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| Where AIRFIELD came from . . .When I was a kid, I wanted to travel, meet people, and try things that existed way beyond the Long Island town where I lived. Books let me do a lot of that. Exploring whatever came my way let me do more.
Researching the book was great fun. I spent months talking to people who knew aviation in its adolescence. Poking through libraries, museums, and airline archives, I found tales of pilots landing in farm fields and of stunt fliers carving loops over awestruck audiences. I read of wing walkers and air racers. I learned of lost and crashed planes and of planes guided to safety by smudge pots, radio beams, and light beacons strung across the land. Staring into black-and-white photos, I met the radiomen whose equipment let aviation grow up. And again and again, I read the eloquent, groping words of early-day pilots who wanted to describe the enormous sky they'd lost their hearts to. From AUTHOR AT A GLANCE Jeanette IngoldCopyright ©1999 by Harcourt Brace |
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My dad worked at La Guardia Airport when I was growing up,
and occasionally he'd take me to see the huge hangars there, where great
propeller planes shone under bright lights and mechanics worked through the
night. I was enthralled by the place, just as I was by the stories my
folks told of the 1930s, when Dad first went to work for the airlines and the
two of them shifted about from one tiny Texas airport to another. Years
later, wishing to learn more about those days, I researched and wrote
Airfield.