NOVEMBER 16th is William E. Barrett’s Birthday, so all this month we’ll be celebrating some of Barrett’s contributions to the pulps! Before he became renown for such classics as The Left Hand of God and Lilies of The Field, Barrett honed his craft across the pages of the pulp magazines—and nowhere more so than in War Birds and it’s companion magazine War Aces where he contributed smashing novels and novelettes, True tales of the Aces of the Great War, encyclopedic articles on the great war planes as well as other factual features. Here at Age of Aces Books he’s best known for his nine Iron Ace stories which ran in Sky Birds in the mid ’30s!

We’ll be featuring four of Barrett’s aviation themed tales—one each Friday—and a few of his factual features—Famous Firsts and Is That a Fact?—peppered throughout the month. First up we have a tale of Tommy Curtis and Sergeant Clymer, observers with the 4th Balloon Company. Clymer was old and grizzled—as hard as they make them, and born to army life. He had hooted at first, when they teamed him with Tommy “That weak sister!” Curtis—nothing in his experience had prepared him to understand a man who blushed and stammered and carried another man’s picture in his watch! Curtis was a slender hundred-and-forty pounder, to whom no talk was fighting talk and Clymer had been prepared to dislike Tommy Curtis and to make his life miserable. That was before he took to the air with him!

Four crashing jumps from a flaming sausage in one day were enough for one man. When Eddie met the pilot who knocked them down and boasted—Sausage Men Are Crazy!

From the June 1930 War Aces, it’s William E. Barrett’s “Sausage Men are Crazy!”

• Download “Sausage Men Are Crazy” (June 1930, War Aces)