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correct in his attire, you would take him for some rather ponderous scholar.” Miss Martyn was upbraided when she addressed Hoxsey as “Archie.” It was “Arch.” Hoxsey was clean-living—he wouldn’t have been taken on by the Wrights if he had been anything but—and he would even give his machine a good dusting before each flight. Just about his only vice was a fondness for chewing gum. His jaws were always chomping, either on the ground or up in the air when he was performing one of his stunts with his good friend and fellow Wright flier Ralph Johnstone, from Kansas City.

    On Saturday evening Hoxsey was presented with a silver plate at a dinner held in St. Louis’s Racquet Club in recognition of all he’d accomplished during the meet, particularly the hundred-mile flight from Springfield, Illinois, to St. Louis, a feat that Hoxsey played down. “The credit is due to the biplane,” he told the audience of his three-and-a-half-hour trip a week earlier. “Several men could have made the trip.” Then Ralph Johnstone and another of the Wright team, Walter Brookins, received gold medals and warm words of appreciation for all their efforts. Johnstone had entertained the estimated sixty thousand at Kinloch Park that afternoon by flying “repeatedly close to the people in the pavilion, sometimes passing within 10 feet of them. Once he headed straight for one of the pavilions at a low altitude about 5 feet from the ground. For a moment it seemed that he would crash into the light fence and the crowd behind it, but when he was within 15 feet of it, he tilted his elevator and shot up over the people’s heads.”
    The thirty-year-old Johnstone collected his medal and returned to his table, where his wife, a former actress, greeted him with a kiss. This was a rare night off for the couple, a break from their six-year-old son, Ralph junior, who was back at the Jefferson Hotel in the care of a nanny. The pair had met a few years earlier when Johnstone toured America and later Europe as a trick cyclist, earning a decent wage, but nothing compared with what he raked in now as an aviator. Even though he’d been one of the Americans eclipsed by Grahame-White at the Boston Meet, Johnstone had still earned $5,000 for nine days’ work. Unfortunately for him, it all went to the Wrights, as did every last dime of prize money won by one of the brothers’ exhibition team. In return the aviators were paid $20 a week and a further $50 for every day they flew. The fliers had at first refused the terms, to the amusement of the Wrights. No contract, no airplane. So with a grumble the men all signed, promising as they put pen to paper that they would also not drink or gamble during a meet.
    Johnstone had been taught to fly six months’ earlier by Walter Brookins on Huffman Prairie in Ohio, where the Wrights had experimented so often with their invention in 1904–5. They made for an odd couple, Brookins and Johnstone, even though they enjoyed one another’s company. The twenty-two-year-old Brookins had singularly failed to impress Marguerite Martyn, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, who reckoned that Brooky, as the Wrights called him, was a chip off the old brothers’ block, though that was no surprise for Brookins had grown up in the same neighborhood and had been taught at public school by their sister, Katharine. “It may be that the Wrights have succeeded in converting him into one of their perfectly adjusted pieces of machinery,” wrote a dismayed Martyn. She found the dark-eyed Brookins “unapproachable” and “diffident” and, worst of all, he displayed “genuine boyish scorn for all things feminine.” No, concluded Martyn, Walter Brookins was most definitely not heartthrob material. Johnstone, on the other hand, showed potential. “He is quite the most ‘showy’ in his personality,” wrote Martyn, “and he is the handsomest of the [St. Louis] aviators, and fits the popular description of a matinee idol, but