“There is no sound but the wind. If I lose speed the wind dies away, and there is no sound at all.” - Clements Sohn

FOWLER – The grainy 24 seconds of black-and-white video footage shows a two-seat airplane 6,000 feet up in the sky as a small shape seemingly floats down and away from it.

At first, Clements Sohn appeared to glide, spreading his arms to open man-made wings of steel tubing and sailcloth.

Then, less than 1,000 feet above the crowd of 200,000 gathered below, the fabric of Sohn’s unopened parachute is visible, rippling in the air above him. It never fully opened.

The camera captured his drop but not the moment Sohn’s body met the ground near a set of grandstands. The fall broke every bone in his body.

It’s been 80 years since Sohn’s very public death at the Vincennes, France, airshow.

The Fowler native, who lived in Lansing, was only 26, but he died an international sensation, nicknamed the “Batwing Man” in honor of the suit he had constructed and wore for several public sky-diving jumps. It allowed him to glide for several seconds after jumping from airplanes.

His unorthodox career and tragic death made headlines in newspapers all over the world, but his grave at Most Holy Trinity Cemetery west of St. Johns consists of a lone stone marker that bears his name, the dates of his birth and death, and an inscription:

“A contributor to the advancement of aviation.”

In May, from the kitchen table at his home in St. Johns, Leon Kramer, 71, thumbed through a photo album given to him by his father, Clayton Kramer, Sohn’s cousin. Inside are photos, news clippings and handwritten postcards from Sohn to his family.

Kramer and other distant relatives, along with community members and area historians, grew up hearing about Sohn’s risky jumps.

His story, they said, may be cautionary, but it's also important — a tale of a true Michigan daredevil.

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Clem 'the daredevil'

The postcard, addressed to Leon Kramer’s grandparents, is dated Feb. 20, 1935.

“Dear folks,” it reads. “Have been here at Daytona since Friday. Expect to be in New Orleans next week. The weather sure is nice. Have been doing a lot of swimming and fishing. Have two jumps here at Daytona.”

“Love, Clem,” reads Sohn's neatly written closing remark.

By the winter of 1935, Sohn already held the world record for delayed parachute jumps, waiting until a height of just 800 feet above the ground before pulling the chute's cord above a Wayne County airport.

According to a 1930s Lansing State Journal article, Sohn said he'd been inspired to delay the use of a parachute as long as he could in 1932, after watching famed parachute jumper Spud Manning.

Just days after the postcard was written, Sohn made an even bigger name for himself, jumping from an airplane at Daytona Beach in Florida and "gliding like a bat" with his wings for the first time. He used his wings to soar and maneuver but relied on a parachute to land.

"I am sure that I could have glided a mile or more literally, if I had concentrated my efforts on that," Sohn told a reporter afterward. "It was cold, and I was in a hurry to get to the ground."

Sohn often gave confident interviews after his winged jumps.

“Someday I think everyone may have my wings and be able to soar from the house tops…” he once said.

Dorothy Motz Bradley, 91, of Fowler, remembers that Sohn had grand aspirations.

Her husband, Larry, who died in 1984, was Sohn's cousin and a good friend. She said Sohn spent a great deal of time at the Motz family farm in Fowler, where Larry kept an airplane. The two flew it up together, she said.

“Larry always called Clem the daredevil,” Motz Bradley said. “He could do anything. He tried to do everything, and he wanted to fly like a bird. It was just part of him.”

First cousin Alan Kramer, 92, said that, in the 1930s, Sohn was a “household name” in Clinton County. He graduated from Lansing’s Eastern High School in 1930, and his father, Gottlieb Sohn, was a Lansing police officer, but Sohn had grown up on a farm in Fowler.

Alan Kramer was 12 when Sohn died but remembers watching him parachute from an airplane at the Ionia County Fairgrounds a few years before his death.

“He’d take a bag of flour and spill it out as he came down,” Alan Kramer said. “He wanted people to be able to see him fall. It was so different.”

Leon Kramer said his father took airplane rides with Sohn, too. By 1936, Sohn was being paid $10,000 a jump, his father told him, and traveling constantly.

An article published in the Lansing State Journal shortly after his tragic final jump, explains how Sohn got his start helping well-known Lansing pilot Art Davis with “aeronautical chores.”

Sohn started working for Davis in 1929 and made his first parachute jump in Miami the next year. Davis worked with him on the hand-crafted bat wings, and, during practice jumps, Sohn perfected “swimming through the air with the current” while wearing them.

“I think he was testing this around Fowler,” Leon Kramer said.

The 'original Batman'

A reporter who witnessed a test jump with the wings dubbed Sohn the “Batwing man,” and the term stuck, although over the years he’s also been referred to as the “original batman” and the “human bat.”

According to news accounts, Sohn wore a microphone during one of his jumps, narrating the stunt in a calm voice as he fell from the sky.

His family members were incredibly proud of Sohn’s antics.

“He was pretty famous,” said one of Sohn’s nieces, Janet Lewis, 81, of Elsie.

Herbert Pasch said his late wife, Patricia, another of Sohn’s nieces, was proud to be related to Sohn. “He was a pioneer,” he said.

Scott Peters, curator of collections at the Michigan History Museum, said that’s true. He said skydivers today use modern wings to soar from the tops of mountains and cliffs. Those wings are far more technologically advanced, he said, but utilize principles Sohn put into practice 80 years ago.

One of Sohn’s earlier wing models is part of the Michigan History Museum’s collection, along with a pair of Sohn’s goggles. The items hung near the entryway to the building in downtown Lansing as recently as 2015, Peters said, but have since been placed in storage.

Sohn isn’t the only daredevil to try soaring with wings and isn’t the only one who died doing it either, but he was recognized worldwide for succeeding several times before his death, Peters said.

“His (wings) were probably some of the more famous that actually worked.”

Ron Mamatson, a volunteer archivist with the Paine-Gillam Scott Museum in Clinton County, said the building houses photos and news clippings about Sohn. Docents talk about the famous Fowler native when they give tours of the museum, he said. Guests who hear the story are interested and usually surprised they've never heard of Sohn.

"But he was a popular figure during that point in time," Mamatson said. "He was known as America's bird man."

He was a celebrity in Lansing too. Six weeks before his death, Sohn visited his alma mater to talk with Eastern students about his career.

Leon Kramer said, years after Sohn's death, his father would receive clippings and articles in the mail about him from friends and family. He saved all of them in the album.

“People would send this stuff to my dad,” Leon Kramer said. “Or maybe even my grandpa, and then my grandpa would give it to my dad knowing that he would save it.”

Kramer saw the album over the years, when his father got it out to look through it.

“He would say, ‘Look at this. Look at this here,’” Leon Kramer said. “As a kid growing up, my dad just always talked about Clem. I guess he was just proud of him.”

A public death

Leon Kramer said his father told him Sohn was so daring it was "scary" when they would take airplane rides together, and he did have close calls.

The summer before his death, Sohn dislocated his shoulder during a jump in England. His wings tangled with his parachute as it began to open, and a secondary parachute didn't open until he was close to the ground, making for a rough landing.

In a front page Lansing State Journal article dated the day after his death, John Early, a friend of the Sohn family, said Sohn had confided in him before the jump. He told Early he planned to stop using his wings after he returned from France.

"It's a tough break he had to be killed on his last tour," Early said.

But Sohn's father told Early he'd "expected" his son's death.

Spectators watching his last jump, during which he fell for more than a minute, screamed, cried and fainted when he hit the ground.

Sohn's manager Rhonda Davis watched and attempted to rush to his body, as bystanders held her back. When asked what she thought happened, Davis said, "Clem must have fainted."

An investigation revealed that his first chute never opened, because its cords were twisted. Friends and family theorized that the parachute was damp from the boat trip to Europe and that Sohn had failed to properly repack it before making the trip.

Leon Kramer said his father always defended Sohn's diligence before jumps.

“My dad said he knew Clem very well, and he always checked everything before he did this,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Sohn was buried May 11, 1937, in Most Holy Trinity Cemetery after a funeral at St. Casmir's Catholic Church.

Fellow pilots Harvey Hughes and George Starr flew planes above the burial site dropping pink and red roses on the grave from overhead.

Janet Lewis said those who knew Sohn well are gone now.

He's a local daredevil who lives on in museum displays and the stories that distant relatives still tell about him.

"People should know about him," Lewis said. "He was impressive, but most people today probably have no idea."

Contact Reporter Rachel Greco at (517) 528-2075 or rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @GrecoatLSJ.

High points of Clem Sohn’s daredevil career