What members of the North American Lutheran Church do for their neighbors in Jesus' name

This is happening now in the Dayton area. @LivingWaterLC is happy to be part of the efforts. @TheNALC https://t.co/1DOqICvzY1

— Mark Daniels (@MARKJDANIELS) February 19, 2020

Huffman Prairie and the Wright Brothers

After their success at Kitty Hawk, Dayton, Ohio's Wright Brothers still needed to perfect their powered airplane technology. Instead of trekking back to Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, chosen for its twenty-mile per hour average winds and its remote location on the Outer Banks, the Wrights decided to stay in Ohio, relying on the engine forged by their employee, Charlie Taylor, and a catapult to set and keep them aloft.

During the "flying seasons" of 1904 and 1905, Wilbur and Orville Wright experimented at Huffman Prairie, an 84-acre parcel of flat land that became the world's first airport. The brothers took hundreds of test flights there.

Huffman Prairie was about ten miles from the Wrights' home on Hawthorn Street and from their bicycle shop on Third in Dayton. They reached Huffman Prairie via the Interurban trolley that ran between Dayton and Springfield. The picture below shows the spot where the trolley stop was. As you approach the prairie, you travel along a narrow, tree-lined road that must be on the old trolley right-of-way.

Huffman Prairie is now part of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base complex in Fairborn, Ohio. Below is an Ohio historical marker telling a bit about Huffman Prairie. You can walk all around the site where the history of the world was significantly changed.

Below are two views of Huffman Prairie. The second one shows replicas of the Wrights' hangar and catapult on the site where they placed them in 1904 and 1905.

If you haven't read David McCullough's wonderful biography of the Wright Brothers, I highly recommend it. It's a real treat! (By the way, Tom Hanks has bought the movie rights to McCullough's book.)

"If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would tell him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio." (Wilbur Wright)

'Life's Tragedy' by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a major American poet, African-American, who was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. He was a high school classmate and friend of Orville Wright. Wright, with his brother, Wilbur, of course, invented the first functional airplane. There was a lot of intellectual candle-power in Orville's and Paul's class! Dunbar was married to poet Alice Moore. Tragically, Dunbar died of tuberculosis at the age of 34.

This poem is poignant, beautiful, sad, and true all at the same time. It suggests that the greatest tragedy of life is to come close to that "perfect love," the kind "which lays aside its vanity and gives...truth."

(Sources: The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, and The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.)

It may be misery not to sing at all,
And to go silent through the brimming day;
It may be misery never to be loved,
But deeper griefs than these beset the way.

To sing the perfect song,
And by a half-tone lost the key,
There the potent sorrow, there the grief,
The pale, sad staring of Life's Tragedy.

To have come near to the perfect love,
Not the hot passion of untempered youth,
But that which lies aside its vanity,
And gives, for thy trusting worship, truth.

This, this indeed is to be accursed,
For if we mortals love, or if we sing,
We count our joys not by what we have,
But by what kept us from that perfect thing.

© by owner.

Saturday This and That

Things that caught my eye this past week...

People are ticked off at Manny Pacquiao...
...They think they were ripped off because he boxed with a severely injured rotator cuff. And the Nevada Boxing Commission isn't too happy with him either. But I think the promoters are gleefully counting their take.

If you like Chipotle's guacamole...
...the restaurant chain has made your dreams come true, revealing their "secret" recipe this past week.

The secret recipe for getting "millennials" in church?...
...Be the church.

In recent presidential election cycles, less experience...
...has led to victory in November.

If you're passing through Dayton in the next month...
...there's still time to see the Dayton Art Institute's interesting show, on loan from the Reading museum, of American Impressionism works. Saw it a few months ago and it's worth the price of admission.