It is not known if this message that appeared over farm fields near Muncie, Indiana, in the spring of 1923, was actually meant to be a distress signal, but it is confirmed that Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was at the controls of the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” that applied it to the cloudless skies.
Earlier that year, Fredrick Mockford, the senior radio officer at London’s Croydon Field, popularized the phrase, a corruption of the French venez m’aider, as a verbal equivalent of telegraphy’s SOS. The proper procedure was to pronounce “mayday” three times in succession, MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY, to distinguish it as an actual declaration of an emergency and not a message about a MAYDAY declaration. In any event, only one MAYDAY appeared that day in white smoke against the background of the azure skies of Indiana.
Art Smith had, by this time, crashed many times while piloting various aircraft, most famously his elopement flight and the botched landing at Osaka, and survived. At this point in his life, he was routinely flying mail between Cleveland and Chicago. It will be three more years before he mistakes the lights of a farmhouse for that landing field at night and plows into a copse of trees and perishes in the resulting fire.
That May Day, he flew in Troy, Michigan, during Fort Custer’s Americanization Day parade, dropping confetti on the troops of the recently repatriated Russian Expeditionary Force as they passed in review. He performed his old aerobatic maneuvers for the appreciative crowd—endless loop-to-loops, traced by the curlicue of ragged smoke that might have looked as if he was in some kind of distress, stalled, on fire, and about to lose all control.
We lose track of Art Smith after that until he reappears again in our records, skimming over Indiana at treetop level. Below him, a ground fog of dust aroused by farmers breaking open the soil for spring planting. Beasts of all sorts scatter and stampede through the pastures beneath the Jenny, propelled by the engine’s persistent trill. Perhaps the smell of the earth reaches the altitude, finds its way into the cockpit, freshening the thick stench of burnt engine oil and paraffin. It is a kind of accident that he is here now at the confluence of the seasons, of history, on his way home or off on some new adventure. The new leaves in the stretching trees just catching the sun are almost ready to explode.