Island of the Skies

8 From the Hempstead Plains to the surface of the moon, Long Island was the place where aviation got off the ground and soared to the skies. Island of the BY GEORGE DEWAN f aviation was born on a wind-blown, sandy hill near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, it was raised and nurtured on the flatlands of Long Island’s Hempstead Plains. Not to take anything away from Orville and Wilbur Wright’s magnificent Iflying adventure just 100 years ago this December 17. (Or from an amazed teenage witness named Johnny Moore, who raced into town shouting, “They done it! Damned if they ain’t flew!”). Or from the multitude of adventurous, seat-of-the-pants fliers from around the world who took to the air over the next three decades to push aviation from infancy to adulthood. But in the early days of manned flight, Long Island was where much of the Eight years after the Wright action was. It was the scene of a number Brothers’ success at Kitty Hawk in of firsts––the first air mail; the first solo 1903, a plane soars over the flight across the Atlantic Ocean; the first Mineola Fairgrounds. “blind” flight, in which the pilot took COUNTY MUSEUM DIVISION NASSAU NEW YORK archives • FALL 2003 9 off and landed by instruments; later at Hazelhurst Field in “You Will Fly Tomorrow...” the first non-stop flight across Mineola, Nassau County. He Those were the days when the United States; the first was hooked. Once he got an impromptu airplane ride American-designed and -built his own pilot’s license, Harris was irresistible for the strong monoplane; the first wireless became a barnstormer himself of heart. In the late ‘20s, radio transmission from an in the heady days of the 1920s. summertime motorists in their aircraft; the first American “We would fly around until Model A Fords heading south on Cross Bay Boulevard in search of sun and sand at Skies MUSEUM THE CRADLE OF AVIATION woman to pilot an airplane–– we found a lot big enough to to name just a few. fly out of,” Harris later told Speed, altitude, and endur- an interviewer. “We would ance records were routinely land there and start carrying set and broken. Pioneering passengers for $10. If we flights regularly began or ended couldn’t get $10 we would on Long Island, the most take $5. That is, if we were memorable one being the hungry enough...We went all 1927 flight to Paris of Charles over the Island.” Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Then there was Elinor Smith, Louis. Starry-eyed airplane who grew up in Freeport, five builders set up shop and tested miles south of Mineola. In the Rockaway Beach were enticed Charles Lindbergh’s historic non-stop flight to Paris began at new designs. Daring young summer of 1917, when she by a large sign painted on Roosevelt Field on Long Island. barnstorming pilots in their was six, she took the first of the side of a roadside airplane He flew the 3,610 miles in fragile flying machines thrilled many $5 plane rides with a hangar at the end of a thirty-three hours, thirty minutes. huge crowds with their aerial hotshot French flyer named sandy airstrip: YOU WILL FLY exploits. Louis Gaubert, who had parked TOMORROW—WHY NOT Fiery crashes were always his Farman biplane in an TODAY? Jammed into the sand part of the story. On hand to abandoned Hicksville potato was another sign: PASSENGER document the excitement with field. Smith, who thirteen years RIDES $5. OVER N.Y. CITY graphic photos and blaring later would be named the best AND THE STATUE OF LIBERTY headlines were the circulation- female pilot in the country, $10 AND $15. hungry New York newspapers. described her first flight in her An unidentified local news- autobiography Aviatrix: “That paper writer later reported: The Magical Kingdom never-to-be-forgotten summer “Anyone who has not taken of the Air of flying with Gaubert shaped his first airplane ride has Many a youngster who got a my life. I remember so vividly something in store for him... $10 plane ride was converted my first time aloft that I can Passengers are not strapped in for life into a true believer in still hear the wind sing in the their seats, nor are parachutes the magical kingdom of the air. wires as we glided down...I fastened to their backs, any Frank Harris, born in Jamaica, knew my future in airplanes more than they would be if the Queens in 1906, got his first and flying was as inevitable as ride was being taken in an airplane ride a dozen years the freckles on my nose.” www.nysarchives.org 10 flocking to an airfield Glenn NASSAU COUNTY MUSEUM DIVISION NASSAU Curtiss had developed on the Hempstead Plains. He came down to New York City, look- ing for a flat place, and when he came to Long Island he must have felt like Brigham Young when he crossed the last mountain and said, ‘This is the place.’” Not for nothing has Long Island become known as the “cradle of aviation.” The great Hammondsport, New York plane-maker Glenn Curtiss— whose Buffalo plant produced the World War I workhorse Jenny biplane—moved down- This NC-4 flying boat (“N” for automobile. As far as the roaring engines, combined state in 1917 to Garden City, U.S. Navy; “C” for Curtiss actual flying is concerned, it with the smell of oil, gasoline, Engineering Company) took off a new town built on the barren is different from any other and the pungent odor of from Rockaway to become the first flatlands of central Nassau sensation. There is nothing of banana oil lacquer, or “dope”— airplane to cross the Atlantic County. His company was the the roller coaster’s breathtaking which was applied to tighten Ocean. Carrying a crew of six, the first facility devoted solely to dive. It is more like soaring and strengthen airplane plane was guided by a line of U.S. airplane research and develop- destroyers strung across the ocean and the only sensation of speed fabric—was a heady mixture ment, and he bought the firing star shells at night to keep is that caused by the wind for young people who dreamed western section of nearby the plane on track. whistling by.” of flying. Roosevelt Field, re-christening Flying was more than just Pilots and Plane-Makers it Curtiss Field. Out of this a show, however, and more One of these was a teenager venture came the first flying than just a thrilling ride in the named George Dade, who boat, and in 1919 the Curtiss- sky. As Joshua Stoff, curator of arrived from Wisconsin in 1921 built NC-4 became the first the Cradle of Aviation Museum with his father, Jesse, a wood- airplane to cross the Atlantic. at Mitchel Field, has written, worker attracted to a job with Museum director Stoff Long Island was a natural the new Curtiss Engineering refers to the period through airfield, especially the area in Co. in Garden City. Dade was the mid-’30s as Long Island’s THE CRADLE OF AVIATION MUSEUM THE CRADLE OF AVIATION central Nassau County known overwhelmed with what he “Golden Age of Aviation.” historically as the Hempstead saw, as he later wrote (with “During the Golden Age,” Plains, a flat, treeless prairie journalist George Vecsey) in Stoff wrote in his book The formed by the outwash of Getting Off the Ground: Aerospace Heritage of Long the glacier that sculpted Long “In our way, we were joining Island, “there were more Island. Running from Queens the brigade of pioneers—the aviation manufacturers on almost to the Suffolk County inventors, mechanics, kids off Long Island than in any other border, the 60,000-acre plain the farm, veterans from World area of the country.” is the only true prairie east War I, people willing to risk of the Mississippi River, ideal Fields of Dreams Glenn Curtiss of their lives to be pilots.” In in colonial days for cattle There have been at least eighty Hammondsport, New York 1929, at age seventeen, Dade grazing. But by the beginning airfields, large and small, developed the flying boat (top became one of the youngest photo), and is often called of the twentieth century, the scattered about Long Island, people in the country to earn the “father” of naval aviation. cattle were gone and airfields from Queens County in the a pilot’s license. “They were covered the landscape. The west to Montauk Point in the NEW YORK archives • FALL 2003 11 At age nineteen, Elinor Smith was named the best female pilot in the country. east. The 1910 International daredevil aerobatics. (And Aviation Meet was held at where, half a century later, tens Belmont Park in nearby Elmont; of thousands of shoppers a year later, a second meet was would gather for the opening held in Garden City. At this of a Macy’s branch in the meet, pilot Earle Ovington, fabulous new shrine to con- designated as U.S. Mail Pilot sumerism, the Roosevelt Field #1, made the nation’s first Shopping Center.) official air mail flight, a six-mile But a new era was begin- jaunt to Mineola, where he ning as the “Golden Age” dropped a mailbag onto the was dying. The 1930s saw the small Mineola airfield. groundwork being laid for But one airfield stands out development of the airplanes THE CRADLE OF AVIATION MUSEUM THE CRADLE OF AVIATION in historical memory: Roosevelt that would help win World Field, once the largest aviation War II: the Wildcat and Hellcat, field in the world.

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