudier Harris, Phil Beidler, John Crowley, Bruce Smith, Joyelle McSweeney, Kate Bernheimer, Lex Williford, Dave Madden, Peter Streckfus, Lucy Pickering, Andy Johnson, Michael Meija and Mindy Wilson, Kathy Merrell, Bill and Bebe Barefoot Lloyd, Leslie and Dan Hogue, Grace Aberdean, Jason McCall, Jeremy Butler, Frannie James, Melissa Delbridge, Charles Morgan, and Sandy Huss.
“Thank you, Sioux City. See you on the ground”: Joe Geha and Fern Kupfer, Steve Pett and Clare Cardinal, Sam Pritchard and Tista Simpson, Susan Carlson, Rosanne Potter, David Hamilton, Kathy Hall, Mary Swander, Anne Hunsinger, Jane Dupuis, Rick Moody, and Laurel Nakadate.
Flight Instruction. Instrument Certification: John Barth, Scott Sanders, Edmund White, Dana Wichern, David Hamilton, Howard Junker.
Finger Four Formation: Tessa Fontaine, Jess Richardson, Betsy Seymour, Dara Ewing.
The Tuscaloosa Pursuit Squadron: Jim Merrell, Hobson Bryan, David Allgood, Sam Rombokas, Bob Lyman, Mirza Beg, Jim Labauve, Steve Davis, Bill Buchanan, Lee Pike, Dan Waterman.
En Route Air Traffic Control: Rachel Yoder, Jenny Colville, Jennie ver Steeg, Colin Rafferty, Elizabeth Wade, Jennifer Gravley, Matt Dube, Miles and Susan Gibson (Spitfire and Hurricane), Michael Czyzniejewski and Karen Craigo, Del Lausa, Vivian Dorsel, Lauren Leja, Alicia Mathais, Greg Hauser, Nik De Dominic, Cindi Speros Yonts, Sejal Shah, Chris Riley, and Mark Feldman.
Indiana Migratory Flyways: Julia Meek, Dawn Burns, Linda Oblack, Sarah Jacobi, Dan Zweig, Jill Christman, Mark Neely, Jean Kane, Patty Brotherson, Kathy Curtis, Linda Dibblee, Irene and Robert Walters, Wayne, Ruth and Andrew Payne.
Dead Stick Landers and Controlled Crashes: Sean Loveless and Peggy Shinner.
Approaches, Departures: Marian Young.
Wing Warpers, Wing Walkers: Susan Neville, Michael Rosen, Jay Brandon, Michael Wilkerson, Ann Jones, Nancy Esposito, Rikki Ducornet, Valerie Miner, Melanie Rae Thon, Louise Erdrich, Paul Maliszewski.
Airbase Martone: Tim, Amy, Ben, and Gina.
Lift, Drag, Weight, Thrust: Sam and Nick.
Pitch, Yaw, Roll, and Center of Gravity: Theresa.
About the Author
Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he learned at a very early age about flight. His mother, a high school English teacher, read to him of the adventures of Daedalus and Icarus from the book Mythology written by Edith Hamilton, who was born in Dresden, Germany, but who also grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Martone remembers being taken by his father to Baer Field, the commercial airport and Air National Guard base, to watch the air traffic there. He was blown backward on the observation deck by the prop-wash of the four-engine, aluminum-skinned Lockheed Constellation with its elegant three-tailed rudder turning away from the gates. At the same time, the jungle-camouflaged Phantom F-4s did touch-and-goes on the long runway, the ignition of their after-burners sounding as if the sky was being torn like blue silk. As a child growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Martone heard many stories about Art Smith, “The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne,” and the adventures of this early aviation pioneer. In the air above the city, Martone, as a boy, imagined, “The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne” accomplishing, for the first time, the nearly impossible outside loop and then a barrel-roll back into a loop-to-loop in his fragile cotton canvas and baling wire flying machine he built in his own backyard in Fort Wayne, Indiana, whose sky above was the first sky, anywhere, to be written on, written on by Art Smith, “The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne,” the letters hanging there long enough to be read but then smeared, erased by the high altitude wind, turning into a dissipating front of fogged memories, cloudy recollection.
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The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
By Michael Martone
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