Big Money (36 page)

In my dreams it always seems

    
I hear you softly call to me

         
Valencia!

Where the orange trees forever scent the

    
Breeze beside the sea

 

which in itself typifies the great drama of the Miami we have today. At the time only twenty years ago when the site of the Bay of Biscayne Bank was a farmer's hitchingyard and that of the First National Bank a public barbecue ground the ground here where this ultramodern hotel and club stands was isolated primeval forest. My father and myself were clearing little vegetable patches round it and I was peddling vegetables at the hotel Royal Palm, then a magnificent hotel set in a wild frontier. Even eight years ago I was growing tomatoes

 

Valencia!

 

SEEK MISSING LOOT

 

WOMAN DIRECTS HIGHWAY ROBBERY

 

Lazy River flowing to the southland

    
Down where I long to be

 

RADIUM VICTIMS TIPPED BRUSHES IN MOUTHS

 

this peninsula has been white every month though there have been some months when West Florida was represented as only fair

 

GIRL EVANGELS AWAIT CHRIST IN NEW YORK

 

When the red red robin

    
Comes bob bob bobbin' along along

 

We Want You to Use Our Credit System to Your Utmost Advantage. Only a Small Down Payment and the Balance in Small Amounts to Suit Your Convenience.

 

There'll be no more sobbin'

    
When he starts throbbin'

 

URGES STRIKES BE TERMED FELONIES

 

When he starts throbbin'

    
His old sweet song

When the red red robin

 

bright and early he showed no signs of fatigue or any of the usual evidences of a long journey just finished. There was not a wrinkle on his handsome suit of silken material, the weave and texture and color of which were so suitable for tropic summer days. His tie with its jeweled stickpin and his finger ring were details in perfect accord with his immaculate attire. Though small in stature and unassuming in manner, he disposed of $20,000,000 worth of building operations with as little fuss or flurry as ordinarily accompanies the act of a passenger on a trolley car in handing a nickel to the conductor.

On December seventeenth, nineteen hundred and three, Bishop Wright of the United Brethren onetime editor of the
Religious Telescope
received in his frame house on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, a telegram from his boys Wilbur and Orville who'd gotten it into their heads to spend their vacations in a little camp out on the dunes of the North Carolina coast tinkering with a homemade glider they'd knocked together themselves. The telegram read:

 

SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING ALL AGAINST TWENTYONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM LEVEL WITH ENGINEPOWER ALONE AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR THIRTYONE MILES LONGEST FIFTYSEVEN SECONDS INFORM PRESS HOME CHRISTMAS

 

The figures were a little wrong because the telegraph operator misread Orville's hasty penciled scrawl

but the fact remains

that a couple of young bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio

had designed constructed and flown

for the first time ever a practical airplane.

 

After running the motor a few minutes to heat it up I released the wire that held the machine to the track and the machine started forward into the wind. Wilbur ran at the side of the machine holding the wing to balance it on the track. Unlike the start on the 14th made in a calm the machine facing a 27 mile wind started very slowly. . . . Wilbur was able to stay with it until it lifted from the track after a forty-foot run. One of the lifesaving men snapped the camera for us taking a picture just as it reached the end of the track and the machine had risen to a height of about two feet. . . . The course of the flight up and down was extremely erratic, partly due to the irregularities of the air, partly to lack of experience in handling this machine. A sudden dart when a little over a hundred and twenty feet from the point at which it rose in the air ended the flight. . . . This flight lasted only 12 seconds but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started.

A little later in the day the machine was caught in a gust of wind and turned over and smashed, almost killing the coastguardsman who tried to hold it down;

it was too bad

but the Wright brothers were too happy to care

they'd proved that the damn thing flew.

When these points had been definitely established we at once packed our goods and returned home knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last.

They were home for Christmas in Dayton, Ohio, where they'd been born in the seventies of a family who had been settled west of the Alleghenies since eighteen fourteen, in Dayton, Ohio, where they'd been to grammarschool and highschool and joined their father's church and played baseball and hockey and worked out on the parallel bars and the flying swing and sold newspapers and built
themselves a printingpress out of odds and ends from the junkheap and flown kites and tinkered with mechanical contraptions and gone around town as boys doing odd jobs to turn an honest penny.

The folks claimed it was the bishop's bringing home a helicopter, a fiftycent mechanical toy made of two fans worked by elastic bands that was supposed to hover in the air, that had got his two youngest boys hipped on the subject of flight

so that they stayed home instead of marrying the way the other boys did, and puttered all day about the house picking up a living with jobprinting,

bicyclerepair work,

sitting up late nights reading books on aerodynamics.

Still they were sincere churchmembers, their bicycle business was prosperous, a man could rely on their word. They were popular in Dayton.

In those days flyingmachines were the big laugh of all the crackerbarrel philosophers. Langley's and Chanute's unsuccessful experiments had been jeered down with an I-told-you-so that rang from coast to coast. The Wrights' big problem was to find a place secluded enough to carry on their experiments without being the horselaugh of the countryside. Then they had no money to spend;

they were practical mechanics; when they needed anything they built it themselves.

 

They hit on Kitty Hawk,

on the great dunes and sandy banks that stretch south towards Hatteras seaward of Albemarle Sound,

a vast stretch of seabeach

empty except for a coastguard station, a few fishermen's shacks and the swarms of mosquitoes and the ticks and chiggers in the crabgrass behind the dunes

and overhead the gulls and swooping terns, in the evening fishhawks and cranes flapping across the saltmarshes, occasionally eagles

that the Wright brothers followed soaring with their eyes

as Leonardo watched them centuries before

straining his sharp eyes to apprehend

the laws of flight.

Four miles across the loose sand from the scattering of shacks, the Wright brothers built themselves a camp and a shed for their glid
ers. It was a long way to pack their groceries, their tools, anything they happened to need; in summer it was hot as blazes, the mosquitoes were hell;

but they were alone there

and they'd figured out that the loose sand was as soft as anything they could find to fall in.

There with a glider made of two planes and a tail in which they lay flat on their bellies and controlled the warp of the planes by shimmying their hips, taking off again and again all day from a big dune named Kill Devil Hill,

they learned to fly.

 

Once they'd managed to hover for a few seconds

and soar ever so slightly on a rising aircurrent

they decided the time had come

to put a motor in their biplane.

 

Back in the shop in Dayton, Ohio, they built an airtunnel, which is their first great contribution to the science of flying, and tried out model planes in it.

They couldn't interest any builders of gasoline engines so they had to build their own motor.

It worked; after that Christmas of nineteen three the Wright brothers weren't doing it for fun any more; they gave up their bicycle business, got the use of a big old cowpasture belonging to the local banker for practice flights, spent all the time when they weren't working on their machine in promotion, worrying about patents, infringements, spies, trying to interest government officials, to make sense out of the smooth involved heartbreaking remarks of lawyers.

In two years they had a plane that would cover twenty-four miles at a stretch round and round the cowpasture.

People on the interurban car used to crane their necks out of the windows when they passed along the edge of the field, startled by the clattering pop pop of the old Wright motor and the sight of the white biplane like a pair of ironingboards one on top of the other chugging along a good fifty feet in the air. The cows soon got used to it.

 

As the flights got longer

the Wright brothers got backers,

engaged in lawsuits,

lay in their beds at night sleepless with the whine of phantom millions, worse than the mosquitoes at Kitty Hawk.

 

In nineteen seven they went to Paris,

allowed themselves to be togged out in dress suits and silk hats,

learned to tip waiters

talked with government experts, got used to gold braid and postponements and vandyke beards and the outspread palms of politicos. For amusement

they played diabolo in the Tuileries gardens.

 

They gave publicized flights at Fort Myers, where they had their first fatal crackup, St. Petersburg, Paris, Berlin; at Pau they were all the rage,

such an attraction that the hotelkeeper

wouldn't charge them for their room.

Alfonso of Spain shook hands with them and was photographed sitting in the machine,

King Edward watched a flight,

the Crown Prince insisted on being taken up,

the rain of medals began.

 

They were congratulated by the Czar

and the King of Italy and the amateurs of sport, and the society climbers and the papal titles,

and decorated by a society for universal peace.

 

Aeronautics became the sport of the day.

The Wrights don't seem to have been very much impressed by the upholstery and the braid and the gold medals and the parades of plush horses,

they remained practical mechanics

and insisted on doing all their own work themselves,

even to filling the gasolinetank.

 

In nineteen eleven they were back on the dunes

at Kitty Hawk with a new glider.

Orville stayed up in the air for nine and a half minutes, which remained a long time the record for motorless flight.

The same year Wilbur died of typhoidfever in Dayton.

In the rush of new names: Farman, Blériot, Curtiss, Ferber, Esnault-Peltrie, Delagrange;

in the snorting impact of bombs and the whine and rattle of shrapnel and the sudden stutter of machineguns after the motor's been shut off overhead,

and we flatten into the mud

and make ourselves small cowering in the corners of ruined walls,

the Wright brothers passed out of the headlines

but not even headlines or the bitter smear of newsprint or the choke of smokescreen and gas or chatter of brokers on the stockmarket or barking of phantom millions or oratory of brasshats laying wreaths on new monuments

can blur the memory

of the chilly December day

two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio,

first felt their homemade contraption

whittled out of hickory sticks,

gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement,

stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewingmachine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio,

soar into the air

above the dunes and the wide beach

at Kitty Hawk.

the stranger first coming to Detroit if he be interested in the busy economic side of modern life will find a marvelous industrial beehive; if he be a lover of nature he will take notice of a site made forever remarkable by the waters of that noble strait that gives the city its name; if he be a student of romance and history he will discover legends and records as entertaining and as instructive as the continent can supply

 

I've a longing for my Omaha town

         
I long to go there and settle down

 

DETROIT LEADS THE WORLD IN THE
MANUFACTURE OF AUTOMOBILES

 

I want to see my pa

    
I want to see my ma

         
I want to go to dear old Omaha

 

DETROIT IS FIRST

 

IN PHARMACEUTICALS

     STOVES RANGES FURNACES