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Birmingham Aviation: From Fairgrounds Air Shows to the Southern Museum of Flight
Alabama Review, Jan 2004 by Dodd, Don
IN THE YEARS before World War I the airplane came to the Birmingham public's attention at spectacular flying demonstrations by professional aviators. Flights at the Birmingham fairgrounds were a regular feature of the fall Alabama State Fair between 1912 and 1915. Inspired by the aerial displays, some of the city's adventuresome youth entered the army's air service in 1917, served valiantly in skies over Europe, and emerged as skilled aviators. They returned to Birmingham to begin a flying club and a flying squadron of the Alabama National Guard. Aviation activity during the 1920s centered on Roberts Field, the first city-owned airport, and then on the big, new Birmingham Municipal Airport after it opened in 1931. The annual National Air Carnival was the premier aviation attraction in the city and one of the major ones in the nation in the 1930s. Birmingham natives joined the United States Army Air Corps (later the United States Army Air Forces or AAF) in World War II and returned to serve in the air national guard or at the Birmingham Naval Air Station. Others joined the growing civilian aviation community and became members of organizations such as the Birmingham Aero Club (BAC). Air guard members helped train Cuban exiles to fly and maintain the Douglas B-26 Invader and other aircraft prior to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. To preserve the city's rich aviation heritage, BAG members purchased land and began construction of an aviation museum in the late 1970s that opened as the Southern Museum of Flight in September 1983.1
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Airplanes have been displayed in Birmingham since at least 1909, when E. T. Odum exhibited his invention at the Alabama State Fair, but visitors did not see the invention take flight. Odum cancelled his scheduled demonstration after the steel shank of the propeller bent during an engine test. "The beautiful birds of the air" that thrilled the crowds each day were dirigibles flown by Ray Knabenshue and Lincoln Beachey. Phil Parmalee of the Wright Company took off at the 1910 fair despite rain and a stiff wind, earning fame as the first person to pilot an airplane in the city. Photographs record flying demonstrations at fairgrounds air shows in 1912, 1915, and 1921, some of which proved fatal. Thousands of fairgrounds spectators witnessed a 1912 crash. Joseph Stevenson of New York City got off the ground in his "Stevenson Biplane" (assembled for the flight the day before), stayed aloft for about two minutes, rising to a height of thirty to forty feet, then "could not elevate his flight." The airplane turned to the left and then the right before shooting to the ground, motor first. A spectator compared the flight and fall to a spent arrow that goes rapidly upward until it loses its strength and falls to the ground. Stevenson tried unsuccessfully to jump from his self-designed and self-built aircraft. He was pulled unconscious from beneath the plane and, wife by his side, transported by ambulance to the Robinson Infirmary with a fractured skull, a broken rib, and a punctured right lung. He died the next morning.
Among Birmingham's World War I aviators, 2nd Lt. William Terry Badham of the 1st Army's 91st Air Squadron served with distinction and returned as an ace. In 1918, riding backseat in a two-seat observation aircraft over German-held territory, Badham used his feet to push twenty-five-pound percussion bombs through a hole in the fuselage. Although this had little effect on the German airfield he was attacking, it was one of the earliest daylight bombings performed by American forces and an omen of the future of aerial bombardment. Badham later became an ace for destroying five enemy aircraft, and he won the Distinguished Service Cross for shooting down two German planes in one dogfight. Although he was one of only a few to become an ace as a backseater in an observation aircraft, he took no pride in his achievements. Reflecting on the war sixty-six years later, the eighty-nine-year-old commented, "There were better men than I, and better shots, who died. I was doing my job. I was doing my duty."3
After the war Badham's brother, Henry, founded the Birmingham Flying Club with Maj. jimmy Meissner (also a World War I ace, Meissner came to Birmingham as an employee of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company), Sumpter Smith, Don Beatty, and others. The club evolved into the 135th Observation Squadron, Alabama National Guard, commanded by Meissner, and later became the 106th Observation Squadron. Well-known aviators Odell Garrison and Johnny Gill served with the 106th in the 1920s.4
Barnstorming aircraft of the postwar era landed in Birmingham wherever they could-ball fields, fairgrounds, and a field behind East Lake Park-but the first recognized airport was Dixie Field, opened in 1919 east of Elmwood Cemetery (now the location of Loveman Village) by Virgil Evans, the state adjutant general during World War I. Roberts Field followed at a location northwest of Birmingham Southern College on Village Creek in 1922, then Messer Field (192627), which was later Central Park Field (1934-52), and finally the Birmingham Municipal Airport between East Lake and Tarrant City in 1931. Flying legends Glenn Messer and Eddie Stinson managed Dixie Field after 1920, but Messer established Messer Field on North Sixteenth Street after a tornado destroyed the aircraft at Dixie. He also wing-walked in his co-owned (with Phoebe Fairgrave) Flying Circus, patented several inventions, and designed and built his own airplane, the "Air Boss." Messer's flying career spanned seventy years. His first solo flight was on May 13, 1911, at age fifteen, and his last was on February 20, 1982, at age eighty-seven.5
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