When L.A.’s Age of Flight Got Off the Ground

In 1910, when planes were made of paper and pilots were made of steel, Los Angeles’ aviation age sputtered to life in a beanfield.

On Jan. 10, on a plateau overlooking San Pedro Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula, more than 20,000 flight enthusiasts gathered to witness the first International Air Meet in the country. Just seven years before, Orville and Wilbur Wright had first sailed 40 yards over Kitty Hawk, N.C.

The event was promoted by a hustling local entrepreneur, Dick Ferris, who had visited France the previous year and witnessed the world’s first air show. Back home, he pitched the idea to enthusiastic city fathers and town merchants. Soon, an aviation committee was selected and the ball was in motion.

Ferris mounted a campaign--flaunting Southern California’s mild winter weather and naming each of the meet’s 10 days after a city or state: Pasadena, San Diego, San Francisco, Arizona. . . .

City workers dug trenches for a gasoline line from a storage tank to the site. Potholes were filled on the unpaved roads, and three miles of wire fence went up to surround the 57-acre field. Huge tents were erected for the airplanes and mechanics. Three train-car loads of sawdust covered the grandstand and concession areas, and several water trucks would quench the crowd’s thirst to the tune of 10 cents a glass--quite a price when you could get a beer for a nickel.

While the future was taking shape over their heads, 276,000 spectators arrived at the meet in buggies, mule-drawn wagons, trains and the then-6-year-old Red Cars.

Smack in the middle of farmland--donated by the Dominguez family--onlookers set their sights on the wild blue and watched as biplanes and monoplanes roared into dizzying flips and spirals to the accompaniment of a brass band.

But all of a sudden the music stopped as the young and daring French aviator Louis Paulhan began climbing higher and higher into the sky. Ferris, with his coattails streaming in the breeze, ran onto the field shouting and shaking his finger for the band to continue. But it was useless. The bandleader and musicians stood transfixed, along with the audience, their mouths open in amazement as Paulhan reached a dizzying 4,165 feet, setting a world altitude record.

A tough 13-year-old street kid named Jimmy Doolittle, who one day would rise to become a World War II general and celebrated flier himself, gawked at Glenn Hammond Curtiss, who broke the world air speed record by whizzing along at 55 m.p.h.

Doolittle would later say that the air meet changed his life forever.

Other pioneer aviators present were Roy Knabenshue, Edgar Smith, Waldo Dean Waterman, Charles Willard, Clifford B. Harmon and Lincoln Beachey, who five years later would fatally plunge into San Francisco Bay, realistically demonstrating a suicide dive for 50,000 onlookers.

Georgia (Tiny) Broadwick, a 4-foot, 8-inch daredevil, thrilled spectators as she parachuted from a hot-air balloon hovering overhead, thus becoming the first woman sky diver.

There were only a few minor mishaps: Two pilots crashed before getting into the air, a plane caught fire on the ground and a pilot was struck on the back of the head by a propeller while trying to start his engine. He was not seriously injured.

The show generated a hefty profit. Gold medals were hung on the winners, who divided a $40,000 purse.

To a few, however, the sporting event was more than just romance and adventure. Like Doolittle, they had seen the future and would become the pioneers of the aircraft industry.

Five years after the meet, Glenn Martin, a professional “birdman” who would found aerospace titan Martin Marietta, started a company in Inglewood and hired Donald W. Douglas to work for him.

The following year, Douglas, an MIT graduate, opened his own business in a barbershop on Pico Boulevard. His company would eventually become half of McDonnell Douglas.

Today, the only obvious traces of the great air meet are two small plaques. One was erected by the Native Daughters of the Golden West on the south side of Victoria Street, near the entrance to Cal State Dominguez Hills. The other, a California state landmark, is close by on Wilmington Avenue. A room filled with memorabilia and a detailed diorama of the meet can be seen at the Dominguez Ranch Adobe on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 1 to 4 p.m.

Most residents of the suburban tracts that cover what was, briefly, the world’s aviation center are unaware that their area’s streets and a school are named for an entrepreneur and such aerial pioneers as Willard, Paulhan, Broadwick and Curtiss.