100 years ago in Spokane: Flying is hot work, writes local aviator

A Spokane family received a letter from a relative who was training to be a combat aviator. Here’s what he wrote:

“I just got down about 10 minutes ago from an hour’s jaunt through the skies. There isn’t any doubt about it, it’s the greatest game of all, not even clinging to the sides of (an Alpine mountain) is in it. … Just at this minute I am literally red hot, because you have to go up about 4,000 feet any way before it gets cool, and the heat from the engine I cannot claim to be an added attraction. So you sweat through the seat of your pants and through the back of your shirt and under your helmet and inside your goggles and your ears and your legs. As a first-class Turkish bath, I know nothing better.”

From the war beat: The Yakima Valley had lost 26 men in the war, a toll attributed to the fact that a unit called “old Company C,” recruited locally, had been sent into the battle of Chateau Thierry, with devastating results.

That company lost six percent of its 150 privates.