The Afternoon Everett First Looked Up
In 1911 a 'birdman' circled the mill stacks in a machine of spruce and wire, and the whole town stopped work to watch.
At twenty minutes past three o'clock yesterday afternoon the aviator Fowler, having ascended from the meadow south of the city, passed over the mills at a height estimated at one thousand feet, and the whistles of every plant on the bayside were opened in salute.
Work was suspended on the docks and in the yards while the machine made two great circles above the city. On Oakes Avenue a delivery horse took fright and distributed a load of bread over half a block, to the profit of the neighborhood's boys.
Men who watched from the roof of the Commerce Building declare the sight was worth a day's wages, and some few predict that such machines will one day carry the mails.
“The sight was worth a day's wages.”
The crowd that stopped work to watch one airplane would find their grandchildren building them by the thousand at Paine Field — where watching planes take off is still a local pastime.
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