Kitty Hawk Wasn’t the Only Aviation First; How About Airplane Golf?

Sure, Kitty Hawk, N.C., is in the news inasmuch as Wednesday marks the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. But let’s not forget that Southern California has had its share of aerial firsts too. I mean it was Long Beach, not Kitty Hawk, that hosted the first airplane golf match, for instance.

During a 1924 recruiting promotion for the Army Air Corps, a “pair of pilots swooped low over Virginia Country Club’s 18 greens and dropped golf balls in an effort to get closest to the pin,” relates the book “Long Beach: The City and Its People.” “Players on the ground handled the putting. The match was called when one of the pilots dropped his entire supply of balls on a fairway, barely missing a gallery composed of club members.” And that was the end of the sport of airplane golf.

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Local aerial milestones (cont.): Not to steal the Wright boys’ thunder, but let’s also take note of the Southland’s role in:

* The first cross-country soft drink promotion: Calbraith P. Rodgers, advertising the joys of a nickel soft drink called Vin Fiz, flew from Sheepshead Bay, N.Y., to Long Beach in just 49 days. He crashed 11 times and had to change planes 17 times.

I don’t know if he interested anyone in Vin Fiz, but he sure would have soured me on airplane travel.

* And the first in-flight movie: It was on a Los Angeles-New York TWA flight in 1961 and the film was “By Love Possessed,” starring Lana Turner. Somehow, the institution survived that cinematic bomb.

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Switching to ocean-going adventures: In a Carnival newsletter, Wendell Jones of Ojai spotted a mention of a not-so-macho cowboy (see accompanying).

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Next stop -- the Twilight Zone: Wondering what lies ahead in 2004? Well, on a visit to Houston, David Forward of Cerritos saw a turn-off where you might get some answers (see photo).

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Food for thought: For those who feel guilty about eating pizza, Jim Walker of Burbank found another way it can be absorbed into the body (see photo).

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Earaches: Can you believe some of the corny news promos playing on once-serious KFWB-AM (980) these days? For instance: “Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what McCauley Culkin thinks of Michael Jackson?” No, actually, it wouldn’t be interesting.

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Everyone’s got Kitty Hawk on their mind this week: On one closed-captioned news broadcast, Ronald Boyd read about a defendant who supposedly could not “discern wright from wrong.”

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miscelLAny: Museums Los Angeles magazine notes that the recently opened Hollywood History Museum inhabits the historic Max Factor building, which still displays “the original Max Factor makeup rooms -- famously labeled ‘Blondes Only,’ ‘Redheads Only,’ ‘Brunettes Only’ and ‘Brownettes Only.’ ”

The term brownettes for brown hair belongs in the Museum of Forgotten Words.

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LA-TIMES, Ext. 77083; by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A. 90012; and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.