"For 16 months, from June 1910 to November 1911, the team members performed at air meets across the country -- uncrating their aircraft from rail cars, thrilling crowds, haggling with promoters, perplexing their bosses, falling in love, getting divorced, counting gate receipts, and setting aerial records."
So reports a 2008 story in Air and Space Magazine, a publication of the Smithsonian Institution.
And one of those "air meets" was right here in Grand Forks, 100 years ago this month.
It was to feature North Dakota's first powered flight.
Marilyn Hagerty provides the details in her column on this page. But the July 19, 1910, flight at the Grand Forks Fairgrounds just north of town -- the same site as the fairgrounds today -- deserves even more attention.
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For 1910 was one of aviation's pivotal years. It marked the birth of the air show, the very first of which in America had taken place in January, only a few months before the Grand Forks event.
The Wright Exhibition Team that crisscrossed the nation that year were hardly experienced fliers. In fact, they, too, had been trained only that year, Orville Wright having taken a group of four novices and trained them to fly in only four months, Air and Space reported.
But his inexperience didn't stop one of those new pilots, Arch Hoxsey, from taking one of the most remarkable flights in American history.
As Marilyn notes, Hoxsey was the pilot who came to Grand Forks. A few months later at an air show in Missouri, he invited President Theodore Roosevelt to strap in for a ride. The president said yes and went on to become the first president to fly.
The sheer riskiness of this action comes through in the following tragic fact: In December 1910, only two months after piloting the president, Hoxsey himself was killed in an air show crash. In fact, 31 aviators died in crashes in 1910, up from only four the year before.
Earlier this month, Prairie Public Broadcasting's "Dakota Datebook" did a nice feature on the 1910 Grand Forks air show. Here's an excerpt:
"When it was time to fly, Hoxsey started his engine and the unmuffled exhaust, according to a news report, sounded 'like a fusillade of pistol shots.'
"Hoxsey accelerated his 'aeroplane' along a 'monorail starting track . . . with the speed of an express train' until the machine lifted 'smoothly and gracefully into the air.' The crowd of 10,000, wrote the Grand Forks Herald, collectively 'took a big breath and then gave vent to a GREAT cheer.'"
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Hoxsey flew for 22 minutes, "making figure eights in the skies over Grand Forks. ... The newspaper told of an 86-year-old man who, when 'the aeroplane went up slowly but surely, rose suddenly to his feet, rubbed his eyes to be sure that they were not deceiving him, and as the machine soared upward and around like a giant bird; he laughed like a schoolboy and the tears -- tears occasioned by pure delight and by the realization of the hope of years, coursed down his cheeks.'"
Hoxsey's encounter and flight with Roosevelt is preserved in an amazing silent film. A quick Google search will take you to it, and it's worth the trip:
The film shows Hoxsey approaching the president's motorcade, extending his invitation to TR and, remarkably, Roosevelt saying yes.
"Roosevelt was on the machine before I was," Hoxsey told a reporter in a later interview.
"He was bareheaded. A newspaper man gave him a cap and he said, 'Let 'er go.' We started.
"I didn't look at Roosevelt until I felt the machine wiggle. He was waving at the crowd. We were up about 150 feet.
"'Be careful not to pull any of those strings,' I warned him. He was sitting directly underneath the valve cord of the engine and the engine would have stopped had he touched it.
"'Nothing doing,' he shouted back, showing his teeth. ... I was very careful. I said to myself, 'If anything happens to him, I'll never be able to square myself with the American people.' I was mighty glad when we landed. I never felt a greater responsibility in my life."
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For his part, Roosevelt loved the experience.
"That was the bulliest experience I ever had," Roosevelt said at a dinner later that day, where Hoxsey was a guest. "I envy you your professional conquest of space."
-- Tom Dennis for the Herald
