As he did, his tongue blurted out “fly sheen,” short for “flying machine,” what airplanes were called in their infancy and his.
About a decade later, he stood on his father’s vegetable farm a mile north of U.S. 40 near Tecumseh Road to watch a historic fly sheen pass overhead.
A version of that Ford Tri-Motor then 11-year-old Yeazell spotted in July of 1929 will visit Urbana’s Grimes Field on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on a tour sponsored by the Experimental Aircraft Association.
Some will take flights in the plane, others merely take a look. Its arrival has 93-year-old Yeazell, who lives at Oakwood Village, gliding into the past.
Newspaper accounts of the 1929 flight confirm his recollection: It was overcast the day the Pennsylvania Railroad and Transcontinental Air Transport’s Ford Tri-motor passed overhead en route from Port Columbus Airport to Indianapolis. That segment was the easternmost air link of the coast-to-coast rail-air passenger and package service initiated that day.
“We were a mile north of 40, and the westbound planes would fly about half a mile north of 40,” Yeazell recalled.
The route from New York to Los Angeles was called the “Lindbergh Line,” and both aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and aviatrix Amelia Earhart lent (or perhaps sold) their names to the project.
That same day a front-page story announced that the rival New York Central and two other railroads were working with Western Air Express on a competing service that would make the trip in 46 hours, two hours faster.
Like his mother, Yeazell was fascinated with airplanes. His interest, skill and years in the military during World War II propelled him into a career in aviation engineering with Springfield’s Steel Products Engineering Co., or SPECO.
After working on gliders at WACO in Troy before the war, Yeazell worked on B-29s during the war. His first real engineering job at SPECO was designing drives for the flap system of the C-5 transport plane.
Aboard the Ford Tri-Motor Yeazell spotted in 1929 was E.E. “Eddie” Greiner, operator of Springfield’s Municipal Airport.
Traveling from Port Columbus to Indianapolis, then Kansas City by plane, Greiner took a train to Santa Fe and boarded a plane flown by Lindberg (described as the “ace of the world’s birdmen”) on the final leg to L.A.
Lindberg never accepted Greiner’s invitation to visit Springfield, but Earhart appears to have accepted it — or at least to have remembered Greiner.
Two years later, on Aug. 21, 1931, “Lady Lindy,” as she was called, flew an auto-gyro into Springfield’s Municipal Airport for a visit at Greiner-Little Aviation.
The auto-gyro she piloted is a kind of odd cross between a fixed-wing airplane and a helicopter. Still, it’s what young Bill Yeazell would have called a “fly sheen.”
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