Inaugural Logbook of Members & Flights — Volumes I–III, 1910 to 1912
Kept faithfully by H. Whitlock Pruitt, Cor. Secretary, in fountain pen black and India ink.
These pages record the assembled labor of our membership: the running and re-running of small engines in cold sheds, the patient stitching of muslin to spruce ribs, the long looks at weather. Every entry herein has been transcribed in the order submitted, with no flight admitted to the record absent the witness of two members in good standing. The Secretary asks the reader's indulgence regarding the occasional smudge — the press of the work has not always permitted the ink to dry as completely as one would prefer.
Of the seventeen founding members, one alone is absent from the bound record: Eldred Cassius Hollander, watchmaker and former bicycle-frame brazier, b. Springfield, Ohio, 1874.
Hollander attended every meeting from March 1910 through August 1911, contributed thirty-eight dollars in dues, and declined to ever be photographed. His sole submitted aircraft — drafted in violet pencil on the verso of three meeting minutes — was the Æolus Mark IV, a single-passenger machine driven by a counter-rotating twin propeller off a single 14-hp Curtiss block, with wings that folded along three hinges for storage in a coachhouse.
The Secretary's margin note, dated 4 September 1911, reads only: "E. C. H. departed at dawn from the Patterson pasture. He carried sandwiches, a thermometer, and the violet drawings. He has not returned. The membership wishes him fair winds, and continues to keep his seat at the long table."