1919

Edward O. Southard learned to fly the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny at March Field in Riverside California in 1919. About eighteen months earlier William Muir Russel was honing his pilot skills at Ashburn Field and then Rantoul Aviation Field both in Illinois. But that's where the differences in their early flying school experiences end. They both learned to fly in the same plane. They both saw frequent crashes. They both mastered the same controls take-offs and landings. And they both first flew solo in a Jenny. In 1919 author William H. Bollman melds Southard's photographs taken with a Brownie No. 2 Kodak box camera with excerpts from Russel's letters that were compiled in the book A Happy Warrior. The photographs and words describe what it was like to learn to fly in the same plane that Amelia Earhart first learned to fly in and in the same plane that Charles Lindbergh first soloed in in this entry in the Trip Back in Time: Vintage Photo Album Series™. 1919 tells the story of what it was like to be among the very first to learn to fly this open-air biplane at a time when very few had even seen a plane up close.