The Man Called Brown Condor Read Free

at the shop, his boss would come to him to fix it. Mr. Cobb knew how to drive a steam locomotive; he drove them out of the shop, across the roundtable, and down the siding to wait for an engineer to come along to put it in service and make up a train, but that was not the same as climbing up into a cab, opening the throttle, and highballing down the main line pulling a string of cars toward some destination miles away. Now he was worried, saddened really, that his boy might be haunted by a dream that would remain a dream.
    John Robinson was born in Carrabelle, Florida, in 1903, coincidentally the same year the Wright brothers made the world’s first powered airplane flight. Following the accidental death of his father, his mother, Celeste Robinson, moved to Gulfport, Mississippi, with her baby boy, John, and his four-year-old sister, Bertha, to live with her father. At the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Celeste met Charles Cobb. It was not long before they were married. Mr. Cobb was employed in a good paying job at the G&SI engine shop and roundhouse at Gulfport, the southern terminus of the line that hauled Mississippi timber and cotton to the port. He was a gentle man that had taken to the baby boy and little girl as if they were his own. He was rewarded with the love of the little children who worshiped the man who would be the only father they would ever know. Although Charles Cobb wanted to adopt the children and give them his name, Celeste insisted that they keep their real father’s name. In Johnny’s case, whenever someone asked about his name Celeste would answer that Robinson was his dead father’s name, then smile and say, “but Charles was for his stepfather, Mr. Charles Cobb.” No one ever knew if that was true, but the name by which the world would know him was John Charles Robinson.
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    Gulfport was founded in 1898 on the foundation of the man-made port, railroad, and timber industries. The virgin, long-leaf, yellow-pine forests of south Mississippi were being cut, shipped by rail to the port and by ship to the world. By 1910 Gulfport was the second largest timber exporting port in the world. It boasted a population of ten thousand and had an electric company, streetcars, waterworks, and many brick-paved streets downtown. Between the north/south G&SI and the east/west L&N railroads, eighteen trains arrived and departed daily. Some would think that a town with a constant flow of lumberjacks, sailors, railroad men, construction workers, and fishermen, and with more bars than churches, would be a rough place—and it was. But it was also a town of law and order with a thriving middle class. Many blacks owned their own homes at a time when that was uncommon in the South. This was largely due to the relatively good wages that the railroad paid and the black stevedores, who had formed a union at the busy port, earned.
    The Cobbs built a white, two-story wood frame house at 1905 Thirty-First Avenue in the middle of the Big Quarter. It had half brick and half wooden columns across the front porch and was large enough for Celeste Cobb to rent several rooms to boarders. There were two bedrooms downstairs and five bedrooms upstairs. The Cobbs took the front bedroom downstairs and the babies at first were in the downstairs back bedroom. As Bertha grew older, she got a front bedroom upstairs.
    As the years passed, there was very little doubt about John Charles Robinson’s continued interest in all things mechanical—especially airplanes. By the time he was twelve, the Great War burst across Europe, and stories about airplanes and the daring pilots who flew them and fought high in the sky covered the pages of newspapers and magazines. When there was time between school and chores at home, John would whittle out model planes and build kites and fly them on the beachfront.
    In an interview in 1974, Mr. Harvey Todd recalled, “Designing and building kites and fighting them was