I have some shocking news for you. The man in the Iron Mask was not Leonardo DiCaprio. And anyway, he didn’t wear an iron mask. I mean, the first time you drool in your sleep an iron mask would rust shut. It was a velvet mask. And he was not the twin of King Louis XIV or any other Louie. Who he was seems to have been mixed up in what is called “The Affair of the Poisons” which is a morality tale of a cute little love-sick tramp with the affinity for “inheritance powders”, and her amoral boyfriend. Throw in the King’s mistress for a little spice, and you have a recipe for what Alexis de Tocqueville called “L’Ancien Regime”, and what in modern terms we would call a soap opera of the rich and infamous. It leaves me wondering why they waited so long to start chopping off heads.
We begin in 1659, with a little tramp named Marie Madeleine Margherite D’Aubray Brinvillers. We’ll call her Maire for short. I don’t think she’ll mind. Marie was a tiny doll of a woman who seems to have committed no major public sins until she was about thirty when her husband introduced her to a handsome cavalryman named Godin de Sainte-Croix, to whom the husband owed a whole bunch of money. Hubby had to move out of the country to avoid his other creditors, and he left Marie behind as a sort of payment on account for Sainte-Croix. Marie didn’t seem to mind this arrangement, and neither did Sainte-Croix. Except, as much fun as Sainte-Croix had with little Marie, she wasn’t making him any richer. Where, oh, where was Sainte-Croix going to find enough money to live in the style to which he wanted to grow accustomed to? Sainte-Croix developed a multi-step plan. Step one was to encourage Marie to do some charity work. Step two was for Sainte-Croix to make the acquaintance of certain people with a knowledge of chemistry, such as a man known only to history by the name of “Auguer”.
Now, in the days before CSI the only way to prove poisoning - as opposed to just an unhygienic cook - was to catch the suspect pouring poison on the food, or get him to confess. This is why torture was so popular for so long. It never failed. No matter who you arrested, ten minutes with them on the rack and your case would be solved. But if your suspect was too connected to be tortured the only alternative was to lock him up while you slowly collected evidence. It might take decades. And during that time witnesses could be bought off, killed off, or just die of natural causes. It all made for the convoluted plots of some very popular French novels.
So when poor people started dropping dead at the hospital where Marie volunteered, nobody took notice. They were poor people. In 17th century France the streets were littered with dead poor people. So when Marie had perfected the formula she had gotten from Sainte-Croix, which she did in 1666, she had no trouble slipping the poison into her father’s lunch. He died suddenly and his little darling inherited a little money, which she and Saint-Croix eventually burned through. So in 1670 Marie poisoned her two brothers. She inherited a little more money. By now, the heirs in the Brinvillers family were getting nervous. But still nobody suspected the little elf Marie. She was too cute. Cute people can’t be serial murderers. And just when the homicidal little pixie was about to knock off her own mother, Gordin Sainte-Croix unexpectedly dropped dead himself. Mon Dieu! Cele semble suspecte?!
The cops were brought in. They uncovered a hand written confession by Sainte-Croix (Why do upper crust muderers always feel the need to write it down?). And they also found a list of names of satisfied customers who had been directed by Sainte-Croix to Msr. Auger. The list included little Marie, but it also included Madame de Montespan, who was Louis XIV’s mistress – which in pre-revolutionary France was almost a cabinet position - and the Duchesse of Orleans, Louis’s sister-in-law. Marie panicked. The cops were not going to torture the King’s mistress, but they would have no hesitation about putting a cutie like Marie on the rack. She ran off to her husband in exile. But she was now infamous and he wanted nothing to do with her. So Marie signed herself into a convent in Liege, Belgium.
This placed the pious nuns running the convent in a moral bind. They were sworn to provide sanctuary to all who asked for it, but on the other hand, how do you solve a problem like Marie? How do you catch a cloud of suspicion and pin it down? The good sisters consulted scripture and after due deliberations decided to rat out their guest. They allowed a cop disguised as a priest to enter the convent and while offering solace to the trouble little lady he escorted Marie right out the front gate, where she was immediately arrested. Marie was brought back to Paris in chains, tortured for a confession, tried in secret, and on July 16, 1676 she was forced to drink eight pints of water… and then mercifully she was beheaded. And just to be sure, they then burned her corpse. And that is how you solve a problem like Marie..jpg)
It looked like all hell was about to break loose in France, but just before it did...Louis XIV ordered all further investigations to cease. He shut it down. Nobody ever asked Madame Montespan or the Duchesse of Orleans how their names came to be on a list of people who had bought “inheritance powders”. But there was still one big problem oustanding: Msr. Auger. Who was he, and what did he know? And more importantly, did he have any plans to write his memories? And what does any of this have to do with Leonardo DiCaprio?
Nothing: like I said, the “Man in the Iron Mask” was really the “Man in a Velvet Mask” and that just sounds too fey for a novel. Ask yourself - why would the King of France keep someone locked in one prison after another for decades, required to wear a mask at all times in front of strangers and not allowed to converse with anyone, even with his jailers? It’s too complicated. James Bond villains have simpler plans than that. Why not just kill him? You don’t even need a trial, let alone a secret trial. By the middle of the 17th century the one thing France had a surfeit of besides starving peasants, was nobility with no morality. Louis could have knocked off every royal mass murderer from “Auger” to the Marquis de Sade and nobody would have said “Boo”. If you ask me this story is mostly a fantasy invented by Alexande Dumas. And wasn’t the truth just as entertaining as the myth? Not to Marie's relatives, of course, but for you? It was for me.
The cops were brought in. They uncovered a hand written confession by Sainte-Croix (Why do upper crust muderers always feel the need to write it down?). And they also found a list of names of satisfied customers who had been directed by Sainte-Croix to Msr. Auger. The list included little Marie, but it also included Madame de Montespan, who was Louis XIV’s mistress – which in pre-revolutionary France was almost a cabinet position - and the Duchesse of Orleans, Louis’s sister-in-law. Marie panicked. The cops were not going to torture the King’s mistress, but they would have no hesitation about putting a cutie like Marie on the rack. She ran off to her husband in exile. But she was now infamous and he wanted nothing to do with her. So Marie signed herself into a convent in Liege, Belgium.This placed the pious nuns running the convent in a moral bind. They were sworn to provide sanctuary to all who asked for it, but on the other hand, how do you solve a problem like Marie? How do you catch a cloud of suspicion and pin it down? The good sisters consulted scripture and after due deliberations decided to rat out their guest. They allowed a cop disguised as a priest to enter the convent and while offering solace to the trouble little lady he escorted Marie right out the front gate, where she was immediately arrested. Marie was brought back to Paris in chains, tortured for a confession, tried in secret, and on July 16, 1676 she was forced to drink eight pints of water… and then mercifully she was beheaded. And just to be sure, they then burned her corpse. And that is how you solve a problem like Marie.It looked like all hell was about to break loose in France, but just before it did...Louis XIV ordered all further investigations to cease. He shut it down. Nobody ever asked Madame Montespan or the Duchesse of Orleans how their names came to be on a list of people who had bought “inheritance powders”. But there was still one big problem oustanding: Msr. Auger. Who was he, and what did he know? And more importantly, did he have any plans to write his memories? And what does any of this have to do with Leonardo DiCaprio?Nothing: like I said, the “Man in the Iron Mask” was really the “Man in a Velvet Mask” and that just sounds too fey for a novel. Ask yourself - why would the King of France keep someone locked in one prison after another for decades, required to wear a mask at all times in front of strangers and not allowed to converse with anyone, even with his jailers? It’s too complicated. James Bond villains have simpler plans than that. Why not just kill him? You don’t even need a trial, let alone a secret trial. By the middle of the 17th century the one thing France had a surfeit of besides starving peasants, was nobility with no morality. Louis could have knocked off every royal mass murderer from “Auger” to the Marquis de Sade and nobody would have said “Boo”. If you ask me this story is mostly a fantasy invented by Alexande Dumas. And wasn’t the truth just as entertaining as the myth? Not to Marie's relatives, of course, but for you? It was for me.- 30 -
After he reached El Paso it took Bob Fowler a month to escape Texas. He crash landed in a rice field outside of Seixas, Louisiana, on Christmas Eve. He landed in New Orleans at about 3 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. It took him until February of 1912 to reach Florida. He landed on the sand at Jacksonville Beach on February 12, not that anybody noticed, what with the Titanic going down just two nights later. Bob would later observe with understatement, “I was the first to start and the last to finish.” It had taken him 116 days to travel 72 hours of flight time and 2,800 miles across America. The very next year Bob Fowler made the first non-stop transcontinental flight – across the Isthmus of Panama. Bob Fowler was a pretty crafty fellow.
Bob sold The “Cole Flyer” in 1912, and after being used in the movie business for a few years it was sold again, this time for scrap. The engine is on display at the Exposition Museum in Los Angles. In 1916 Bob started the “Fowler Airplane Corporation” in his home town of San Francisco. He modified and sold Curtis JN-4’s (“Jennys”) to the U.S. Army as trainers, and after WWI he started Bluebird Airways, a passenger service. He retired to San Jose and died in 1966, at the healthy old age of 82.
Jimmy Ward, the man who came to his senses and dropped out of the amazing race, died in Florida sometime after 1917, allegedly of stomach cancer. He was buried in an unmarked paupers grave. Some of his fellow aviation pioneers collected money to give him a more respectful funeral, but I can find no record of that ever happening. Perhaps somebody down in Florida can correct my mistake.
Cal Rogers was testing a new airplane on Wednesday April 3, 1912, just off shore of Long Beach, California when he ran into a flock of sea gulls. The plane banked sharply 45 degrees and slid into the surf, crashing just feet from where Cal had posed grinning in the surf with the “Vin Fiz” in December. The engine broke loose from its mounts and crushed Cal, breaking his neck. He was still breathing when swimmers pulled him from the water, but he died soon after. Cal Rogers was the 127th death since the Wright Brothers flight in 1903, and the 22nd American aviator killed. Considering the number of people flying in 1912, those were still terrible odds.
His mother, Maria (Rogers) Sweitzer, took procession of her son’s body and had it shipped back to Pittsburg. There Calbraith Perry Rogers was buried in Allegheny Cemetery under an elaborate tombstone, marked with the words “I Endure, I Conquer.” 
And little Maude was determined to endure and conquer as well. After lengthy court battles with her ex-mother-in-law in California, Maude was awarded legal possession of the “Vin Fiz Flyer”. How could this be? Wasn’t the Flyer back in Ohio, being rebuilt? It was. But the contents of the baggage car of the “Vin Fiz Special” contained enough spare parts and replacement parts and replaced parts, many of which had actually flown on sections the transcontinental voyage at least once, to construct a second “Vin Fiz Flyer” and still claim it as an “original.”
Two years after Cal’s death, and after the court battles with Maria had finally been settled, Maude married Charlie “Wiggie” Wiggin, who had shown such faith and devotion to her Cal; two lonely souls who shared an adoration of another man. “Wiggie”, had, by this time, acquired his own pilot’s license. And Maude and Wiggie made a living for a few years barnstorming their “Vin Fiz Flyer” around the country. And then they quietly faded out of history. 
It would be ten years later when Jimmy Doolittle would cross the continent in less than a day - 21 hours 19 minutes, with just one stop for fuel. And as you sit in your tiny passenger seat, crammed four to an aisle, held prisoner on the tarmac for endless hours, forced to use a toilet designed for a diminutive Marquise de Sade, charged extra for a micro-waved “snack”, a pillow, a blanket, a soda or a thimble full of peanuts, consider the sacrifices of those who suffered before you; landing in chicken coops, landing in tree tops, landing in barbed wire fences, landing in Texas for day after day. And remember the immortal words of Cal Rogers; “I am not in this business because I like it, but because of what I can make out of it.”
It has become the mantra of every airline passenger world wide.
In fact it can not. What you are seeing, at a time when most Americans had not yet seen an airplane, is the “Cole Flyer”, piloted by Bob Fowler, using a hand car as a catapult to become airborne, an aviation first. So the engineer can be excused for not recognizing what he saw, as it had never been seen before, ever, in the four billion year history of the earth. It was a desperate measure, tried after Fowler had been trapped in the sand for four days, 16 miles west of El Paso, Texas. The Mexican border was only three miles to the south. And staring head on at the steam engine bearing down on him, Bob Fowler said he wondered if he was going to become the first pilot in history to crash into a locomotive. Bob lifted off the hand car at the last possible second and became airborne, missing the front of the oncoming locomotive he said, by “…no more than ten feet.” I doubt if the engineer comprehended what he had seen, particularly after it flew off over his head, followed by the shattering crash of the handcar against the breast of the huge iron beast. This makes Bob Fowler the world’s first UFO, if it really happened.
I had my doubts. But according to the New York Times, on July 24, 1904, three New Jersey teenager couples borrowed a handcar for a Saturday night “joy ride”. After some drinking and dancing, at about 11 p.m., they found themselves pumping their way across a bridge over the Delaware River with a Lakawana passenger Express bearing down on them. It sounds like a turn of the century version of “Saturday Night Fever”. All the couples jumped to safety, with only one male, Albert Jones, suffering a broken shoulder. According to the Times, the express “barely escaped being wrecked”, but it did escape. So I guess it could have happened the way Fowler tells it. Bob would use a handcar catapult to launch himself three more times on his journey to the Atlantic Ocean. But he would never again come so close to being killed by a locomotive.
Meanwhile, back in Los Angels, Cal Rogers was slowly recovering from his injuries. Propped up in a wheel chair, with both legs in casts, his wife hovering on his right, his mother perched judgmentally to his left and his brother standing back out of the line of fire between them, Cal assured the doubtful reporters, “I’m going to finish this flight, and I’m going to finish it with the same machine.” It must have been a contentious press conference, since everyone in the photo looks as if one of them has stepped in something very unpleasant. I wonder who that could have been?
Cal had, by my rough count, crashed 70 times in crossing the country, (23 in Texas!) or about once every 43 miles. His sponsors must have been fed up with the repair bills. And with all the engine problems of late, Cal must have been a bit uneasy about trusting his life to the skills of the 17 year old Charlie “Wiggie” Wiggen, his new chief mechanic (with Cal, below), since Charlie Taylor had opted out of the little opera being staged aboard the “Vin Fiz Special”.
On December 10, 1911 Cal hobbled out to the Vin Fiz one last time. He lashed his crutches to the wing strut, checked his lucky soda bottle and waited while Weggie primed his propellers. Then he rolled (Weggie having replaced the skids with wheels) across the Compton field and rose into the air. Twelve miles later he settled down in front of 50,000 people in Long Beach. After landing, Cal had his plane pushed forward until the wheels were in the surf. Cal Rogers had said he would reach the Pacific Ocean, and now he had. But whether it was in the same airplane was debatable. The only parts that remained of the “Vin Fiz Flyer” that had taken off from Sheepheads Bay, New York on September 17th were one vertical rudder and the oil pan. On New Years Day, 1912, Cal made a few hundred dollars flying over the Rose Parade and dropping rose petals. He needed the money. Cal and Mable Rogers were now flat broke.
NEXT TIME: EPITATH.
Ford was rebuilding the Wright Brothers workshop in Dayton as a memorial, and had hired detectives to track Charlie down. They brought him back to advise and reconstruct the wind tunnel and put the 1903 Flyer back together. In 1941, his work for Ford finished, Charlie quietly went back to California and returned to work in a Defense plant. In 1945 Charlie suffered a heart attack. He was never able to work again. When Orville Wright died in 1948 he left Charlie an annuity in his will of $800 a year. By 1955 inflation had reduced that to a pittance, and when a newspaper reporter found Charlie he was surviving in the charity ward of a Los Angles hospital. 
Immediately the aviation community raised funds, and Charlie was able to spend his last months in a private hospital. He died at the age of 88 in 1956. He is buried in the Folded Wings Mausoleum, in Valhalla Memorial Park, directly under the approach to Burbank Airport runway 15-33.
Charlie Taylor lived for 48 years after he gave up his seat to a young Army Lieutenant. And he never did learn to fly. And that too was typical for Charlie Taylor, the unsung hero of powered flight.
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