Adventure Magazine Cover — page 187: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Dates CAMP-FIR]) A Meeting-Place \ for Readers Writers : See and Adventurers “ae eS “STA i. Af aah ae oe eo SD Our Camp-Fire came into being May 5, 1912, with our June issue, and since then its fire has never died down. Many have gathered about it and they are of all classes and degrees, high and low, rich and poor, adventurers and stay-at-homes, and from all parts of the earth. Some whose voices we used to know have taken the Long Trail and are heard no more, but they are still memories among us, and new voices are heard, and welcomed. We are drawn together by a common liking for the strong, clean things of out-of- doors, for word from the earth’s far places, for man in action instead of caged by cir- cumstance. The spirit of adventure lives in all men; the rest is chance. But something besides a common interest holds us together. Somehow a real come radeship has grown up among us. Men can not thus meet and talk together without growing into friendlier relations; many a time does one of us come to the rest for facts and guidance; many a close personal friendship has our Camp-Fire built up between two ann who had never met; often has it proved an open sesame between strangers in a far land. Perhaps our Camp-Fire is even a little more. Perhaps it is a bit of leaven working gently among those of different station toward the fuller and more human understand- ing and sympathy that will some day bring to man the real democracy and brotherhood he seeks. Few indeed are the agencies that bring together on a friendly footing so many and such great extremes as here. And we are numbered by the hundred thousand now. If you are come to our Camp-Fire for the first time and find, you like the things we like, join us and find yourself very welcome. There is no obligation except ordinary manliness, no forms or ceremonies, no dues, no officers, no anything except men and women gathered for interest and friendliness. Your desire to join makes you a member. ig SEEMED to me that every time he dropped into the office, when his duties in the Air Service brought him near New York, Thomson Burtis mentioned casually that one or more of the originals of the characters in his stories had met with ac- cident and ‘‘gone west.” So I asked him to give all of us the list of those who had been killed since he began writing these stories for us: Langley Field, Hampton, Virginia. In complying with your request to let the Camp- Fire gang in on the real fate of the people back of my stories, I think it will be obvious that I can not give the real names of the characters. I have tried, in my gallery of Air Service portraits, to draw. as truly as I could the real men—their foibles and weaknesses as well as their virtues—careless, reck- less, more often than not of the type called ‘“‘wild”’ by more dignified folks. And sometimes I have touched up or toned down the men I knew and liked, as the yarn required. WHEN the stories were written, every man of them wasalive. Inthe first yarn Colonel Mills, C. O. of Donovan Field, made his bow to Adventure. He was killed in an airplane wreck in the East, 12 and the pilot of the plane was the original of Jimmy Jennings. They were caught in a storm. Dumpy Scarth, lovable, brilliant, irrepressible, childlike in his satisfaction over his own striking ability as a flyer, was zooming a single-seated scout after dropping a bomb, and collided with another ship. Both men went west. He was a man that dared the gods to kill him every day he flew, and finally got his through an accident that is as rare as it is fatal, and at a time when he was not thinking of taking any chances. He was killed in Virginia. EX MACDOWELL still lounges his way through life unconcernedly, but the original of Dave Ransom dropped like a stone from three thousand feet. What went wrong with the ship we never knew. It happened down in Kentucky and I was assigned the melancholy duty of escorting his body back to New England. Pete Miller, veteran of the border patrol, was killed in an automobile wreck down in Texas. Sleepy Spears, now married along with Slim Evans; is still around, but little Al’ Johnson, as brilliant an acrobatic pilot as ever flew a ship, hit a flag-pole © some months ago and carried himself and his pas- senger Into the phantom squadron. ub Chester, reliable, quiet, with the reputation of-gwtsing-where he was going without fail, cracked up in the Middle West and died from the effects. Cutman, in ‘There and Back,” was recently 177 1DOO C@©