Veterans Airport of Southern Illinois Director Doug Kimmel is among an elite group of honorees that will be inducted into the Illinois Aviation Hall of Fame at the annual banquet on June 16.
Dean Karau
For the Star Courier
This brief paragraph was buried on page 8 of the Dec. 22, 1903, Kewanee Daily Star Courier: “The United States government wants the flying machine invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright, the Dayton, O., brothers who made a successful test of their invention at Kitty Hawk, N.C.”
That was our hometown’s inauspicious introduction to the age of flight, which had begun a mere five days earlier.
A young Annawan boy was only five years-old at the time, so he surely didn’t read that article. But by 1910, Frederick Eugene Machesney had fallen in love with “aeroplanes,” and within a decade and a half, had become Kewanee’s flying “ace.”