The World War I surplus Canuck bi-plane that set down in Camp Creek was occupied by its owner, St. Louis automobile dealer Leon A. Klink, and a friend of his that everybody called Slim. Klink had hired Slim, who already had 250 hours of flight time, to fly the plane while Slim waited on official acceptance to the Army flight school at Brooks Field in San Antonio. While waiting, Klink persuaded Slim to fly him south out of a nasty Midwest winter to the Rio Grande and then west to California.
The flight went smoothly enough until they got to Florida and had a minor accident that required repairing the plane. There they got word that Slim was to report to flight school on March 15. He and Klink decided they could make it to California in time for Slim to get back to Texas by train if they took along some extra fuel, which he carried in two five-gallon cans lashed to the wing next to the fuselage. He later wrote of the experiment: "It was quite a job leaning out of my cockpit, into the slipstream, and unlashing one of those cans; and then, empty, lashing it back again. But with the aid of a steamhose slipped over the nozzle, I hardly spilled a drop."
In Texas, Slim mistook the Nueces River for the Rio Grande and followed that route until the all the fuel was exhausted and the two had to put the plane down in a pasture near Camp Wood. They hitched a ride into town to get some gasoline and ended up spending the night with a nearby ranch family.
The family later noted that Klink talked a lot more than Slim, who was also called the Old Swede, in reference to his heritage, and also Charlie, a derivative of his given name: Charles Augustus Lindbergh. In three years he would be the most famous aviator in the world but on that March afternoon in Real County he was just a young pilot who had made a slight navigational error.
The field where Lindbergh and Klink landed was soft enough for a landing but too soft, it turned out, for a takeoff. Lindbergh ditched the luggage, passenger seat, tool box and Klink, which made the plane light enough for got Lindbergh to get it airborne. Klink gathered all their stuff caught a ride into town. Lindbergh flew ahead and put the plane down on Camp Creek's graveled main street. This caused quite a commotion in Camp Wood; the whole town turned out. That turned out to be a good thing.
Just as the field had been soft enough to land, the street where Lindbergh landed was wide enough for a landing but taking off was going to be a tight squeeze between telephone poles on either side of the street. Lindbergh's thinking was that if you could drive a car down the street you should be able to drive an airplane, but the plane hit a rut, veered out of control and crashed into Warren Puett's hardware store. Fortunately the store was unoccupied at the time because everybody in town was gathered outside to watch the takeoff, or rather what was supposed to be the takeoff.
Lindbergh offered to pay Puett for the damages, but Puett declined because the incident was good advertising and, really, a good time was had by all. Lindbergh and Klink took a room at the Fitzgerald Hotel and waited on a new propeller and shellac to arrive from Houston.
On their next try, an aptly named dagger plant tore a hole in their plane. Lindbergh and Klink were grounded again, this time for eight days. They never did make it to California. By the time they were ready to go again it was time for Lindbergh to report to San Antonio on his way to the history books. He flew to Brooks Air Force Base and was told Klink's plane was in no shape to fly and also to get it off the field; he flew it to Stinson Air Force Base. Three years later he flew from New York to Paris and became an international celebrity.
The incident is remembered in Camp Wood with a historical marker and in a local museum with a model of the plane that Lindbergh crashed into Puett's hardware store and also with the wooden propeller that the two daring young men in their flying machine left behind.
