788 



G L K A N I N G S IN BEE CV L T U R E 



w 



r 



LJT 



HEN I 



went up in 

 the air in 

 September, liter- 

 ally not figura- 

 tively that time, 

 the gentleman 

 who has paid my 

 bills for more 

 than 20 years 



said, "I am willing to bet $25.00 you will 

 tell your Gleanings friends about it. ' ' 

 ' ' No, ' ' I replied, ' ' not that I wouldn 't like 

 to, but I fail to see how I could trail an air- 

 plane flight across a food page, do youf " 



Perhaps another thing that deterred me 

 from writing about it was the fact that my 

 father, in alluding to my venture in the Oc- 

 tober issue, called me matronly and spoke 

 of Gleanings and me as babies nearly 50 

 years' ago. Now, father, you may take pride 

 in the fact that Gleanings is getting on, 

 and you may even tack on a few years, in 

 a loose manner of speaking; but don't you 

 know that women are different? You have 

 been calling Gleanings and me nearly half 

 a century old ever since we turned forty. 

 Your habit of exaggeration pains me. 



And how I hate that word matronly, an 

 unreasonable feeling since I am proud to 

 be the mother of three children. But some- 

 how the word ' ' matronly ' ' conjures up a 

 vision of a woman with a grim, determined 

 face, a double chin and bulgy figure with a 

 tight-fitting waist. A matron belongs in an 

 institution, insane or otherwise, not a home. 



But to return to my subject, it was Mary 

 Roberts Einehart 's delightful article, ' ' The 

 Sky Is The Limit, " in a recent Post whicli 

 provoked me to leave the subject of food 

 temporarily. When she wrote an account of 

 a trip to Havana a few years ago I wanted 

 to rise and say, ' ' Now Mary, you are not 

 fair. You have told all the drawbacks and 

 omitted so many delightful features." You 

 see I had just been down to Havana myself. 

 Having just been up in tlie air too, I cannot 

 feel that she quite does air travel justice. 

 Why, I wouldn 't exchange my little fifteen- 

 minute experience for her four flights, 

 stunts, long distance and all, for the simple 

 reason that she evidently did not have half 

 the enjoyment I did, altho I do covet those 

 stunts. 



1 suppose everyone has certain beautiful 

 dreams which come to them again and again 

 from their youth up. I cannot remember 

 when I was too young to dream of flying, 

 of propelling myself thru space by will 

 power, of soaring thru the air and viewing 

 the landscape from above. Pictures of an- 

 gels with their inadequate wings always fas- 

 cinated me as a child. For years I have 

 promised myself that when the children 

 were old enough to get along fairly well 

 without a mother I was going to have an 

 airplane joy ride. 



In August our nineteen-year-old son wrote 

 back an enthusiastic account of a flight he 

 had enjoyed, without our permission, in a 

 hydroplane at Atlantic City. He told us 



A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW 



Stancy Puerden 



LJ 



Dkoicmbkr, I9l<) 



the Curtis Com- 

 ]ianv had taken 

 up '100,000 peo- 

 1 ) 1 e without a 

 single casualty. 

 Thereupon I be- 

 gan planning a 

 future trip to 

 the nearest Cur- 

 tis field. And 

 then came the county fair with a visiting 

 airplane which was advertised to take up 

 passengers. 



When the Puerden family reached the fly- 

 ing field at the edge of town that September 

 afternoon the weather did not look very 

 promising. We watched one passenger soar 

 away, and then it began to rain and we all 

 went home and it occurred to me to wash my 

 hair before we went back to our lake cot- 

 tage, where we had been spending some 

 weeks. Midway in the drying process, w^hich 

 I was facilitating by sitting before an elec- 

 tric fan, father came in and said, "When 

 are you going up? It has stopped raining." 

 Not having said I was going up, I made a 

 rather bewildered reply which father, being- 

 more than a little deaf, seemed to take as 

 saying I intended to fly immediately, and 

 so he said, ' ' I will go and notify all the 

 neighbors. They will want to see you go 

 up. ' ' The neighbors all being relatives, it 

 struck me as rather indecent that they 

 should take such pleasure in seeing me risk 

 my neck. Then my two boys came in, and 

 they and their sister looked so eager that I 

 decided that they should think they had a 

 brave mother for once, and I hastily pinned 

 uj) that damp hair and announced that I 

 was ready if they could find their father. 

 Incidentally, if you want to dry your hair in 

 a hurry let me recommend an airplane ride, 

 without a helmet. 



During the few minutes while the little 

 preliminary details were adjusted I kept 

 saying to myself, "I am at last going to 

 have the exjaerience that I have wanted all 

 my life. This is going to be the realization 

 of hundreds of dreams. ' ' Even the signing 

 of the statement that I absolved the avi- 

 ators of all responsibility did not trouble 

 me. I was blissfully dazed. But the pros- 

 pect of climbing to that inaccessible cockpit 

 before a crowd was not pleasant. I need 

 not have worried. My nearest relative by 

 marriage picked me up and put me over the 

 high side with as much sang-froid as if he 

 were in the habit of lifting his wife into 

 airplanes. As the assistant strapped me in 

 he said, "Don't touch any of those levers." 

 Evidently I showed alarm, for the pilot said 

 reassuringly, ' ' It will do no harm if they 

 touch you. He just means you must not try 

 to take hold of them." Did that nice boy 

 take me for an idiot? 



Then the assistant whirled the propeller, 

 a mighty wind sprang up, we hesitated for 

 a moment and then rushed lightly up grade 

 across the field, gathering speed as we went. 

 I had dreaded the bumps in that rough field; 

 but there was not the slightest sensation of 



