Page 3 - Demo

“I can’t help but believe that there is a primal impatient energy loose
in the world, a reckless competitive urge, a novelty-seeking “thrill” gene that occasionally finds even a cautious grey-haired editor like me putting the pedal to the metal (so long, suckers!)
Flipping through the pages of this issue, I can’t help but believe that there is a primal impatient energy loose in the world, a reckless competitive urge, a novelty- seeking “thrill” gene that occasionally finds even a cautious grey-haired editor like me putting the pedal to the metal (so long, suckers!) despite the risk.
In his tribute to the record-breaking Navy pilot James Roland Kyle, Jr., author Doug Harvey describes the early worldwide fascination with flying as a phenomenon “so forceful, it could not be subdued by the fact that death or grave injury were commonplace among those who took to the air.”
Maybe the best way to describe it is as a “bug.” Before his death in 1989, the pioneer aviator Squeek Burnett taped his recollections, beginning with his boyhood in Lynchburg. “I was well bit by this thing called the aviation bug,” he reported, “bit so deeply I never got rid of it.” How else to explain a passage like this:
Getting underneath, around, and over the wing wires and braces and structure of the aircraft was a little bit of a problem, but Mac suggested that I do it first without the parachute. I didn’t think anything of it, doing it without a parachute, and that’s exactly what I did. I got through there with about an eighty- to ninety-mile-per-hour wind blast on me and went out to the inter-plane struts and sat out there between them, enjoying the ride on the wing. Man, I loved that.
The legendary Lynchburg stock car driver Earl Lee Brooks had a wife and five children. He owned and operated Brooks Garage along with a salvage yard that sold used auto parts. “But his real love was racing,” says his son Ervin. And the whole family became entwined in the romance.
Earl’s wife, Dorothy Brooks, “watched every lap while he was on the track and wrote down the time for each one.” She also helped to form an organization that provided medical and financial support to injured drivers and their families.
It’s to our credit that after every crash we ask the question, what went wrong? instead of what the heck did you expect? Is it possible, for example, to have trains hurtling along day and night, pounding away on thin rails running over bridges and up and down steep hills without breaking down or, even worse, colliding?
New regulations were put in place after the charred remains of Samuel Spencer, president of the Southern Railway System, were recovered from the wreckage at Lawyers, several miles south of Lynchburg, on Thanksgiving Day, 1906. And that’s a good thing.
from the editor
In the heyday of Lynchburg’s canal era, steamboats were banned from the upper James River. The turbulence they created was damaging the canal banks. “In addition,” writes Gibson Hobbs, “horse-drawn boats frequently engaged in illegal races with these steam-powered competitors, causing even more damage.”
despite the risk.”
Keep the trophy and the kiss from Patsy Cline, I’ll take the air bags.
ns3742, Digital Library and Archives, University Libraries, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Permission to publish granted by Norfolk Southern.
FALL/WINTER 2009 