Roosevelt goes up in a flying machine; the former president says he felt no fear

Theodore Roosevelt had left the White House the year before and was touring Missouri when he stopped at Kinloch Field outside St. Louis on October 11, 1910. There, Wright brothers pilot Arch Hoxsey waited with a Wright biplane. Roosevelt removed his hat, pulled on a cap, and climbed in, and Hoxsey took him up, circling a nearby park twice, a distance of about four and a half miles. He later declared he never felt a bit of fear. No sitting or former American president had ever left the ground in an airplane before…