Popular Culture
Ellen Church: “Sky Girl”
Ellen Church was born in 1904, a year after the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk. As a young girl, she saw airplanes perform at the country fair near her hometown of Cesco, Iowa. She decided that she wanted to learn to fly. After graduating from high school, she moved to the…
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“The Blond Hans”
One of the ideas that appears over and over again in the statements made by her contemporaries about Sigrid Schultz is that she “knew everyone.” Working through her letters and draft memoirs, it certainly seemed to be true. I found correspondence from people like novelist Paul Gallico and dancer and choreographer Ted Shawn that made…
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From Portable Pianos to Portable Organs
Earlier this week My Own True Love and I were at an event at an aviation history museum in Poplar Grove, Illinois.* In the course of chatting with the executive director, the GI Steinway (aka the Victory Vertical) came up. The director mentioned that another museum in the community had a portable organ made for…
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