In 1925, flying over North Highlands, with his mother, Ida, on board, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, negotiated a crash landing after the motor driving his de Havilland choked. Descending from two thousand feet, he expertly voplaned his craft to earth. Neither was injured. It was the second such emergency landing he survived with his mother who later said: “I looked at Art and touched his shoulder. When he smiled at me, I knew I was with my boy and I was safe.” Days later, his airplane repaired, Smith took to the sky again to commemorate the event. His mother, safely on the ground this time, blew kisses into the air from her gloved hands.
Observed that day from further west, Art Smith’s homage to his mother read as an exclamation. A farmer harrowing a field off Bass Road, his attention drawn by the pesky buzz of the airplane overhead, called for his wife to come see as the letters appeared there, punctuated by the blotting clouds. A year later, after the crash he would not survive, Art Smith would be laid to rest at the nearby Lindenwood Cemetery. During the interment there, a flight of de Havilland airships would bomb the gravesite with a dusting of flower petals. Ida, it is said, held up her hand as if to receive a homing pigeon. Or a hawk.
