Just a few
short years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, airmail became the
wave of the future in communications. A
certain B. E. Hinkle in Washington, D.C., needed to renew his subscription to
the Crawfordsville Daily Journal. He
enclosed a letter with his payment.
"I was so fortunate as to see the first plane, in flight, that carried mail from our capital to New York City, and also the incoming plane from the metropolis to Washington."
(May 17, 1918. Crawfordsville Daily Journal.)
The letter bore a new twenty-four cent stamp
had only just been printed for the first time on May 14, and this letter
appeared in our local paper on May 17.
This stamp was to become
famous when it was accidently printed upside-down. The “Inverted Jenny,” after the Curtiss Jenny airplane it depicted, is
now worth about 1.6 million dollars. Don’t
you wish you had one?
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