ERNIE did a superior job as telegraph editor, for which
he received sixty dollars a week. Some of this went to
Dana, where the farm was not doing well, so there wasn't
too much money. What there was, he and Jerry spent without
thought of budget or future.

He was as fast and clean a copy-handler as I ever knew, and
worked a hard, tense shift of eight hours. But he asked one day if
he could try writing an aviation column on the side--he was de-
veloping a veneration for aviators that was reminiscent of his de-
votion to automobile racers. The project was approved, and on
March 26, 1928, there was launched what may have been the first
daily aviation column in the country.

Ernie would finish his office work at two or three in the after-
noon, then prowl the old Washington-Hoover Airport, the
Army's Bolling Field, the Anacostia Naval Air Station, and some-
times the smaller airports such as the one at College Park, Mary-
land. At home, in the evening, he turned out an aviation story, and
from the office in the morning he would phone the airports for a
list of arriving and departing planes. Such a roll call took only an
inch or two of type in those days, when Eddie Rickenbacker is said
to have remarked while watching a mail plane take off, "There
goes another postcard."

Ernie's acquaintanceship among aviation people grew. The
apartment at 456 came to be a haven and rallying place for pilots
and their wives and girl friends, and for others connected with

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