WHY DO WE IGNORE OUR OWN?
He was widely honored and in the national news He has been described as one of the most creative engineers ever - a man who took out fifty-some patents before he died in 1927 all concerning the production of power and transmission of power. He had been called “the father of the aircraft radial engine”, and was a pioneer in flight along with Orville and Wilbur Wright, Langley, Curtiss, Berlloit, and others.
This exceptional man – Charles M. Manly - was born in Staunton, Virginia, April 24, 1876.
As far as I know, there is not one, single marker anywhere in “The Queen City” in memory of the man and his accomplishments on behalf of the nation and of the world. His was a short life - barely fifty one years - but in those years he packed a tremendous, amount of good, often dangerous work.
Charles M. Manly has been dead for seventy-six years and it is past time we remembered him ...honored him. I thought one of the newly Industrial Parks might well have been named after him. That would, it seemed to me, be a place to start honoring the memory of this native son who did so much to give us the travel and communications capabilities we know and accept so casually today.
Manly studied Mechanical Engineering at both Furman and Cornell Universities and after his academic years he faced many historic hurdles which faced our nation.
It was Manly who was at the controls each time the Langley airships were “launched.” On one such “flight” attempt he came very near to being trapped and drowned in the wreckage of the shattered plane which fell to pieces in the Potomac River.
Aviation today owes Charles M Manly a debt which can never be fully repaid for his inventiveness and improvements on his original radial engine which has successfully powered so many flights world-wide for a century or more
I appreciate the memorials we have honoring President Woodrow Wilson, Stonewall Jackson's mapmaker Jed Hotchkiss' home on East Beverley Street, and , in modern times, the Statler Brothers Quartet - a prime entertainment group.
It seems improper that we do not, in any way, mark Charles M. Manly as a native son of Staunton ,Virginia.
A.L.M. June 26. 2003 [c442wds]
