DTMFall'25_Final - Flipbook - Page 18
In 1909, Louis Blériot made the first successful
flight across the English Channel, inspiring the
passion of Claude Grahame-White who would
become a leader of British aviation, experimenting
with the militarization of aircraft before World
War I and piloting the first night patrol mission in
that conflict. The poem’s popularity surged as men
really did begin to conquer the air, and by 1910, the
poem’s popularity merited its own delightfully
illustrated volume. Published by Houghton Mifflin
Company, the foreword remarked, “When Mr.
Trowbridge wrote the poem he little dreamed that
he himself would ever see men fly successfully. Yet
from his description of this flying-machine and in
Mr. [Wallace] Goldsmith’s clever drawings we see
an embryonic monoplane, which is not unlike Mr.
Grahame-White’s Bleriot.”
Indeed, mankind was beginning to take dominion
of the air, finally answering the plaintive question
asked by Darius Green and countless dreamers
before him, “The birds can fly, an’ why can’t I?”
(One cannot help but think of Judy Garland’s
Dorothy, singing of a land somewhere over the
rainbow–and the humbug conman who crashed his
balloon. Perhaps “Yip” Harburg, the lyricist of
Somewhere Over the Rainbow, was himself familiar
with Darius Green?)
Trowbridge concludes his poem with the following
moral:
–Stick to your sphere.
Or if you insist, as you have the right,
On spreading your wings for a loftier flight,
The moral is, –Take care how you light.
Louis Blériot in his Flight Leathers. Photo Courtesy of Medium.com
That moral becomes especially poignant when
considering this history: In 1902, the streets of San
Angelo were not yet paved, as much of the year the
roads were dry and, before automobiles and
streetcars, paving seemed like a needless expense.
It wasn’t until January of 1912 that San Angelo
resident Walter Buck “made the first tracks” with
his Maxwell automobile on Beauregard, the city’s
first paved street (San Angelo Evening Standard,
January 30, 1812) City Engineer J. J. Goodfellow, Sr.
was in charge of overseeing the project, for which
the city had allocated some $20,000 and which
also included a sewage system. His son, John James,
Jr. assisted him in his civil engineering business.
While a student at the University of Texas, young
Goodfellow, Jr. volunteered for the Infantry during
World War I and attended flight training in
California. Lt. Goodfellow’s bomber plane was shot
down in France in September 1918, where the
lieutenant was buried with full military honors and
awarded the Croix De Guerre. Goodfellow Air Force
Base, which had its beginnings as a flight training
field for Army pilots in 1941, was named for him.
