The controversial 1950s entertainer Arthur Godfrey was hired by Eastern Airlines in 1953 to promote its Lockheed Constellation service. The Constellation was one of the last of the long-distance propeller driven airliners. It flew, according to Wikipedia, on an airfoil scaled up from a P-38. Godfrey’s promotional video is below. It’s a reminder of a bygone era when, among things, pilots smoked Chesterfields in the cockpit. It also captures, to some extent, the public excitement of flying when it was a novel mode of transportation. Today millions travel by air each year. It has been a long time since we’ve looked up into the sky with wonder; long since we wondered what it was like to be a bird — and fly.
Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,
When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;
Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,
Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father’s field,
And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;
And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,
Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men;
Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:
That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:
For I dipt into the Future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue
[youtube 3rgzAnrI6Bw]
Part 2 “Now it’s time for a Chesterfield”
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