Dear Orville and Wilbur,

Thank you.

My love affair with flight came some 50 years after yours. I flew for the first time more than half a century after Orville’s feet left the ground on that cold beach at Kitty Hawk. And while that flight took less than 12 seconds, mine has lasted a lifetime.

While your fascination was with the mechanics of flight -- lift, thrust, and drag -- mine has been with travel. It is not how you rose above the earth that fascinated me, but why. Your efforts fueled a lifelong love of travel that has affected every facet of my personal and professional life.

For me it began in 1954. As a 12 year old I began writing embassies around the world asking for literature on countries I had only dreamed of seeing. They would send me brochures and photographs and packets replete with statistics about these exotic places. As a result of my letter writing, the FBI arrived at my parents’ doorstep in New York inquiring as to who was communicating with the Soviet Union!

In the mid-60’s I met a man who had bought the Huntington Hartford Collection of old posters, the largest collection of posters in the world. I told him that I would love to buy a few posters from him. He advised me to pick a theme and I selected flight. He sold me five aviation posters and that’s how this collection began.

In the mid-70’s the collection took off when I bought a company called National Standards, which published aerospace standards. I started using this growing collection to cover our office walls. After we sold the company I found myself with less wall space, but the collecting, and the travel, never stopped.

After 50 years of fascination and nearly 40 years of collecting, I have now seen almost all the places that that 12 year-old boy dreamed of in that apartment in New York. What were once thin pamphlets of paper are now a collection of memories, photographs and these posters that will outlast me.

Sincerely,

Robert N. Snyder