Biplane

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DICK BACH couldn’t write a book about flying if he tried.

And that, son, is a compliment.

If by “flying” we mean a mere manual of technical plans and exercises, how to take off and land, repair a motor, or restring your 1917 piano-wire harp, it is obvious from the first page of this book on that that is not what we are going to get from the very young Mr. Bach.

If on the other hand we intend to ventilate our knowledge, go up with Icarus, come down with Montgolfier and re-ascend with the Wrights, thoroughly aerated and highly exhilarated, then of course we must put ourselves in Dick Bach’s farmboy Tom Swift hands. He does not “fly” just as his great-great-great grandfather Johann Sebastian Bach did not “write music”: he exhaled it.

I am an idea—not a descriptive—writer. But I cannot resist describing Dick Bach to you. He is tall and angular and kind of slopes himself through your door, like Gulliver entering the house of a Lilliputian. He might have just come in off the plowfield. That makes sense, for probably he just emergency-landed his biplane in your north quarter and on his way across to your friendly light he could be expected to have pitched in and helped with the harvest.

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