A true story about two brother’s antics on the Western Plains of Oklahoma in the 1920s and ’30s.
By Benjamin GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | 2025 Truth Endures©
The Flying Wagon
You’ve heard of the Wright Brothers, but you probably haven’t heard of the Groff Brothers—JD and Bennie. Two western Oklahoma boys growing up wild and dusty in the 1920s and ’30s. They didn’t have blueprints or flying machines. What they had was imagination, a tall barn, and a battered old wagon that Bennie believed could fly.
Bennie was the older one. He was full of ideas that didn’t always make sense. They always sounded like fun—at least to him. JD, the youngest, often found himself drafted into Bennie’s adventures under what you might call “big brother persuasion.” Bennie had a way of making cooperation seem more appealing. He would start listing all the minor sins JD had committed that week. JD wasn’t dumb. He knew how to pick his battles.
One summer day, Bennie got it in his head that their wagon could be made to fly. All it needed were wings—planks nailed out to the sides—and a launch platform. The barn roof, with its steep pitch and high drop, was just the place. Bennie did the math. He calculated it as only a 1930s farm kid could. He figured the wagon might be too heavy to lift both of them. So, of course, he chose JD to be the pilot.
JD protested. Loudly. But Bennie made his case and called in his leverage. They went up with the wagon. They dragged it onto the roof like a couple of cartoon inventors chasing the wind.
Perched high above the ground, JD sat nervously in the creaking wagon, holding on to the sides. The wings were loose, the wheels rattled, and JD knew better than anyone how this would end.
“Hold on tight and don’t jump out!” Bennie shouted.
“I won’t,” JD called back, “I’ll fall!”
And with that, Bennie gave the wagon a mighty shove.
It was right about then that their mother—Mom—looked out the kitchen window. She saw what no mother should ever see: her youngest son soaring off the roof in a makeshift flying contraption. She dropped what she was doing and ran out the door, just in time to witness gravity take over. The wagon left the barn roof for the briefest moment of flight—then fell straight down like a stone.
JD hit the ground in a cloud of dust and bent wood. Miraculously, he survived—more scared than scraped, and too winded to say anything right away. Bennie stood nearby, squinting at the wreckage like a disappointed engineer.
“Well,” Bennie muttered, “I guess there wasn’t enough lift.”
Mom had a different theory: they would never try that again.
JD agreed with Mom.
That was just one of many scrapes the Groff brothers got into over the years. Bennie had the ideas, and JD often paid the price. But through it all, they stuck together—laughing, fighting, inventing, surviving. That’s what brothers did.
The wild stunts and hijinks came to an end far too soon. Bennie passed away in his mid-forties, and with him, a certain spark left the family. One relative said the family had been “a little less jovial” ever since.
It’s true. A parent never fully recovers from losing a child. And a brother never fully recovers from losing his bud.
For a moment, a wagon flew on top of a barn in western Oklahoma. Two boys believed they could touch the sky.
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