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Kentucky by Heart: Richard Clayton was another high-flying NKyian; celebrating late spring’s beauty


By Steve Flairty
NKyTribune columnist

Last week I wrote about a man from Owen County, Harry “Clark” Karsner, who built a small airfield in the county and after World War II, taught military veterans to pilot his small planes. Along with that, he established a Christian evangelistic messaging service broadcasting from one of his aircrafts, called the “Gospel Plane.”

Well before Karsner’s time was another Northern Kentuckian whose high-flying exploits deserve some mention. Richard Clayton, an English immigrant, set up a clock-making and silversmith shop in Cincinnati in the early 1830s. In 1854, he moved across the Ohio River to Ludlow after buying Somerset Hall, the former summer home of William Butler Kenner.

Clayton’s “Grand Aerial Voyage” (Image courtesy of Boston Rare Maps, South Hampton, Massachusetts)

Clayton brought to the area his interest in balloon flights that he had developed while in England. According to The Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky, he “constructed a 50-feet-tall airship from 4,500 square feet of silk cloth. When filled with hydrogen gas, the balloon, named The Star of the West, could carry a payload of about 1,000 pounds.”

He became the second balloonist to fly over Cincinnati — Thomas Kirkby, in 1934, was the first — when on April 8, 1835, Clayton flew from an amphitheater on Court Street in Cincinnati. Unlike Karsner’s Owen County venture, Clayton had a profit motive. He charged several thousand people 50 cents each to view the lift off. The balloon, interestingly, had onboard a 20-pound dog and was dropped safely by parachute near Cincinnati. The Star of the West set down nine and a half hours later on a mountaintop in Monroe County, Virginia—reportedly a world record for the longest balloon flight.

His second flight from the same site, soon after on May 13, failed. Strong winds caused it to crash into a nearby building, and when the basket was torn free from the balloon, Clayton luckily landed safely on a rooftop. Supporters of Clayton raised money to replace the destroyed balloon, and he flew again on July 4, 1835. He took letters with him, reportedly the first “air mail” in the country. That flight was aborted, too, about one hundred miles from Cincinnati at Waverly, Ohio, but he was able to deposit the mail he carried to the local post office (at least partially “air mail”). On another flight late that summer, his balloon exploded but he again managed to survive.

Steve Flairty is a teacher, public speaker and an author of seven books: a biography of Kentucky Afield host Tim Farmer and six in the Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes series, including a kids’ version. Steve’s “Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes #5,” was released in 2019. Steve is a senior correspondent for Kentucky Monthly, a weekly NKyTribune columnist and a former member of the Kentucky Humanities Council Speakers Bureau. Contact him at sflairty2001@yahoo.com or visit his Facebook page, “Kentucky in Common: Word Sketches in Tribute.” (Steve’s photo by Ernie Stamper)

Did those dangerous times on a high-flying balloon stop him? Not enough to completely curtail him, at least for a while. He would go onto fly successfully from New Orleans, along with Louisville and Lexington, in Kentucky. He did, however, retire from flying after more than a dozen flights and returned to his clock-making business. It’s not known for sure when he died, though one source says in 1878.

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The late spring period of the year has long been a favorite of mine. Why? Mainly because I like the temperatures of these times. The 60s and 70s are comfortable, especially with little of the sultry high humidity summer later brings. Along with that, it saves our household some steep utility bills because usually neither the furnace nor air conditioning units need to run.

The period of the year also brings distinct reminiscences of my nearly seventy-year past, and most are positive, though, uh, not all. Consider:

• It’s the time when school takes an extended break, typically starting before June. I mostly loved being a full-time classroom teacher for twenty-eight years, but the summer rest certainly refreshed—though the summer typically was used for graduate classes or a summer job. Ironically, I was so in love with teaching and my students my first couple years that I felt somewhat depressed with the time off. Really.

• In 1972, I served as a camp counselor at rural Boone County’s Camp Ernst after the first year in college. I presided over young groups of campers in sessions before summer arrived. The weather was comfortable for those four weeks—except for one night, when it dropped to the 40s or perhaps to the high 30s. Whatever, it was cold. The cabins were screened rather than enclosed, and I was woefully under-dressed and shivered much in my not-ready-for-prime-time sleeping bag. I slept little, if any, though for some reason, the campers slept soundly. Age eighteen at the time, I’ll confess I considered calling my parents to come pick me up but didn’t. That wouldn’t have looked good at all some five decades later, and not at that time, either.

The Flairty family’s coreopsis plants do well in the late spring. (Photo from Steve Flairty)

• Late spring brought swimming time in my childhood! I lived for the chance to put on my shorts, whether they were trunks or cut-off jeans. Often, my little brother, Mike, and I found ourselves on beaches at park lakes. (Readers might recall that our family took many Kentucky day trips.). Concrete pool admissions usually costed more, and Dad’s modest income for our family had to be stretched.

On one occasion, the use of a lake for a place to swim meant doing so in a VERY natural body of water. It was a pond and set on land that would later be flooded by authorities to form the A.J. Jolly Park, in southern Campbell County, a thousand-acre park and campgrounds location that thrives today. The pond property previously belonged to our Uncle Walter and it was full of fish.

Being in the 1960s, I don’t recall who, but someone in our family initiated the project of seining the pond to harvest the fish, either for a big frying or to transfer to another home. A bunch of us left a perfectly normal Flairty family reunion on a Sunday afternoon to do the deed. The details of the project are somewhat vague, but there was gray, mushy mud that made the water opaque and probably quite smelly.

Back to today’s goings on, I spent Saturday working at Suzanne’s Woodford County Farmers Market booth, then later in the afternoon and early evening, it was plenty of yardwork and an hour of power washing our driveway. I felt like I could have worked all night because of the temperate weather of this season.

I love the late spring.


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