Google logo is in celebration of the first manned flight today. Surprise - click on the logo and up pops list of many links to Wright Brothers and related stuff.

neat! I noticed that OneLook has also gotten into the game.

Cool, wow--thank you! I went to the link of pictures that they actually took:
http://www.outerbanks.com/wrightbrothers/wrightlc.htm We've been to the national memorial a couple of times--the kitchen still looks just the same, though not so well-stocked as it is in their picture.

Seems like an appropriate place to slip this in:

"High Flight"

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Only 19 years old when his Spitfire crashed into another plane over Tangmere, England...

year?

Magee joined up in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was just 18 years old when he started flight training; in less than twelve months he was in England. He died on December 11, 1941, aged 19, by which time he had become a pilot officer – promotion was rapid in those days, for obvious reasons.
He is buried in a special military area of a churchyard in a small village in Lincolnshire and his stone carries the first and last lines of his poem:

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth-
Put out my hand and touched the Face of God."

I find his brief story deeply affecting. I know it’s trite, but we - on both sides - truly lost the best and brightest of two generations during the two world wars. What might they have achieved?

thanks, dixbey.
not trite at all. truly a tragedy what is lost...

One of my favorites. I used it on my late USAF pilot husband's memorial card.
We had a thread about personal favorite poems a long while ago and I put this poem in. Read some nifty poetry I hadn't read before.
Perhaps it's time for another in a new thread ? Just one suggestion : if it is a looooong poem and a link exists it would be nice to use the link . Just thinkin'

Have to put in my beloved Rupert Brooke's:

The Soldier 


If I should die, think only this of me:
   That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
   In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
   Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
   Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
   A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
     Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
   And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
     In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

dxb, my friend Geoff has peeked in here again, and asked me to post that "Antoine deSt-Exupery was shot down over the Mediteranean while flying a reconnaisence mission in an American-built Lockheed Lightning by a German who was reputed to be a great fan of St-Ex's work. History has
such ironies!"

I read in the Reader's Digest from Oct. 2003 the true story of a U.S. Civil War saga. A Southern woman whose husband was a POW up North learned of a Yankee soldier (from Vermont, eta, Flatlander, and dellfarmer!) who'd been wounded and left to die when his company moved out of the Shenandoah valley. At great peril to herself, she nursed him back to health. He was able to get her husband released, and the two families became friends. She was ostracized by her neighbors for years for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.