The Aircraft Boys of Lakeport (Illustrated)

The Aircraft Boys of Lakeport: it is 1912. The Wright Brothers famous flight took place only nine years earlier. By the start of World War I, airplanes were performing recon, artillery spotting and attacks against ground positions. Lindbergh's solo transatlantic flight took place in 1927. But it wasn't until thousands of pilots came home after the end of WWII, in 1945, that general aviation boomed. Stratemeyer's descriptions of the reliability of aircraft are probably overstated, and his assessment of limited damage and injury understated, but without any regulations whatsoever, it's entirely possible that the Lakeport teens could have learned to fly. It is interesting to note that the term "air plane" does not appear in the book even once; Stratemeyer used "aircraft." Regardless, action, adventure, high drama, and right vs. wrong make this last volume in the series another delightful, fast-paced book.

Edward Stratemeyer (1862-1930) was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was an American publisher and writer of books for children. He wrote 150 books himself, and created the most famous of the series books for juveniles, including the Rover Boys (1899 and after), Bobbsey Twins (1904), Tom Swift (1910), Hardy Boys (1927), and Nancy Drew (1930) series, among others.

Stratemeyer pioneered the technique of producing long-running, consistent series of books using a team of freelance authors to write standardised novels, which were published under a pen name owned by his company. Through his Stratemeyer Syndicate, founded in 1906, Stratemeyer produced short plot summaries for the novels in each series, which he sent to other writers who completed the story. Stratemeyer's series were also innovative in that they were intended purely as entertainment, with little of the moral lessons or educational intent found in most other popular fiction of the early twentieth century. Stratemeyer's series included, besides the famous ones, many that are now forgotten except by collectors: The Motor Boys (1906), Honey Bunch (1923), The Blythe Girls (1925) and Bomba the Jungle Boy (1926).

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