The seeds of Bellefonte’s glory were planted when the government began the Air Mail Service in 1918. Other times we’d go to the train station to see the 8:16 come in from Milesburg. We’d stay and watch until the mechanics went off duty. “It was just fun, riding in the rumble seat to the field with our hair flying. “I’d hitchhike to the field with a friend pretty near every day after school,” recalls Jim Saxion, 78, who retired as a furniture refinisher at nearby Penn State University. “My father would come back from the field,” Barger recounts, “and the next thing I knew lobsters were crawling across the kitchen floor.” Her father was a dentist who treated the pilots at discount rates in return, the fliers brought him buckets of live lobsters from New York. We’d cut across farm fields.” A B-29 gunner in World War II, Sampsell found the terrific illumination of the mail airplane’s headlight “brighter than anything I saw until I was over Japan in a bomber.”įor 87-year-old Edna Barger, Bellefonte’s glory years meant lobsters. “My second or third grade teacher let any of us go who wanted to,” he says, “and we’d get there somehow even though the strip was three miles away. Max Sampsell, a retired store manager, remembers teachers dismissing classes whenever an airplane landed. I never had the audacity to speak to them.” In my six-year-old mind those pilots were gods. There were usually 25 or 30 people there.

I’d nag my dad to take me even though it was way past my bedtime, and when I got older I’d ride my bike. The big kick was going to the field to watch the night mail come in. “You can’t conceive how exciting it was,” he says. Jim Kerschner, 67, a former radio station manager and now Bellefonte’s mayor, is one of several men who grew up in that era and never got over their infatuation with flying. It may be regarded as typical of the light of science, showing the way to mankind in his flight against time and distance.” This chain of glittering points seems to have a mystical significance. As the Los Angeles Times breathlessly reported in 1923, “The line of lights by which the night transit of the airplanes between Chicago and Cheyenne is guided appeals to the imagination as well as to practical instincts….

Coast-to-coast flying was made possible only with the advent of night flying. Pilot Eugene Johnson lands in Hazelhurst, New York, carrying mail from the West Coast, in the first transcontinental air mail flight on August 22, 1923. To be young in Bellefonte in those adolescent years of American aviation was to be part of something wonderful. Was it really 60 years ago that mailplanes landed nightly in the little central Pennsylvania town of Bellefonte, bearing a cargo of life and pride and excitement? Was it that long ago and more that daredevil Slim Lewis buzzed the courthouse and made the fish-shaped weather vane spin, and handsome Max Miller roared around town in his green Nash roadster? The town was even tinier then (population 3,996 in 1920, 6,200 now), but during the 1920s it performed a vital service as the first airmail refueling stop in the nation. Finally the airplane would land, and as the ground crew closed in to refuel for the journey’s next leg, the pilot would climb ever so casually from the cockpit. The images still linger in their memories: the sound of an approaching motor, the mad scramble to the grassy field on the edge of town, the moment when the great light on the mailplane suddenly switched on, its beam flooding the waiting crowd.

Mailplane appked