My grandfather was constantly experimenting in his laboratory. He held a number of patents on incandescent grates and furnaces, in addition to several on gold and enamel inlays and other dental processes. He was one of the first to foresee the possibilities of porcelain in dentistry, and later became known as “the father of porcelain dental art.”
During the first four years of my life, I lived in our Minnesota home with the exception of a few trips to Detroit. Then my father was elected to Congress and thereafter I seldom spent more than a few months in the same place. Our winters were passed in Washington, and our summers in Minnesota, with intermediate visits to Detroit.
When I was eight years of age I entered the Force School in Washington. My schooling was very irregular due to our constant moving from place to place. Up to the time I entered the University of Wisconsin I had never attended for one full school year, and I had received instruction from over a dozen institutions, both public and private, from Washington to California.
Through these years I crossed and recrossed the United States, made one trip to Panama, and had thoroughly developed a desire for travel, which has never been overcome.
My chief interest in school lay along mechanical and scientific lines. Consequently, after graduating from the Little Falls High School, I decided to take a course in Mechanical Engineering, and two years later entered the College of Engineering of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
While I was attending the University I became intensely interested in aviation. Since I saw my first airplane near Washington DC, in 1912, I had been fascinated with flying, although up to the time I enrolled in a flying school in 1922 I had never been near enough a plane to touch it.
The long hours of study at college were very trying for me. I had spent most of my life outdoors and had never before found it necessary to spend more than a part of my time in study.
At Wisconsin my chief recreation consisted of shooting-matches with the rifle and pistol teams of rival Universities, and in running around on my motorcycle which I had ridden down from Minnesota when I entered the University.
I had been raised with a gun on our Minnesota home, and found a place on the R.O.T.C. teams at the beginning of my freshman year at Wisconsin. From then on I spent every minute I could steal from my studies in the shooting gallery and on the range.
The first six weeks of vacation after my freshman year were spent in an Artillery School at Camp Knox, Kentucky. When that was over I headed my motorcycle south and with forty-eight dollars in my pocket, set out for Florida. After arriving at Jacksonville I started back the same day, but over a different route leading farther west than the first. Seventeen days after leaving Camp Knox I arrived back in Madison with a motorcycle badly in need of repair and nine dollars left in my pocket. After stopping in Madison long enough to overhaul the engine I went to Little Falls to spend the remainder of my vacation.
Soon after the start of my third semester at Wisconsin I decided to study aeronautics in earnest, and if, after becoming better acquainted with the subject, and it appeared to have a good future, I intended to take it up as a life work.
I remained at the University of Wisconsin long enough to finish the first half of my sophomore year. Then about the end of March, 1922, I left Madison on my motorcycle en route to Lincoln, Nebraska, where I had enrolled as a flying student with the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation.
The roads in Wisconsin in March, 1922, were not all surfaced and when, after leaving the well-paved highway, I had progressed only about four miles in as many hours, I put my motorcycle on the first farm wagon that passed and shipped it to Lincoln by rail at the next town.
I arrived at Lincoln on the first of April. On April 9, 1922, I had my first flight as a passenger in a Lincoln Standard with Otto Timm, piloting.1
I received my first instruction in the same plane a few days later under I. O. Biffle, who was known at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation as the most “hard boiled” instructor the army ever had during the war.
The next two months were spent in obtaining, in one way or another, my flying instruction, and in learning what I could around the factory, as there was no ground school in connection with the flying course at that time.
We did most of our flying in the early morning or late evening on account of the strong Nebraska winds in midday with their corresponding rough air which makes flying so difficult for a student.
I believe that I got more than my share of rough weather flying, however, because my instructor, or “Biff” as we used to call him, had certain very definite views on life, one of which was that early morning was not made as a time for instructors to arise. So as I was the only student and Biff my only instructor, I did very little early morning flying.
By the end of May I had received about eight hours of instruction which (in addition to the $500 cost of my flying course) had required about $150 for train fare and personal expenses.
One morning Biff announced that I was ready to solo, but the president of the company required a bond to cover possible breakage of the plane, which I was not able to furnish. As a result I did not take a plane up by myself until several months later.
Before I had entirely completed my flying course, the instruction plane was sold to E. G. Bahl, who was planning a barnstorming trip through southeastern Nebraska. I became acquainted
