In early September of 1916 while recovering in Indiana from the surgery on his broken leg, the injury he sustained in the crash at Sapporo ending his first tour of Japan, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, received word that Benjamin Henry Day, Jr. had died in Summit, New Jersey. Smith was introduced to Day, the son of the founder of the New York Sun, five years before when Smith was engaged by the editor of the Hillsdale, Michigan, newspaper, The Hillsdale Daily Standard Herald, to deliver the paper to the nearby towns of Camden, Jonesville, Litchfield, Pittsford, and Reading. While not writing any words in the sky, Art instead dropped words upon the towns, the newspapers bundled with jute hay baling twine. He circled as the bundle descended, waiting as the recipients below gathered up the packages and waved to him in gratitude. The arrangement anticipated the more complicated logistics the United States Post Office would soon inaugurate for delivering its mail and in whose service Art Smith would give his life a decade hence. Occasionally, while making such deliveries for the Daily Standard Herald, Art Smith would spill his cargo over acres of Michigan, the knots in the twine giving way and a squall of newspaper broadsheets raining down upon the citizens below. There was nothing to be done as the unbound sheaves shifted and spun to the ground. Aloft, Art Smith, conscious that the prop wash of his plane stirred further the thermal meanderings of his spilled cargo, delighted in the notion that all these letters were like motes of dust descending. And though the scored pages flapped like birds, they did not fly or soar but covered the countryside below in shoals and drifts in the open fields and along the fencerows. He watched from above while those below gleaned the litter from the landscape. It was like following the bouncing ball in the new movie cartoon sing-alongs. He had seen one recently animating the song “Come Josephine in My Flying Machine.” Art drifted away from the chaotic commotion below, his memory drifting too. He had met Josephine Magner, the song’s romantic subject, who also performed on the demonstration circuit, parachuting from dirigibles, the blooming silk of her bobbing chute, another oscillating orb through the air…
But we have drifted ourselves here. This entry was to annotate the elliptical pattern Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, produced over Summit, New Jersey, in the fall of 1916, out of respect for the recently deceased Ben Day. Ben Day invented the printing process that bears his name, benday, composed of fields of equally sized and distributed dots of ink that created, when arrayed on newsprint, the illusion of depth on flat photos and allowed for the expansion of color in the Sunday funnies of the nation’s newspapers. The sky that day was cloudless, a perfect canvas for his skywriting. To replicate and apply the benday’s precise rigorous pattern Art Smith summoned all his powers and skills of aviation. The break healing in his aching bone was being painfully knitted back together. Through the throbbing pain, he bore down hard on his plane’s rudder. Afterwards as he flew above the field of clouds he had created, he looked earthward and through the stippled screen of rings, marveling at the illusion of depth, the disruption of space, the perforation of the sky the stencil of dots brought about, the dappled nature of the dimpled shadows cast upon the ground below. The Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh…! He found himself repeating as the sieve of smoke imprinted itself upon his memory and, bit by bit, a dot at a time, upon this empty photographic plate now exposed to this one moment’s moment.