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. 3