Big Money

by John Dos Passos

  The Campers at Kitty Haw

  On December seventeenth, nineteen hundred and three, Bishop Wright of the United Brethren onetime editor of the Religious Telescope received in his frame house on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, a telegram from his boys Wilbur and Orville who’d gotten it into their heads to spend their vacations in a little camp out on the dunes of the North Carolina coast tinkering with a homemade glider they’d knocked together themselves. The telegram read:

  SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING ALL AGAINST TWENTYONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM LEVEL WITH ENGINEPOWER ALONE AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR THIRTYONE MILES LONGEST FIFTYSEVEN SECONDS INFORM PRESS HOME CHRISTMAS

  The figures were a little wrong because the telegraph operator misread Orville’s hasty penciled scrawl

  but the fact remains

  that a couple of young bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio

  had designed constructed and flown

  for the first time ever a practical airplane.

  After running the motor a few minutes to heat it up I released the wire that held the machine to the track and the machine started forward into the wind. Wilbur ran at the side of the machine holding the wing to balance it on the track. Unlike the start on the 14th made in a calm the machine facing a 27 mile wind started very slowly. . . . Wilbur was able to stay with it until it lifted from the track after a forty-foot run. One of the lifesaving men snapped the camera for us taking a picture just as it reached the end of the track and the machine had risen to a height of about two feet. . . . The course of the flight up and down was extremely erratic, partly due to the irregularities of the air, partly to lack of experience in handling this machine. A sudden dart when a little over a hundred and twenty feet from the point at which it rose in the air ended the flight. . . . This flight lasted only 12 seconds but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started.

  A little later in the day the machine was caught in a gust of wind and turned over and smashed, almost killing the coastguardsman who tried to hold it down;

  it was too bad

  but the Wright brothers were too happy to care

  they’d proved that the damn thing flew.

  When these points had been definitely established we at once packed our goods and returned home knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last.

  They were home for Christmas in Dayton, Ohio, where they’d been born in the seventies of a family who had been settled west of the Alleghenies since eighteen fourteen, in Dayton, Ohio, where they’d been to grammarschool and highschool and joined their father’s church and played baseball and hockey and worked out on the parallel bars and the flying swing and sold newspapers and built themselves a printingpress out of odds and ends from the junkheap and flown kites and tinkered with mechanical contraptions and gone around town as boys doing odd jobs to turn an honest penny.

  The folks claimed it was the bishop’s bringing home a helicopter, a fiftycent mechanical toy made of two fans worked by elastic bands that was supposed to hover in the air, that had got his two youngest boys hipped on the subject of flight

  so that they stayed home instead of marrying the way the other boys did, and puttered all day about the house picking up a living with jobprinting,

  bicyclerepair work,

  sitting up late nights reading books on aerodynamics.

  Still they were sincere churchmembers, their bicycle business was prosperous, a man could rely on their word. They were popular in Dayton.

  In those days flyingmachines were the big laugh of all the crackerbarrel philosophers. Langley’s and Chanute’s unsuccessful experiments had been jeered down with an I-told-you-so that rang from coast to coast. The Wrights’ big problem was to find a place secluded enough to carry on their experiments without being the horselaugh of the countryside. Then they had no money to spend;

  they were practical mechanics; when they needed anything they built it themselves.

  They hit on Kitty Hawk,

  on the great dunes and sandy banks that stretch south towards Hatteras seaward of Albemarle Sound,

  a vast stretch of seabeach

  empty except for a coastguard station, a few fishermen’s shacks and the swarms of mosquitoes and the ticks and chiggers in the crabgrass behind the dunes

  and overhead the gulls and swooping terns, in the evening fishhawks and cranes flapping across the saltmarshes, occasionally eagles

  that the Wright brothers followed soaring with their eyes

  as Leonardo watched them centuries before

  straining his sharp eyes to apprehend

  the laws of flight.

  Four miles across the loose sand from the scattering of shacks, the Wright brothers built themselves a camp and a shed for their glid ers. It was a long way to pack their groceries, their tools, anything they happened to need; in summer it was hot as blazes, the mosquitoes were hell;

  but they were alone there

  and they’d figured out that the loose sand was as soft as anything they could find to fall in.

  There with a glider made of two planes and a tail in which they lay flat on their bellies and controlled the warp of the planes by shimmying their hips, taking off again and again all day from a big dune named Kill Devil Hill,

  they learned to fly.

  Once they’d managed to hover for a few seconds

  and soar ever so slightly on a rising aircurrent

  they decided the time had come

  to put a motor in their biplane.

  Back in the shop in Dayton, Ohio, they built an airtunnel, which is their first great contribution to the science of flying, and tried out model planes in it.

  They couldn’t interest any builders of gasoline engines so they had to build their own motor.

  It worked; after that Christmas of nineteen three the Wright brothers weren’t doing it for fun any more; they gave up their bicycle business, got the use of a big old cowpasture belonging to the local banker for practice flights, spent all the time when they weren’t working on their machine in promotion, worrying about patents, infringements, spies, trying to interest government officials, to make sense out of the smooth involved heartbreaking remarks of lawyers.

  In two years they had a plane that would cover twenty-four miles at a stretch round and round the cowpasture.

  People on the interurban car used to crane their necks out of the windows when they passed along the edge of the field, startled by the clattering pop pop of the old Wright motor and the sight of the white biplane like a pair of ironingboards one on top of the other chugging along a good fifty feet in the air. The cows soon got used to it.

  As the flights got longer

  the Wright brothers got backers,

  engaged in lawsuits,

  lay in their beds at night sleepless with the whine of phantom millions, worse than the mosquitoes at Kitty Hawk.

  In nineteen seven they went to Paris,

  allowed themselves to be togged out in dress suits and silk hats,

  learned to tip waiters

  talked with government experts, got used to gold braid and postponements and vandyke beards and the outspread palms of politicos. For amusement

  they played diabolo in the Tuileries gardens.

  They gave publicized flights at Fort Myers, where they had their first fatal crackup, St. Petersburg, Paris, Berlin; at Pau they were all the rage,

  such an attraction that the hotelkeeper

  wouldn’t charge them for their room.

  Alfonso of Spain shook hands with them and was photographed sitting in the machine,

  King Edward watched a flight,

  the Crown Prince insisted on being taken up,

  the rain of medals began.

  They were congratulated by the Czar

  and the King of Ita
ly and the amateurs of sport, and the society climbers and the papal titles,

  and decorated by a society for universal peace.

  Aeronautics became the sport of the day.

  The Wrights don’t seem to have been very much impressed by the upholstery and the braid and the gold medals and the parades of plush horses,

  they remained practical mechanics

  and insisted on doing all their own work themselves,

  even to filling the gasolinetank.

  In nineteen eleven they were back on the dunes

  at Kitty Hawk with a new glider.

  Orville stayed up in the air for nine and a half minutes, which remained a long time the record for motorless flight.

  The same year Wilbur died of typhoidfever in Dayton.

  In the rush of new names: Farman, Blériot, Curtiss, Ferber, Esnault-Peltrie, Delagrange;

  in the snorting impact of bombs and the whine and rattle of shrapnel and the sudden stutter of machineguns after the motor’s been shut off overhead,

  and we flatten into the mud

  and make ourselves small cowering in the corners of ruined walls,

  the Wright brothers passed out of the headlines

  but not even headlines or the bitter smear of newsprint or the choke of smokescreen and gas or chatter of brokers on the stockmarket or barking of phantom millions or oratory of brasshats laying wreaths on new monuments

  can blur the memory

  of the chilly December day

  two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio,

  first felt their homemade contraption

  whittled out of hickory sticks,

  gummed together with Arnstein’s bicycle cement,

  stretched with muslin they’d sewn on their sister’s sewingmachine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio,

  soar into the air

  above the dunes and the wide beach

  at Kitty Hawk.

  Newsreel LIX

  the stranger first coming to Detroit if he be interested in the busy economic side of modern life will find a marvelous industrial beehive; if he be a lover of nature he will take notice of a site made forever remarkable by the waters of that noble strait that gives the city its name; if he be a student of romance and history he will discover legends and records as entertaining and as instructive as the continent can supply

  I’ve a longing for my Omaha town

  I long to go there and settle down

  DETROIT LEADS THE WORLD IN THE

  MANUFACTURE OF AUTOMOBILES

  I want to see my pa

  I want to see my ma

  I want to go to dear old Omaha

  DETROIT IS FIRST

  IN PHARMACEUTICALS

  STOVES RANGES FURNACES

  ADDING MACHINES

  PAINTS AND VARNISHES

  MARINE MOTORS

  OVERALLS

  SODA AND SALT PRODUCTS

  SPORT SHOES

  TWIST DRILLS

  SHOWCASES

  CORSETS

  GASOLINE TORCHES

  TRUCKS

  Mr. Radio Man won’t you do what you can

  ’Cause I’m so lonely

  Tell my Mammy to come back home

  Mr. Radio Man

  DETROIT THE DYNAMIC RANKS HIGH

  IN FOUNDRY AND MACHINE SHOP PRODUCTS

  IN BRASS AND BRASS PRODUCTS

  IN TOBACCO AND CIGARS

  IN ALUMINUM CASTINGS

  IN IRON AND STEEL

  IN LUBRICATOR TOOLS

  MALLEABLE IRON

  METAL BEDS

  Back to the land that gave me birth

  The grandest place on God’s green earth

  California! That’s where I belong.

  “DETROIT THE CITY WHERE LIFE IS

  WORTH LIVING”

  Charley Anderson

  First thing Charley heard when he climbed down from the controls was Farrell’s voice shouting, “Charley Anderson, the boy with the knowhow. Welcome to little old Detroit,” and then he saw Farrell’s round face coming across the green grass of the field and his big mouth wide open. “Kind of bumpy, wasn’t it?”

  “It was cold as hell” said Charley. “Call this a field?”

  “We’re getting the Chamber of Commerce het up about it. You can give ’em an earful about it maybe.”

  “I sure did slew around in that mud. Gosh, I pulled out in such a hurry I didn’t even bring a toothbrush.”

  Charley pulled off his gloves that were dripping with oil from a leak he’d had trouble with in the bumpy going over the hills. His back ached. It was a relief that Bill Cermak was there to get the boat into the hangar. “All right, let’s go,” he said. “Thataboy,” roared Farrell and put his hand on Charley’s shoulder. “We’ll stop by the house and see if I can fit you into a change of clothes.”

  At that moment a taxi rolled out onto the field and out of it stepped Taki. He came running over with Charley’s suitcase. He reached the car breathless. “I hope you have a nice journey, sir.” “Check,” said Charley. “Did you get me a walkup?” “Very nice inexpensive elevator apartment opposed to the Museum of Municipal Art,” panted Taki in his squeaky voice.

  “Well, that’s service,” Farrell said and put his foot on the starter of his puttycolored Lincoln towncar. The motor purred silkily.

  Taki put the suitcase in back and Charley hopped in beside Farrell. “Taki thinks we lack culture,” said Charley, laughing. Farrell winked.

  It was pleasant sitting slumped in the seat beside Farrell’s well-dressed figure behind the big softpurring motor, letting a little drowsiness come over him as they drove down broad straight boulevards with here and there a construction job that gave them a whiff of new bricks and raw firboards and fresh cement as they passed. A smell of early spring came off the fields and backlots on a raw wind that had little streaks of swampy warmth in it.

  “Here’s our little shanty,” said Farrell and swerved into a curving graded driveway and jammed on the brakes at the end of a long greystone house with narrow pointed windows and gothic pinnacles like a cathedral. They got out and Charley followed him across a terrace down an avenue of boxtrees in pots and through a frenchwindow into a billiardroom with a heavilycarved ceiling. “This is my playroom,” said Farrell. “After all a man’s got to have someplace to play. . . . Here’s a bathroom you can change in. I’ll be back for you in ten minutes.”

  It was a big bathroom all in jadegreen with a couch, an easychair, a floorlamp, and a set of chestweights and indianclubs in the corner. Charley stripped and took a hot shower and changed his clothes. He was just putting on his bestlooking striped tie when Farrell called through the door. “Everything O.K.?” “Check,” said Charley as he came out. “I feel like a million dollars.” Farrell looked him in the eye in a funny way and laughed. “Why not?” he said.

  The office was in an unfinished officebuilding in a ring of unfin ished officebuildings round Grand Circus Park. “You won’t mind if I run you through the publicity department first, Charley,” said Farrell. “Eddy Sawyer’s a great boy. Then we’ll all get together in my office and have some food.”

  “Check,” said Charley.

  “Say, Eddy, here’s your birdman,” shouted Farrell, pushing Charley into a big bright office with orange hangings. “Mr. Sawyer, meet Mr. Anderson . . . the Charley Anderson, our new consulting engineer. . . . Give us a buzz when you’ve put him through a course of sprouts.”

  Farrell hurried off leaving Charley alone with a small yellowfaced man with a large towhead who had the talk and manners of a high-school boy with the cigarette habit. Eddy Sawyer gave Charley’s hand a tremendous squeeze, asked him how he liked the new offices, explained that orange stood for optimism, asked him if he ever got airsick, explained that he did terribly, wasn’t it the damnedest luck seeing the business he was in, brought out from under his desk a bottle of whiskey. “I bet J. Y. didn’t give you a drink. . . . That man lives on air, a regular salamander.”


  Charley said he would take a small shot and Eddy Sawyer produced two glasses that already had the ice in them and a siphon. “Say when.” Charley took a gulp, then Eddy leaned back in his swivelchair having drained off his drink and said, “Now, Mr. Anderson, if you don’t mind let’s have the old lifehistory, or whatever part of it is fit to print. . . . Mind you, we won’t use anything right away but we like to have the dope so that we can sort of feed it out as occasion demands.”

  Charley blushed. “Well,” he said, “there’s not very much to tell.”

  “That a boy,” said Eddy Sawyer, pouring out two more drinks and putting away the whiskeybottle. “That’s how all the best stories begin.” He pressed a buzzer and a curlyhaired stenographer with a pretty pink dollface came in and sat down with her notebook at the other side of the desk. While he was fumbling through his story, Charley kept repeating to himself in the back of his head, “Now, bo, don’t make an ass of yourself the first day.” Before they were through Farrell stuck his head in the door and said to come along, the crowd was waiting.