Fort Wayne raised two pioneer aviators: one lit up the night sky, the other was America's first ace. The city named an airport for each, and they rest in the same cemetery.
A Pirep featured story · KSMD Smith Field, Fort Wayne, IN
In 1910, a Fort Wayne teenager named Art Smith wanted to fly so badly that his parents mortgaged their house for $1,800 so he could build an airplane. He spent six months building it and crashed it on the first flight, destroying everything but the motor. He rebuilt. Within five years he was one of the most famous aviators alive: a pioneer of flying at night, tracing letters across the dark with flares hung on his airplane, one of the inventors of skywriting, locked in a celebrated rivalry with the great Katherine Stinson. He even eloped by airplane; the flight crashed, and he and Aimee Cour were married in their hospital beds.
When Lincoln Beachey, the most famous stunt flyer in America, died in San Francisco Bay during the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, the fair hired the young man from Fort Wayne to take his place. Smith's illuminated night flights over the exposition made him an international star; Japan brought him across the Pacific twice, and his shows there helped inspire Korea's first pilots. The Army turned him down for combat when America entered the war, too short and carrying too many old injuries, so he tested aircraft and trained pilots instead. He died in February 1926 flying the overnight mail between New York and Chicago, off course near Montpelier, Ohio, weeks short of his 36th birthday. Fort Wayne raised a 33-foot monument to its Bird Boy, and when Lindbergh flew over the city afterward, the telling goes, he dipped his wings for Art Smith.
Paul Baer sold Cadillacs in Fort Wayne until 1917, when he quit to fly for France in the Lafayette Flying Corps. When America entered the war he moved to the 103rd Aero Squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille's successor under American colors, and on March 11, 1918 he scored the first aerial victory ever credited to a United States Air Service unit. His fifth, on April 23, made him the first ace in American military aviation. He won the Distinguished Service Cross for taking on seven enemy aircraft alone, added an oak leaf cluster, the Legion d'honneur, and the Croix de Guerre, and held nine confirmed victories when he was shot down and captured that May. He came home to a hero's welcome, flew air mail routes in South America, and died in 1930 taking off from Shanghai, his floatplane striking the mast of a junk in the river.
Fort Wayne named an airport for each of them. The big field south of town began as Baer Field and is now Fort Wayne International; the older field on the north side, flying since 1925, carries the Bird Boy's name, and it is the one you are landing at. Smith and Baer are buried in the same ground at Lindenwood Cemetery, a few minutes apart. One town, two firsts, two fields.