Roosevelt Field Revisited - The Long Island Early Fliers Club

Roosevelt Field Revisited

The article on Roosevelt Field in the Jan/Feb newsletter brought many responses from members. LIEFC Life Member Jim Jenks wrote the following:

Early Roosevelt Field Ads

When Bob Schmidt, who has been a LIEFC member for much longer than I have, and I were in our early teens, we were quite often dropped off by our parents at Roosevelt Field. There we’d spend quite a bit of time walking up and down in front of the hangars taking a peek inside them to see that kind of airplanes were hangared there.

One day we spotted an olive drab colored airplane stashed away in the back of a hanger. Lord or Lordy, it seemed to us that we’d finally seen a World War One fighter, like the ones that starred in pulp magazines that we voraciously read like, "The Lone Eagle." The urge to see the airplane closer was too much for Bob and me to resist even though knew that getting inside the hangar was forbidden to outsiders, and especially to kids. With furtive looks up and down the line, we felt no one could see us, so we quietly scuttled into the hangar.

Bob, who always scored 100% on identification of aircraft when he was in the Air Corps in World War II, immediately recognized the plane as a Thomas/Morse Scout. We were thrilled, so much so that we could no resist taking a small piece of fabric off the plane, a piece about the size of a postage stamp, for our respective collections of aviation souvenirs. Of course, thought we didn’t think of it at the time, the reason no one was supposed to go into the hangars, especially kids, was to keep anyone from doing just what we had done – removing anything from the airplanes.

Thought I didn’t know it at the time we found the Thomas/Morse Scout, the Morse in Thomas/Morse was a multi-talented inventor from Ithaca, New York, where both my mother and father had been raised. Morse actually lived only a couple of blocks from my mother, and they knew each other as children. On hi trips to the Long Island area he often visited my parents at our home in Great Neck. It’s probably just as well that I didn’t make he connection or I’d have badgered him so much for info about the airplane that he’d never had any time to spend with my parents.

My story gets even more exciting from an airplane buff’s point of view.

One time during one of Morse’s visits, he brought a friend with him. The friend’s name was Thomas, and sure enough he was the other half of the Thomas/Morse combination. He had with him a bundle of papers that turned out to be drawings of a special improved type of anti-aircraft gun that he had invented. He wanted my father to invest in its development. Fortunately, I think, my father didn’t.

Roosevelt Field meant a lot of Bob Schmidt and me. We often bought a few strips of wood there with the meager earnings we had cutting grass or polishing cars. Our purpose in buying the strips was to build, in Bob’s basement, a Primary Glider that we planned to fly. We did build one of the wing ribs. Fortunately for our life expectancy, I think, very soon Bob and I got interested in girls, so what money we had went to a different purpose than building a Primary Glider.

LIEFC member Walter Winicki also remembered Roosevelt Field.

I was born in the late 1920s’ in East Meadow about five or six miles South east of Roosevelt Field. At that time the area was a great deal of farms and fields. At that time the area was a great deal of farms and fields. The skies above were always filled with aircraft activity from Roosevelt, Mitchel and other small airfields in the area.

In December of 1949 I purchased a share of a 1940 Taylorcraft. I was with a group of four pilots who were navigators, recently discharged from the airlines.

My training began in December 1949 at the Hicksville Aviation Country Club. That closed on March 31, 1950, and we then moved to Roosevelt Field. In early April of that year I continued my training and after received my pilots certificate. October 22, 1950 was my last flight out of Roosevelt Field. Sadly the field closed the following year on May 31, 1951, ending a great period of Aviation, never to go back to.