Jack Knight’s was not a hero’s face. Neither rugged nor square-jawed, it was, rather, overly broad in the forehead and narrow in the chin, somewhat like Fred Astaire’s or the famous face on the bridge in the Edvard Munch painting called The Scream. But heroes are as heroes do.
Knight was an airmail pilot at the very start of airmail, years before Charles Lindbergh was. President Warren Harding wanted to shut down the airmail, deeming it unduly dangerous and costly, unreliable and not even especially swift, since mail was flown only by day and loaded onto trains at night. The assistant postmaster general in charge of the airmail, Otto Praeger, in a bid to deflect the presidential ax, set out to demonstrate that mail could be flown through the night.
