[WWI] Fred Astaire as RFC Pilot

[Brad & Merville]

Castle flew with 1 Sqdn. from June 1916 to March 1917 before being posted to Canada for training duties.  No. 1 flew a mixed bag of two-seaters and single seaters including Morane monoplanes and parasols before becoming solely equipped with Nieuports in January 1917.  
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: J.R. Boye 
  To: World War I Modeling Mailing List 
  Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 11:47 PM
  Subject: [WWI] Fred Astaire as RFC Pilot



     Last night I went with my wife to a vintage movie double feature which turned out to be surprisingly OT.
     The Stanford Theater in Palo Alto shows a handful of silent films during the summer. Of course they have a live organist playing and David Packard introduces the films himself.
      I was going to skip the one last night because the show sounded a bit boring. They were showing a 1915 movie starring Irene and Vernon Castle, the famous dance team from 1911-1915. My wife is in a ragtime band, and she wanted to hear the music and see the vintage dancing .
      Now the shows I like the most feature Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, or are OT epics like "Wings" or "Hell's Angels", but any silent movie is an experience so I went along.
     ANYWAY, it turns out Vernon Castle was a British citizen and joined the RFC in 1915. On display in the theater poster room was his scrolling aluminum map, and that was cool to see.
      This was a double feature and the second movie was "The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle"(1939), starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This movie surprised me because it had several long scenes of SE-5s in action.They had the upper Lewis removed and two MGs mounted on the deck ala "Blue Max". Some were in PC 10, but a few were in postwar silver. A funky Nieuport 28 with 'I' interplane struts shows up in some scenes. A Fokker D.VII is show very briefly in flight.
        Vernon Castle died in 1917 while serving as a flight instructor in the USA.  For this sequence there are quite a number of shots of JN-4s in spurious colors.
        My wife looked over at me and laughed at the fact that "her" movie had turned into "his" movie after all. Not the typical Fred and Ginger product!

                                                         J.R. Boye

  P.S. anyone know Vernon Castle's real squadron and war record?




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