In 1916, in the air over his native city, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, attempted to skywrite an ampersand in support of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s election to a second term. In creating the symbol, Smith wrote later, he also wanted to persuade the President and Congress to take America into the Great War, allied with Great Britain and France, where the use of the airplane in aerial combat had commenced and expanded in thrilling new tactics and aerobatics. Smith believed that the ampersand’s tracing replicated the tortured maneuverings of airplanes while “dogfighting” in the skies over Europe. It was only later, upon reflection, Art Smith saw, in its curlicues and crossovers, that the smoke-generated ampersand over Fort Wayne outlined, in a swift gesture, the character of a proudly perched bird. This insight spurred him to adopt the logogram as his personal symbol and to commission its pattern on several devices of jewelry and to have it embroidered as his insignia upon his flying attire and upon the flanks of the fuselages of his future flying machines.