***
reminded me of an incident in which
my older brother and cousin rolled me up in a mattress and tossed me out of
a
second story window in our house. I can't recall whether I was a willing or
unwilling air traveller. I am sure that the experiment was space race
related.
I survived.
***

Which reminds me of one of my dad's stories. My dad was a artist as a youth
and came across L. DaVinci's drawing of a pyrimid-shaped parachute, so he
and two buddies built one and began testing it out from a fourth story fire
escape landing. After one broken leg, and one broken foot they found that it
took at least six feet of "fluffy sawdust" on the ally pavement below to get
the parachute to work right. Upon the third physical injury the doctor
investigated their parachute project and introduced the boys to some guys
just a couple years older who where learning to fly Ginny biplanes at the
nearby Arrow Airfield in Lincoln, Nebr. These guys showed the boys what real
parachutes were like and by the next summer the boys were taking flight
lessons and bailing out with much better equipment. The end of that summer
my dad's buddies took off on the barn storming circuit, but my dad decided
to stay home and stick with his art studies -- a good thing too, because
both of his buddies died in a barn crash stunt.

It turns out the guy who showed them the parachutes was Charles Lindbergh,
which brings me to the reason this story came to mind here on the
Preservationeers maillist. Lindbergh's plane was shipped back to New York in
1927 in a crate made of English pine. The crate was saved by the captian of
the ship and hauled to his farm in New Hampshire. It was remodeled into a
cottage and lived in by various summer visitors, forestry transients, and
hippy back-to-the-landers until 1990 when it was moved to Canaan, Maine and
preserved by its current owner Larry Ross.

John Leeke
www.HistoricHomeWorks.com