TCU Press

Boys' Books, Boys' Dreams and the Mystique of Flight

by  Fred Erisman

Reviewed By  Jim Pearsall, IPMS# 2209

MSRP: $29.95 ISBN: 0-87565-330-8 Hardcover book (Cloth), 346 pages. Available from TCU Press, PO Box 298300, Fort Worth, TX 76129, 800-826-8911, www.prs.tcu.edu. Note: most of the book reviews we post on the website deal with reference titles that provide information useful in building, detailing, and selecting a color scheme for our latest and greatest projects. However, once in a while we're treated to a publication that gets to the heart of what attracted us to the hobby in the first place. Jim Pearsall's review below covers one such book. Many of us "of a certain age" grew up anxiously awaiting the latest installment of a Tom Swift series, or a Saturday afternoon movie serial show. We hope you'll appreciate the perspective when you read this review. Jim (and Dr. Erisman) - thanks for rekindling that flame! John Noack IPMS/USA 1VP Thanks to TCU Press for the review copy. The book itself is thoroughly researched and heavily footnoted. This does not mean it's unreadable. It does mean that the author has done a lot of research and knows his subject. The first chapter covers the methods for creating the aviation series and the people who wrote the books. The rest of the chapters follow the books as they track the development of aviation in America and the world.

Images used with permission of Dr. Fred Erisman, from the Erisman-Odom Collection, Mary Couts Burnett Library, Texas Christian University.

The captions on these pictures give me reason to believe that Mr. Erisman's interest in boys' aviation books is not just a passing fancy. Apparently he, or someone in his family had a collection of these books, which were donated to TCU. The subject of this book may have had a lot to do with changing the way World War 2 was fought in the air. It's about a number of books, usually in series, which dealt with 10 to 22 year old boys and their adventures, all with the single overarching theme of aviation. The "boys' aviation" books were a singularly American phenomenon. There were probably fiction books about aircraft in Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and even Australia, but apparently not as many, and not as popular as the American series. The books were usually written by pseudonymous authors working for a publisher who decided what the plot and theme would be, and expected a book in a hurry. As many critics have noted, the plots were minimal and often strained credibility, the characters were shallow, and the humor was pretty awful. But they got the aviation right. Some of the authors were involved in aviation; most weren't. The publishers made up for this by giving them reference to the latest aviation publications, such as Flying, Aircraft, Scientific American, Aviation (later to become Aviation Week, then Aviation Week and Space Technology), and that unending source of aviation insight, the daily newspapers. Boys ate this stuff up like free candy. They didn't care about the characters, they could get along with miraculous rescues and sheer happenstance for plots, but they loved that technology. A "feel good" ending with the young heroes winding up besting some villain and scoring a fortune at the same time was the norm. It was the in between parts which made reading the book worthwhile to the adolescents and young adults of the first half of the 20th century. The heroes did something technologically challenging like building their own airplane, or in the 1930s or 40s designing an advanced machine for a rich manufacturer, then using their plane to go to Africa, or the Amazon, or the North Pole, where they met exotic people and solved some problem, found a treasure, or made a daring rescue. In these books, boys of 15 to 18 were developing aircraft with flaps, aluminum wings, blind flying systems, or super long range capabilities. These developments were usually real, and the authors got them to their avid readers within months of the actual occurrence. Lindbergh's flight was in May of 1927, the first books either featuring a Lindbergh-like hero, or involving the young hero in Lucky Lindy's flight appeared by Christmas of '27. Why was this important? Those boys didn't read the technical literature. Poring through reams of newspapers, or piles of technical aviation magazines just to get a few facts just wasn't what they did. Without television or the Internet, they read the books. The result was a couple of generations of American boys who wound up being "air minded". They were technically savvy about how an airplane flies, why you could or couldn't do some things with an airplane, alert to the dangers, but most of all, in love with the idea of the romance of flight. The book series almost invariably revolved around the adventures of a single young boy/man who had studied hard in school, picked up some knowledge about airplanes, or was self-taught, and got a break to get the money to build his own airplane. Many of the boys had well-to-do families, if not outright rich parents. Others started poor, but through hard work and lots of luck, wound up with plenty of money. They lived up to the best precepts of American youth by being physically fit, morally straight, and firmly holding to fair play for everyone. They were embodiments of the American Dream that anyone can do anything they set their mind to, if they're willing to work for it. As Samuel Goldwyn said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get". The US Army Air Corps started World War 2 as a second-rate air force. When they started drafting kids into the USAAC in 1940, they got a crop of young men who had been brought up to believe that there wasn't anything they couldn't do with airplanes, and that the aircraft and flight were romantic. They were ecstatic to be allowed to fly or work on real airplanes. Many of them had spent years building models of the latest warplanes and airliners, and now they got to be with the real thing! There was some disillusion when they discovered that a World War is fought in places like North Africa, Burma and New Guinea, but hey, we make sacrifices to get to be with the airplanes, right? And that's how I support my idea that these books had a definite effect on the outcome of WW2 in the air. My father was one of those boys. He was drafted out of college in 1940, because his grades weren't that good. He went through the war in a depot maintenance company with the 5th Air Force, in New Guinea, Biak, Owi, the Philippines and then Japan. When he got home in 1946, he was eligible for the GI Bill, to go back to college. He used his GI Bill to take flying lessons.

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