One of Art Smith’s earliest aerial attempts pays homage to the inventors of heavier-than-air controlled powered flight. It was composed over the open ocean of North Carolina’s Outer Banks near Kill Devil Hills in 1915 after several trial runs spelled out with a stick upon the sand dunes. Back in 1910, Smith had traveled from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis to see the brothers demonstrate their craft. Returning home, an inspired Art Smith breathed out upon the window of the interurban whisking him north and in the fog now clouding the car’s glass he spelled out, with a trembling finger, the name of the creators and in so doing prefigured his own invention of the skywriting in the rapidly approaching future.
During the 1916 barnstorming tour of the upper Midwest, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, wrote this over the town of Wahpeton, North Dakota. The meaning of the message was unclear. One interpretation has it that Smith was asserting his “right” to land his craft on the one paved municipal street below, the citizens of Wahpeton being notorious for their dislike of the many stunt fliers now crisscrossing the region. The other theory holds that this was a signal to Smith’s ground chase crew that he would be turning “right” and heading to the more welcoming town of Breckenridge, Minnesota, on the eastern bank of the northern flowing Red River.
On November 18th, 1925, the Scottish Rite Cathedral opened in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Art Smith flew above the ceremonies, inscribing this message along the corridor of Fairfield Avenue. The Valley of Fort Wayne Ancient and Accepted Order of the Scottish Rite, a growing order of the Masons, sought, at the time, to expand. Max Irmscher & Sons began construction in April of 1924 with 200 masons, mostly local, taking a year and a half to complete the project costing over $1 million. Two steam shovels took six weeks to excavate the ballroom. Over 350,000 bricks were used in the construction, adding to the building’s reputation as the most “fire-proof” in the city. Art Smith had longed to be “tapped” by the secret fraternal organization. He often thought of his skywriting as a kind of masonry. The smoke might be like grouting, or the words concocted out of that vapor a signifier of “wall.” But his contribution to that glorious occasion proved inconsequential, the writing disappearing almost as soon as it was written, and goes unremarked in the printed commemorative program.
Not long before his untimely death in February of 1926, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, affixed the above above an open field straddling the Indiana-Ohio border near Paulding. At the time, Smith served as a pilot for the recently formed Air Service of the United States Post Office flying the routes between New York and Chicago. He would often modify his Curtiss Carrier Pigeon aircraft with his skywriting apparatus, several times advertising over the large metropolitan regions to Write Home or Write Mother via the PO. It is harder to explain this message affixed over the open and desolate pastureland of western Ohio. Smith left no notes in this regard. Who was the intended audience for this swiftly dissipating and somewhat lyrical missive?
