On In-Flight Magazines

According to amateur historian Harold Wilmington, commercial aviation unofficially began in the United States in 1925 when German emigre J. Dorfman ferried Texan robber baron Madison Moore from Salem, North Carolina to Princeton, New Jersey, in his single-engine Schmidt-Ridder biplane.

During a brief refueling stop in rural Virginia, Dorfman, an early adopter of the Hermetic Reformation movement that would sweep the Midwest following the Great Depression, gave Moore a copy of his rambling manifesto, Der Armsessel, which laid out the basis for the redistribution of wealth according to strict astrological mechanics.

Though Moore would later describe the screed as "incomprehensible," he credited his 17-hour trip with Dorfman with opening his eyes to the future of air travel and, in 1946, the oil magnate purchased a struggling regional airline, Fremont Air Transport.

Slim profit margins, ironclad union contracts and a woefully short-sighted business model (based mostly on optimism) kept Moore from turning Fremont around; the airline folded six months after its acquisition. Yet, a simple marketing device saved the Fremont story from the ashcan of aviation history and ensured its place in aeronautical literary lore.

Desperate to separate Fremont from the competition, Moore sought to build a sense of community among the consistently inconsistent passengers of Fremont Air. One such innovation was the introduction of a free, bi-weekly literary supplement. "Cloud Nine," whose layout, tone and typeset were remarkably similar to Der Armsessel, was hailed by New York Times' literary critic Theodore Elms as the "third most influential publication of the age."

Soon, complimentary in-flight magazines were gracing the seat-back pockets of continental and transcontinental airlines alike.

And the man Moore hired to as the first groundbreaking editor of "Cloud Nine"? You guessed it: none other than Chilean-born Poet Laureate Lazlo Tate.