big day

It was a big day, yesterday. Got all enthusiastic about it. Got up early to put some finishing touches on it, my new e-book, pictured here. It's to be found on Kindle & Nook and a few have done so. I got it into my head that it had to be published somehow, yesterday, the story of long-gone Harriet Quimby, who flew the Channel on the 16th of April, 2012. But I confess that I am sad that her story, my version of her story, was published this way.

How I wish that this was a real book. Maybe it will be.

Nat'l Poetry Month No. 16

I don't know who John D. Duvall is, but look at this poem he wrote:

To All That Fly

May God grant you blue skies aloft,
With winds of calm by land,
As you play on the outskirts of heaven,
On the fragile wings of man.

His little verse is particularly apt today, the anniversary of the birth, in 1867, of Wilbur Wright. Moreover, exactly 100 years ago today, on the 16th of April, 1912, pioneer aviator Harriet Quimby became the first female pilot to fly, alone, in a tiny dragonfly of an 'aeroplane' across the stormy English Channel.

“Without any of the modern instruments, in a plane which was hardly more than a winged skeleton with a motor, and one, furthermore, with which she was totally unfamiliar, to cross the Channel in 1912 required more bravery and skill than to cross the Atlantic today." Amelia Earhart, 1928

Women's History Month No. 4

"The men flyers have given out the impression that aeroplaning is very perilous work."

Harriet Quimby

So. Look at that primitive flying machine - state of the art in 1912.

And - yes, I know. NOT the main thing to be taken note of, but golly, look at her beautiful face, at this brave, adventurous, clever, ambitious, and vivacious young woman, in her especially designed wool-&-satin deep purple flying costume. Can't you just tell that she has no idea that she's only weeks to live? Wouldn't you suspect that there's nothing she'd change had she known?

Here is a photograph taken of a globe-trotting photojournalist, an actress, a sometime screenwriter in the pioneering days of film, AND the very first U.S. woman to be a certified pilot. Her name is to be found in the record books for having been the very first 'aviatrix' - her era's term for female flyers - to fly - not simply ride - across the English Channel. A completely courageous feat undertaken early on the 16th of April, 1912, as nervous rumors were beginning to circulate about the R.M.S. Titanic, gone to the bottom of the Atlantic only hours earlier.

And only a few weeks later, on July 1, 1912, oh well. I'd rather not type the words.

What This Day Represents.

So, this being the 15th of April, may I point out that this is the 27th day of spring and the 106th day of the year, more or less.

On another April 15th, in 1542, Leonardo da Vinci was born. Charles Wilson Peale, another remarkable artist, naturalist, and observer of life was born on this day in 1741, almost exactly 200 years after Leo. d. V. entered life. On yet another, 15apr, this one in 1912, the glory of the White Star Line went down to the bottom of the North Atlantic, in the same week that the glamorous, ambitious, world-traveling Harriet Quimby became the very first woman to fly herself and her dragonfly contraption of an aircraft across the English Channel.

And, this being the 15th day of April, let me say that when it comes to taxes, the levying & the paying of them, I concede that I agree with Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society." I'm just saying.

~Franklin D. Roosevelt