At last we gave up. I crawled out to let Flip take a whirl at it alone. By using up half the field, he managed to wish the muddy Sparrow into her element, and after building some altitude, wheeled over the place where I stood and called down that there was another field a short distance away. After pacifying a sheriff, who was about to lock me up for trespassing, by shoving him into a mud puddle, I hopped onto the running board of a Purdue boy’s car and burned road over to Flip’s new landing place—if you could call it that.

The second field was little better than the first, and three attempts were necessary before we willed the Sparrow up just in time to see a nine-foot telephone wire at the height of our prop. Flip threw the nose down and the wires were a scant foot above my head.

We had intended to leave this section of the country for keeps; but a thunderstorm was all around us, we were almost out of gas, the magnetos weren’t functioning right, and it was almost dark, so we hit dirt again five miles away to stop dead in the middle of a wet plowed field.

After that performance we left southern Indiana for more stout-souled fliers, and picked up the thread of adventure in Kentland, where a county fair was progressing nicely without our help. We tried to buy all the watermelons in Indiana by confining our menu to that fruit for dinner, breakfast and lunch. Some of the grifters showed us around, and that night after the midway darkened we were involved in a minor auto wreck. While the car was being repaired in a garage, Flip and I tried our best to “borrow” the siren of the VFD [Volunteer Fire Department] engine which was housed in the same garage. We were unsuccessful, however, and the forthcoming towns were spared the terrors of screeches issuing from the blue. In Ohio, we dropped a pushrod over a solid, if small, field and were lucky enough to find a machine shop close by in the town of New London. We spent the night as the guests of a gentleman farmer, the son of a famous professor, whose house was pleasantly cluttered with all manner of things Chinese. That morning had found us trying the only piece of navigation we attempted on the trip, and the results were marvelous. When we were forced down near New London, we found that we were only twenty-seven miles off a fifty-mile course.

Tailwind Willies Continued...

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