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Centre Daily Times May 2 2005
Bellefonte's airmail history filled with highs and lows
By Rich Kerstetter; rkerstet@centredaily.com
"Leon D. Smith ushered in Bellefonte's golden age of flight on Dec. 18, 1918, when he landed on the field now occupied by the high school with several sacks of mail en route from New York to Chicago.
Smith's de Havilland biplane was about an hour and 20 minutes late, however. He apparently got lost flying over the ridges of central Pennsylvania and touched down initially near State College to ask for directions.
"History has been in the making in Bellefonte this week with the inauguration of the airplane mail service over the Wilson aero route between New York and Chicago, Bellefonte being the first relay station from New York," the Democratic Watchman newspaper proclaimed before recounting Smith's little misadventure.
Daily flights between the two cities began the following summer, with stops at Bellefonte and Cleveland, and cross-country airmail service was in place by 1920.
Service to Bellefonte expanded in 1925.
"During the past month, airplanes have been flying over Bellefonte at night like bats chasing flies, all for the purpose of acquainting the various pilots with night-flying and landing preliminary to the inauguration of the night airmail service, which became an established fact on Wednesday night." the Democratic Watchman reported in its July 3, 1925, edition.
Dean C. Smith landed the first night flight two hours after taking off from New York.
"While the crew at the field supplied his plane with gas and oil, tested the stays, motor, etc., a committee of Kiwanians supplied the pilot with sandwiches and hot coffee, cigars and cigarettes," the Watchman recorded.
The pilots were a colorful lot and included among their number "Wild Bill" Hopson, who, according to a 1991 article in Smithsonian Air & Space magazine "dropped airborne love letters, weighted with bolts, from airfield clerk Charlie Gates to his girlfriend in nearby Hecla Park."
Another was Harold "Slim" Lewis who former Bellefonte Mayor Jim Kerschner said "was the which than which there was no whicher."
"A showman, a hail fellow, a good pilot and well liked," Kerschner told the Smithsonian. According to legend, Lewis often buzzed fright trains, unnerving brakemen, and would repeatedly dive to scatter a herd of bulls owned by a farmer he disliked.
Not every pilot was eager to fly into Bellefonte, however.
As Donald Dale Jackson explained in a May 1982 article, unpredictable weather and the scarcity of landing sites made the Allegheny Mountains torturous.
"Pilots came to call them the 'Hell Stretch' and the 'Graveyard,'" Jackson wrote.
Between 1918 and 1927, 43 postal pilots were killed.
The first local fatality, according to Kathleen Wunderly, writing in the October 2004 issue of American Philatelist, was Charles Lamborn, "whose plane crashed a few minutes after leaving Bellefonte for Cleveland on July 19, 1919."
In 1925, front-pages across the country carried a Bellefonte dateline when Charlie Ames' plane, flying from New Jersey to Bellefonte, among the clouds at night, vanished.
"Searching parties by air and on land have failed to find any trace of him," the New York Times reported.
More than a week later, however, "Ames' splintered aircraft and broken body" were located just a few miles from the Bellefonte field. He had missed the gap in the mountains by about 200 feet.
Jimmy Cleveland was Bellefonte's last airmail fatality in May 1931. Forty years later, his brother and several Bellefonte residents located the crash site and placed a granite marker there.
"Bellefonte's bittersweet interlude as an airmail stop came to and end in 1933," the Air & Space article, also written by Jackson, stated.
"The official reason was bureaucratic: The federal government ruled that commercial aircraft could not use field belonging to the Department of Commerce, as Bellefonte's did because of its radio and weather station," Jackson wrote.
"But the truth was, Bellefonte had become obsolete. Now the mail was carried - along with passengers - on gleaming new long-range commercial transports that had no need to stop in the tiny town."
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