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FLYING WITH WILEY POST 219
Institution alongside Lindbergh's famous plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, was Post's greatest joy.
Wiley Post was born in Grand Saline, Texas, November 22, 1899, and like Rogers, there was a trace of Indian blood in his veins, a heritage of several generations of Southwestern pioneers. His great-grandfather was a Baptist preacher and his parents, descendants of Scotch-Irish stock, wrested a living from the soil. Wiley was the fourth of six children, and from his boyhood he was interested in the machinery used on the Post farm. Early in his youth he determined to become a flier; but he was an indifferent student, being more interested in drawing models of airplanes than in learning the rudiments of grammar. Outside of the mechanical end of farming, he had no interest in agriculture. His fine mechanical sense, however, made him the neighborhood handy man. Post saw his first airplane in 1913 when he visited the county fair at Lawton, Oklahoma, while his parents were living in Chickasha. It was an old Curtiss " pusher," flown by Art Smith, then one of the veteran birdmen. During the World War, Wiley enlisted in the Signal Corps and hoped he would get a chance to fly, but the War Department took aviation out of the corps and made it a separate branch. After the war, Post went to work in an automobile-repair shop and a few months later signed on as a " roughneck" in the oil fields.
He said of that part of his career:
"We got seven dollars a day, but the work was hard and dirty. Sometimes I fed boilers; some