“I used to chat with them in a friendly way and was always polite to them,” Beard recalled, years afterward, chuckling over the joke on himself, “because I sort of felt sorry for them. They seemed like well-meaning, decent enough young men. Yet there they were, neglecting their business to waste their time day after day on that ridiculous flying-machine. I had an idea that it must worry their father.” In these conversations, neither the Wrights nor Beard was likely to bring up the subject of aviation. The Wrights showed no eagerness to talk about what they were doing, and Beard kept to subjects he considered more sensible. But one day, in the autumn of 1904, several of the school children told him they had seen the Wrights flying all around the field. Maybe, thought Beard, that might make a little local item for the paper. When he next saw Orville Wright on the car, a day or two afterward, Beard asked him if it was true that they had been flying all the way around the field. Oh, yes, Orville admitted, they often did that. Then Orville began to talk about something else. Evidently, Beard decided, the fact that an airplane could be flown under perfect control in circles didn’t amount to anything after all. Orville Wright himself didn’t seem to think it was unusual or important. There was no use putting it in the paper. One more reason perhaps for not printing much in the _Journal_ about what the poor, misguided Wrights were doing was that such items were annoying to Frank Tunison, another of the editors--the same Tunison who had turned down the story of the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Having decided that the Wrights were not news, he was naturally irritated to see any reference to them, even on an inside page. “Why do we print such stuff?” he would ask. However, Beard said to Orville, as they rode along on the car: “If you ever do something _unusual_ be sure and let us know.” From time to time he went or telephoned to the Wright home to find out if by remote chance the brothers had done anything worth mentioning. “Done anything of special interest lately?” he asked Orville Wright one evening. “Oh, nothing much,” replied Orville. “Today one of us flew for nearly five minutes.” “Where did you go?” asked Beard. “Around the field.” “Oh! Just around the field. I see. Well, we’ll keep in touch with you.” Doubtless, reflected the newspaperman, the Wrights’ circling of Mr. Huffman’s pasture for five minutes was pretty good for two local boys. But it was hardly a thing to take up space in the paper. Hadn’t Santos-Dumont circled the Eiffel Tower, and flown all around Paris? One more newspaper writer, like hundreds of others, had failed to distinguish between an airship with a gas bag and a flying-machine heavier than air. (At the time of the thirty-eight-minute flight in 1905, however, Luther Beard was among the spectators at the field.)