May 15th, Wednesday | The Man behind the Curtain

The author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had many careers before being a full-time writer. A Spanish farmer flies a feathered plane.

The date is May 15^th, Wednesday, and today I’m coming to you from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

On this evening in 1793, farmer-turned-inventor Diego Marín Aguilera, in the light of the full moon, dragged a contraption to the top of his castle. His cousin and his blacksmith friend looked on as Diego jumped off the top.  The contraption was a flying machine so Diego did not jump to his death. Instead he flew about 19 feet high in the air for a quarter of a mile, crash landing near the next town over when a joint in one of the wings broke.

When his cousin and the blacksmith arrived on scene, fearing the worst, they found Diego with only minor cuts and bumps, and very cross at the blacksmith over the poorly welded joint.

Diego had tinkered with and improved upon a few devices previously, including one for increasing productivity in watermills and another for marble cutting. But his ‘plane’ was his magnum opus. Made out of wood, iron, cloth, and bird feathers, he had spent considerable time studying and analyzing the flight of hawks and eagle while tending his sheep, and a considerable amount of money and time on the creation of the machine.

Word got out locally about Diego’s flight, and the townspeople were not impressed. Rather, they believed Diego was a lunatic and his contraption “demonic.” They banned together and burned Diego’s feathered invention, leaving Diego feeling disgraced and depressed. He only lived another 6 years, passing away at age 44. It wasn’t until nearly two hundred years later that Diego was honored for his attempts at flight by the Spanish Air Force, with a monument next to the ruins of his castle in Northern Spain.

On this day in 1928 Mickey Mouse premiered in the short cartoon, “Plane Crazy” to a small test audience. It was a silent film and was received by the test audience with a “Meh.”  The Mickey Mouse short “Steamboat Willie” came out in November with sound and was a roaring success. The next year, “Plane Crazy” was released with sound, and was liked quite a bit better.

Today is the birthday of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and 14 other Oz related stories, as wells as non-Oz plays, short stories, novels, and poems.

Baum was born in 1856 to a well-to-do family in Upstate New York. His writing career started early. While in their young teens, Baum’s father had acquired a cheap printing press. Baum and his brother quickly went about printing up a paper and distributing it for free to family members and friends. They wrote all the articles and even had spaces for local advertisers.

Baum didn’t take a straight path toward writing fiction. He moseyed around dabbling in other ventures such as raising trendy Hamburg chickens and writing a guidebook on it. He operated a general store at one time, but that venture failed, mostly because of Baum’s generosity and guile. He let customers pay with credit and had a hard time following up and collecting payment. It seemed Baum always went back to writing, usually as a journalist or playwright.

In 1897, at the age of 41, Baum published Mother Goose in Prose, which finally allowed him enough income to focus solely on writing. Three years later, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published and quickly sold out its first run of 10,000 copies. More on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Friday.

Baum has been praised for his vivid Alice-in-Wonderland-like adventure stories, that were often ahead of their time. He featured girls and young women in what could be considered ‘action stories’ and his other works, such as The Master Key, could be practically sci-fi in its content about what inventions we may have by means of electricity.

A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns

O my luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
O I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.

Wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening!