Les Mauldin - Barnstormer

The Barnstorming Years

Brownsville Herald clippingNovember 9th 1924 (plane pix added)

When the war ended and the surplus planes were sold off by the hundreds, Les Mauldin joined a restless fraternity of young pilots who believed the sky was no longer a battlefield but a stage. Barnstorming was not a career in the formal sense—it was motion, risk, improvisation, and nerve. And Mauldin took to it naturally.

c1921 Les Mauldon at Henderson-Mauldin Aero Service Fulton MO 

He flew where there were no airports yet, only pastureland and curiosity. Fields outside towns became runways for a day. Word spread by handbills and newspaper notices: Flying Circus Coming. By afternoon, crowds gathered—farmers, children, shopkeepers—watching biplanes rise where no machine had ever lifted before.

1924 1016 Kindred's Flying Circus 1924 1016 Kindred Flying Circus pilots -Belton Journal

Mauldin flew as part of traveling troupes—sometimes under his own name, sometimes folded into larger outfits like the Kindred Flying Circus—and performed the full repertoire of the era’s aerial daring. Formation flying, looping maneuvers, and precision landings were routine. What drew crowds, though, were the stunts that seemed to flirt openly with disaster: wing walking, rope ladder climbs, parachute drops from thousands of feet, and dead-motor landings that ended in silence broken only by applause.

These were not polished shows. Engines failed. Weather shifted without warning. Repairs were done in barns, sheds, or open fields, with tools carried in cars and pockets. Pilots doubled as mechanics, promoters, and sometimes ticket takers. Mauldin learned every inch of his aircraft—not from manuals, but from necessity.

1924 0707 Kindred Flying Circus - Murphysboro Daily Independent

The barnstorming circuit carried him across the Midwest and South—Illinois, Missouri, Texas—following county fairs, Armistice Day celebrations, and town anniversaries. Each stop added to his reputation as a steady hand and reliable flyer, someone who could be trusted when the motor cut or the wind turned strange.

But barnstorming was also a young man’s life: long roads, roadside hotels, temporary friendships, and the sense that the horizon was always calling. Over time, Mauldin began to move beyond short exhibition hops and toward longer routes and more complex operations. He flew into Mexico—Monterrey, Torreón, Lerdo—where aviation was still raw and full of possibility. There, his skills found new purpose: not just spectacle, but transportation, instruction, and mechanical expertise.

Possibly Les and Etelka's plane after honeymoon crash in Torreon 1925

Les Mauldin photo of unidentified aviatrix and others in Monterrey, Mexico

Those journeys carried him farther still, southward into Central America and beyond—Panama, Venezuela—where hangars replaced barns and airlines began to take shape from the same men who once sold rides for a dollar. The discipline learned in barnstorming—the ability to adapt, repair, judge risk, and fly by instinct—translated directly into this next phase of aviation.

1929 aerial of municipal airport at the time Pan Am expanded runways and services etc.

Eventually, Mauldin’s path bent back north, settling at last in Brownsville, a place where borders met, winds were steady, and aviation was becoming permanent rather than passing. There, he carried with him everything the barnstorming years had taught him. What had begun as daring entertainment matured into legacy.

First Mauldin home in Brownsville, Texas was at the airport. 

He arrived not just as a pilot, but as someone who had lived the early sky—who had known aviation when it was still personal, dangerous, and built one landing at a time.

Publication in the works!

photos from the Les Mauldin Aviation Collection