“Well, Curtiss asked the Army Air Service if they could borrow the Army’s crack test pilot, Jimmie, and the Army lent him. Doolittle went down there all set to win. But there was a party for the aviators before the battle, and the aviators, all being young, and good fellows, got very jolly, and decided that each of them would have to put on a stunt to entertain the others. Now Doolittle decided that his best bet was acrobatics, so he balanced on the window ledge, to show his best handstands and other tricks that he’d learned in college. A brace or something on the window gave way, and down went James into the street, landed on both feet, and broke both ankles. Just before the big show! Well, they took him to the hospital and put both ankles in a plaster cast. “The show went on, and the hero wasn’t there. But was he resting peacefully at the hospital? He was not. With the help of a friend, he cut off the plaster cast, had himself hoisted into an ambulance, and taken to the field. When he got there, they strapped his feet to the rudder bar, and he was all set to go into his act. Only the German plane was in the air. Doolittle zoomed up, and there followed one of the prettiest dog fights that anyone there had ever seen. Doolittle maneuvered and bedeviled that German plane until it turned tail and retired. James circled around once or twice to show that he was cock of the walk, and then came down to get the Chilean contract for the Curtiss people. That’s the way James Doolittle does things. “How did he get so scrappy? Well, he was a born fighter. And then, he grew up in a gold camp in the Klondike, and if there was any place harder than a gold camp in Alaska in those days, it would be hard to find. Jimmie was born in Alameda. California, in 1896. His father was a carpenter and miner, and left for the Klondike in ’97, the year before the big rush to Dawson in ’98. Well, two years later he sent for his wife and the boy James. “Jimmie’s first scrap was with an Eskimo child. He drew blood, and was so frightened that he cried as loudly as the Eskimo warrior. But he never stopped fighting after that first fight. Maybe it was because he was so small that he had to fight. Anyway, he usually was fighting boys bigger than himself, and he got so good that he’d whip them to a frazzle every time. It gets to be a habit, you know, and any way, he was born scrappy. Ask anyone. “The Doolittles left the Klondike, and moved back to California with their obstreperous son, and I imagine the Klondike parents breathed a little easier. In California Jimmie went to school, and on the side became Amateur Bantamweight Champion of the Pacific Coast.