Original Photograph and Stickpin.

Chicago and Grand Rapids: Bud Morriss Airplane School, 1916. Original photograph of "Bud" Morriss, and his chief engineer Tony Stadlman, at the controls of his flying boat. Photograph measures 3 x 2 1/2 inches. It is in the original frame and with the original label on the verso which reads; "This is an authentic photograph taken in Grand Rapids, 1915, of P. G. B. (Bud) Morris at the controls of his Benoist Flying Boat, accompanied by his Chief mechanician Tony Stadlman, who later became Superintendent of the Lockheed Airplane Company of Burbank." Together with an original stickpin for the school in brass and blue and with an image of a biplane. It reads "Bud Morriss Airplane School Chicago 1916." The original celluloid covering the photograph is still present. Rare mementos of an early and influential aviator and his aviation school.Percival George Brockhurst Morriss (1884-1944), a native of England, learned to fly at Brooklands racetrack in 1909. Soon after that he came to the United States. A former assistant engineer in the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, he championed the use of wireless to communicate with airplanes in flight. Later the same year he learned to fly a Bleriot in England, and then joined the Curzon aviators. In 1914 he operated a flying boat service on the Chicago lake front, and in the same year was managing editor of Aero & Hydro, an aviation weekly paper. In 1915 he opened the Bud Morriss Flying School in Chicago. His next venture was with the Benoist Aeroplane Co. of St. Louis, serving successively as assistant pilot and instructor, Chief instructor, and finally as vice-president and sales engineer. In 1917 he served as a member of the Chicago Aero Commission. During the First World War he enlisted as a seaman in the Navy, in which he served for 18 months. Upon discharge Morriss was executive officer of aviation schools at a naval air station. Anthony Stadlman was in 1886 in Bohemia. He emigrated to the United States from his home in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1906, ispired by news of the aviation work of Orville and Wilbur Wright. By 1910 he was helping to build flying machines at the Chicago School of Aviation. For a short while he was chief engineer at the Bud Morris Aviation School. The Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, originally called the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company, was organized in the summer of 1916 by brothers Allan and Malcolm Loughead. Their plant was located in the rear of a garage on State Street in Santa Barbara. Tony Stadlman met Allan Loughead on a Chicago airfield and became superintendent of manufacturing when the company changed its name to Lockheed in 1927.