The Bird Boy's airport: Art Smith in the field record

1911 — 1941

The man is in the People section; this is his ground: Arthur Roy Smith is profiled in full among this history's famous people — the Fort Wayne birth, the parents who mortgaged their house for his airplane, the night flights and the loops, the 1915 season at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific Exposition where he replaced the killed Lincoln Beachey, the Japan tour, the war years spent instructing because the service would not take him, and the night-mail flying that killed him. The airport record needs only the dates that hold the field together: his first publicized home exhibition on 21 October 1911 at the Driving Park, with his mascot kitten Punk riding in a cage on the wing ten days earlier in the local papers' telling; his entry into the U.S. Air Mail Service, dated 1923 in the People profile and the National Airmail Museum's account; and his death on 12 February 1926, in the crash of his mail plane on the Chicago–Cleveland run, near Montpelier, Ohio — the crash that made him, like Baer, a dead aviator whose name a field could carry. What the field record adds is this: when Fort Wayne went looking in 1941 for a second name to put on an airport, it did not reach for a general or a donor. It reached for the hometown boy who had taught himself to fly off the fairgrounds and died carrying the mail, and the little airport he had never landed on — he was nine years dead before it was dedicated — has carried his name ever since.

Sources:

1. Notable People — the full Art Smith profile ("The 'Bird Boy' — Fort Wayne's pioneer stunt flyer"), cross-referenced and not retold here.
2. The News-Sentinel, "Bird Boy" history (egen.fortwayne.com) — the 10 and 21 October 1911 Driving Park exhibitions and the Punk the kitten flight.
3. National Airmail Museum / Friends of Smith Field — Smith's mail-service years and the 1926 crash on the Chicago–Cleveland route.
4. National Park Service, Smith Field article — the 1941 renaming of the municipal airport for Smith, "in honor of a Fort Wayne U.S. airmail pioneer, Art Smith."