Machesney Park group works toward memorializing namesake wifr.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wifr.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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.”