Lester J. Maitland

And this book started a long time back for me.

I was assigned to write an article in Milwaukee, where I live, about Maitland Airport, which was an old airfield along the lakefront.

It's very interesting.

It's now the festival grounds.

The airfield is buried beneath the festival grounds, but the festival grounds, which the city keeps up on a permanent basis, has a sky glider, a gondola ride.

If you ride that gondola, you are actually flying along the runway as it once was.

I was fascinated by the airfield and so was the magazine, but I was even much more fascinated by the man who had lent his name to the airfield, Lester Maitland.

The more I looked into it, the more story there was to find out.

Coming up, we'll hear from one Valley contestant on the current season of Big Brother just after he was voted off the show.

But first, most of us have heard of aviators like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, but most of us have probably not heard of another pilot of that era named Lester Maitland.

A new book sheds light on his life and career, including his time spent in the Valley.

It's called Stone Age Astronaut, The Astonishing Adventures of America's Forgotten Flyer.

Liam Callinan is a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the book's author.

He'll be talking about it on Sunday in Phoenix.

He joins me, and Liam, let's start with who was Lester Maitland?

Lester Maitland was a rather extraordinary person from early days of aviation.

Earlier, we heard from Republican State Senator Andre Jacques, who represents Northeast Wisconsin, been talking about overcrowding in Wisconsin prisons as the state hit a record number of people incarcerated in correctional institutions around the state.

Coming up, the forgotten legacy of Milwaukee aviation pioneer Lester Maitland.

Nearly a century ago, he was the first person to fly from the U.S. mainland nonstop to Hawaii, a harrowing journey.

It was like flying lawn furniture.

I'm Maureen McCollum.

This is WPR News.

In 1927, just after famed aviator Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo flight across the Atlantic, Milwaukee native son Lester Maitland became the first pilot to fly nonstop from the continental U.S. to Hawaii 2,400 miles over the Pacific.

Maitland's accomplishment was celebrated across the nation just as aviation was taking a larger role in the military.