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- [00:00]
A
You know those stories that just live in your brain rent free, like family legends, historical facts. The kind of thing everybody swears is true because we've heard it all a million times. And then one day someone starts asking questions and suddenly the story gets a little wobbly. That's the idea behind the new podcast, Family Lore. It's a podcast that takes those big inherited narratives and pulls them apart. Not to dismantle them just for the sake of it. Better understand the whole making of story. Coming up, we've got a preview of the Family Lore episode titled if Mosquito Hawks Can Fly. It follows one family story claiming that their grandfather took flight before the Wright brothers. Take a listen.
- [00:52]
B
You might Remember back in 1999, the United States Mint started producing specialty quarters. On the back of each quarter, instead of an eagle spreading its wings and looking off to the side, you'd see a unique design representing any given state. For example, on the back of the Massachusetts quarter, you'd have a Minuteman. The Virginia quarter featured ships arriving at Jamestown in 1607. And on the back of the North Carolina quarter, you had a man lying prostrate on a primitive airplane with another man watching from below. This, of course, was a depiction of the Wright brothers and their inaugural flight at the small beach town of Kitty Hawkins. At the top of the coin is the inscription first Flight. This is a story that virtually all Americans know. The Wright brothers were the first to fly. The Wright brothers invented the airplane, or at the very least, the Wright brothers were pioneers in the field of aviation. But there's another story you probably haven't heard that makes the origins of American aviation a little more complex. Hi, I'm Lloyd Lockridge, and this is Family Lore. This story begins in Louisiana, a state not known for aviation. Quite the opposite, really, with its bayous, swamps, labyrinthine coastline, and the nation's biggest river. The state is known for its boats. Cajun pirogues, flat bottom airboats, paddle steamers, the Higgins boat. But the Louisiana man at the center of this episode's family lore was not interested in boats. He was not interested in navigating the water. Before the advent of airplanes, this man dreamed of navigating the sky. His name was Charles Frederick Page, and to hear his story, we have traveled to Alexandria, Louisiana, in person to speak with one of his descendants, Charles Frederick Page's grandson. So let's just get started. Could you tell me your name, please?
- [02:52]
C
Joseph P. Page.
- [02:55]
B
Joseph Page is 87 years old. He's a veteran of the United States Air Force, and his military background shows his House is tidier than a nuclear submarine. And Mr. Page stands with a certain posture, one that conveys not only physical strength, but a kind of strength of character. He's the kind of person who, without saying a word, makes you want to take your hat off when you walk inside. We were greeted by him and his wife of 65 years. We sat down in his living room and immediately launched into a conversation about his early life.
- [03:26]
C
Well, I grew up on Highway 28 east in Pineville, so we lived in the country and about 100 yards away.
- [03:33]
B
Joseph came of age in 1950s Louisiana, an overtly and unapologetically racist environment. Despite living in Pineville, he had to commute across the Red river to Alexandria in order to attend the only all black school in the area. And to add insult to injury, even if he were the first person at the municipal bus stop, he'd have to wait for all the white passengers to board first, only to pass them all on his way to the back of the bus. Indignities like that were a part of daily life. And this kind of blatant discrimination was a confusing experience for young Joseph Page because his neighbors out in the country were white, and he'd play with his neighbors all the time. But if they saw each other in the town of Alexandria, they'd have to pretend like they didn't know each other.
- [04:18]
C
I didn't quite understand it as a child. In my mind, I knew it was not right as to why we could be friends and hang out together in the country when nobody was around, but we could not associate with each other when we were in Alexandria.
- [04:35]
B
And as a child, you remember thinking, this doesn't make any sense.
- [04:39]
C
Yeah, I did. Something was wrong. I couldn't exactly put my hands on it, but by the time I got to junior high school, I knew for a fact it was wrong, and I recognized it as discrimination.
- [04:53]
B
Joseph was grappling with these issues in the midst of a national reckoning. The Civil Rights act of 1964 was on the horizon, and. And the movement for racial equality was gaining momentum. But Joseph had no illusions about the reality of his situation. Despite the promises of civil rights, Joseph's parents told him that he'd need to work twice as hard as white people to achieve the same results. And this was not some abstract lesson. It was inextricably connected to the story of the family's patriarch, Joseph's grandfather, Charles Frederick Page. Charles Page was born in 1864 in Rapides Parish, Louisiana. He was born into slavery, which means that Joseph Page's Grandfather, not his great great grandfather or some distant relative, but his grandfather was at one point enslaved.
- [05:41]
C
I share that story with my grandchildren. Now, to underscore the point of slavery was not that long ago. Think about that.
- [05:50]
B
So tell me one of the first things you remember learning about your grandfather, Charles Frederick Page.
- [05:57]
C
Well, my parents and my aunts and uncles always talked about it when I was a small kid. He was a bigger than life figure in my mind as a kid. They always told us about inventing in the first airship.
- [06:13]
B
In case you didn't catch that. Joseph said that he was always told that his grandfather invented the first airship.
- [06:20]
C
And we would go, as school kids would do. We would go to school at elementary school and say my grandfather built the first airship. And the other kids would laugh at us and say, you know, that's not right. The Wright brothers built the first airplane. So as a kid, you don't want to be embarrassed by your friends, right? So you stop talking about it.
- [06:40]
B
This claim that Charles Frederick Page invented an airship prior to the Wright brothers inventing the airplane, this was a strong piece of Page family lore. It's something the family believes to be true. But a lot of people outside the family are skeptical. At best, those who knew Charles Page respected him, but for other reasons. He was a Renaissance man. He was a timberman, a cobbler, a botanical farmer. He established a cemetery for the black community in Pineville, the first of its kind, the Lincoln Cemetery. He had a vision for diversified farming where a tenant farmer could slowly gain equity in the land he was working. But what a lot of his peers didn't know is that he also had a mind for engineering.
- [07:20]
C
He would have been a great engineer. My grandmother used to complain about when she would tell my grandfather she needed to do chicken coop, he needed to build her a new chicken coop. He would get out the ruler and a pencil and paper and he would design it and he would do all this stuff. All I needed is a simple chicken coop. It did not have to be like perfect, you know.
- [07:48]
B
But Charles Page had bigger ambitions than state of the art chicken coops. And one evening while sitting on his porch, he got an idea from an unlikely contributor. The mosquito hawk. Those big, gangly, slow moving, mosquito looking insects that you tend to see in the spring and fall.
- [08:05]
C
The story I heard repeatedly was that he would sit on his porch in the evenings and watch the flight of those mosquitoes, mosquito hawks. And that inspired him to figure out how he could duplicate that and fly himself and figure out how to do that.
- [08:24]
B
And in the ensuing weeks, months, or even years. Nobody knows for sure. Charles Page worked on a way to fly, and he had a deadline. He needed to design and build something in time for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which was held in St. Louis, Missouri.
- [08:41]
A
To hear the full episode and to learn more of Charles Frederick Page's role in the pioneering days of aviation, search for family lore wherever you get your podcasts.