Tuesday, 19 February 2019
During yesterday's grocery stop, I bought eggs that come from an Eastern Shore farm: Happy Hens' Barnyard (motto: Nesting on a wing and a layer!)
The "college" in College Park, where my campground is, is the University of Maryland. I don't know why that information surprised me, but it did. The school is about 2 miles from here.
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| today's route |
Wright Brothers
December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers had 4 successful flights at Kitty Hawk, NC, the longest of which lasted 57 seconds. Few in the press even believed the report, and those few so misrepresented the facts that there was little general interest.
Initially the Wrights used a catapult to launch the planes because it took too long for the plane engine to build up enough speed for takeoff. In 1910, they installed wheels on the planes, making the catapult no longer needed. (The step-by-step process of invention and development is fascinating. No wheels for the first 5 years!)
In 1905, the Wrights started trying to interest the US government, which finally paid attention in 1907. In 1908, while Wilbur Wright was creating a sensation in France with many successful flights, Orville Wright was performing US government trials at Ft. Myer in Virginia. The last of those trials failed, leaving Orville badly injured and his copilot dead.
In 1909, the military agreed to move the contract work to College Park, which had a larger landing area, fewer civilians living nearby, and a convenient rail line. The airport here has operated ever since.
US Mail Service
In 1754, when Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster General for the British Crown, it took mail 6 weeks to go from Boston to Philadelphia. In 1835, the B&O Railroad opened a branch line to Washington, DC, and the trains began to move mail faster than before; mail clerks sorted the mail on the trains.In 1857, the US government offered a prize of $600,000 for an idea to get mail from Missouri to California in 10 days - and the Pony Express was born. In 1918, the first Postal Air Mail Service was begun with a regular route between Wash. DC (i.e. College Park), Philadelphia and New York City.
Planes in WWI
The French were much more enthusiastic than the Americans about this newfangled flying business, and by the beginning of WWI in 1914 had developed machines capable of helping the war effort. Seeing this, the US woke up and got busy catching up. We joined the war in 1917 and it was over in 1918. But though the war ended, the debts still needed to be paid (those were different times). The government issued Liberty Loans in 1917-18 to pay for the war effort and more than half of all American families participated.
In a 1918 publicity stunt to support the Liberty Loans, Douglas Fairbanks (Sr.) stamped himself as air mail (at 16¢ an ounce, it cost him $414.72) and mailed himself from College Park to NYC. The flight took 4 hours, dropping leaflets along the way to support the Loans.
Flight Innovations
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| the gray one is the helicopter |
Henry Berliner invented the forerunner of today's helicopter and, in 1924, flew this one at 40 mph for 200 yards at a 15' altitude. Fifteen years later, Igor Sikorsky figured out how to make the idea practical.
Note that this helicopter has two rotors, one above each wing. This plane is owned by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum but is displayed here in College Park.
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| this is the plane that went to the North Pole |
Following WWII, returning soldiers used the GI bill to pay for flying lessons. (That use never entered my mind.)
The sign on the left describes the development of many major airlines in the framework of progress in air mail.The sign on the right explains the invention and development of what we now use as a flight simulator. It was created in 1929 but, as with so many good ideas, it took years for it to catch on.
Ercoupe
Until I saw these signs, I never realized that this plane I'd heard of in old novels was real, and that it had a name: Ercoupe. These signs explain that it was sold at Macy's and other department stores; that it was so easy to fly young children (and even women!) could do it; that an oddity of its design allowed people with missing limbs to fly - a boon for disabled soldiers returning from war. It's apparently no longer in production but there are still many of them flying around the world.
Flight Basics
For others like me who've never quite gotten the idea clear, the museum had a nice interactive display for children (my level of understanding) of the following principles:
- Lift: it gets planes from the ground into the air; the air must deflect around the wing top and bottom, then the air above the wing sweeps down faster than the air below the wing and lifts it up
- Gravity: it pulls the planes down to the ground; to fly, a plane must have more lift than its amount of gravity force
- Thrust: it moves the plane forward; a propeller pushes the air from the front of the plane to the rear, moving the plane forward; propellers are shaped like twisted wings and use the same pressure difference to generate thrust that wings use to generate lift
The photo on the left shows propellers of different ages made of different materials.The photo on the right is a close-up of the propeller that's second from the left in the left-hand photo. I took it because that propeller was made of canvas and paper some time in the 1920s. (I find that information stunning.)
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| Fifinella |
WASPs
The Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron was formed in 1942, and in 1943 became the Women's Airforce Service Pilots. They were always considered civilians despite their role in assisting and training male combat pilots during WWII. They were given permission by Walt Disney to adopt his character Fifinella as their symbol. The museum has a pin that was owned by one of the WASPs that looks just like this emblem here. The WASPs were disbanded in 1944.
In 1976, the US Air Force announced it was training its first female pilots. The WASPs, knowing they themselves were the first, started working both for recognition and for veterans benefits. They were granted status as veterans in 1977 but later were denied burial in Arlington National Cemetery. The US Army administers that cemetery and decided the 1977 law didn't make WASPs eligible for Arlington burial (the Army apparently decided they weren't really veterans). It took Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ), a former USAF combat pilot herself, and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) to introduce and get passed a bill correcting the Army's interpretation. Pres. Obama signed the bill in 2016 - almost 30 years after veteran's status was originally granted. (Those good ol' Army boys can really be stubborn.)
There was much more at the museum, but I'd already spent 2 hours there and decided to go back to the critters.
My sister Louise
Death can be so unfair. Louise will never be older than 21, and of course that's still the way I think of her. But this would have been her 67th birthday, the realization of which brought me to a sudden stop. 67 isn't 21. I so wish she'd had the chance to live those years. She was a remarkable person and I'm certain she would have lived a remarkable life.
She had cerebral palsy as a baby and spent her early years wearing leg braces. One of her feet twisted in until she taught it not to when she was in junior high school.
She could read a book and knit a sweater at the same time. And her knitting was beautiful.
She loved horses and horse racing and introduced our whole family to the Triple Crown races. Weezy saw Secretariat win the Kentucky Derby, but died before he finished out the other two Triple Crown races. I'm so sorry because she would have loved it.
She was always the most studious of the 3 of us kids, the hardest working and - no surprise - made the best grades by far. She was a National Merit Scholarship Winner. But she was no goody-two-shoes: she almost got kicked out of school a few weeks before graduation for working on a - gasp! - subversive newspaper. Its main crime in the eyes of the school officials was to point out the separate but very unequal facilities between the black and white high schools in Bryan, TX. (This was 1970.) For that sin, most of the kids who worked on the paper got suspended or expelled.
What Louise explained to me, though, is that they actually had done something they shouldn't have, which was to distribute the paper on school grounds. For some reason, school officials never seemed to notice that infraction so, of course, the kids kept quiet about it.
She sent me a long detailed letter that I still have describing not only the incident but the follow-up conference in the principal's office with him and her and our parents. The climax seemed to be when the principal told Weezy he'd let her back into school but she had to agree not to support the newspaper. And Daddy said, "Are you telling her what she's allowed to think?" And the principal said, "She cannot support this newspaper!" And Daddy said, "Are you telling her what she can and cannot THINK?" And the principal said, "Well, of course he couldn't tell her what to think." Daddy wanted him to admit that.
When Weez asked him later about it, Daddy just said, "Life gets more interesting every day."
And Weezy told me the one thing she'd learned is this: If you're going to do something unpopular, be sure you are unquestionably legal every step of the way. Because it was that improper distribution on school grounds that made it harder for her to defend herself.
She went to Duke University and learned French and lived in the French dorm for a while. She was among those who helped start the women's studies program there and was very involved in their activities. She discovered skydiving and got an extra job to earn the money to pay for it. Sadly, that's also what killed her - her parachute didn't open one day.
When we were young, I saw her have a grand mal seizure the first time she tried on a pair of contact lenses. I never knew what brought it on, but there's no question that's what I was seeing. Momma told me later she'd had another seizure when she was younger, though I don't know the circumstances.
Both her parachutes were packed properly and there was no reason for them not to open, so the conclusion is that she didn't pull the cord. I absolutely believe it's because she had another seizure. This was only 3 weeks after our parents got divorced. She'd recently split up from her boyfriend. She was beginning her senior year of college and didn't know what she wanted to do after graduation. She was stressed. But she was tough. As tough as they come. And I'm certain this wasn't suicide but a medical event.
But despite her death, she had a strong influence on my life. One of the reasons I became a lawyer was to carry on something she'd been thinking of doing herself. She would have loved the Dick Francis books (horseracing and mysteries and good writing all combined? a no-brainer). It's impossible for me to work a jigsaw puzzle without remembering how she'd hold one or more pieces in her hand, waiting until she could find the place they fit but not telling anyone else she had them until we complained that there were pieces missing.
Big things and small ones, she'll always be a part of my life. And all these years later, I still miss her very much.
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