Jumping Back Into An Airfield’s History

WHEN "TIME MACHINE" published a "mystery" photo of a group of men posing in front of an airplane at Roosevelt Field, Arlene Lalonde of East Patchogue recognized it immediately. A similar photograph has been in her family's possession since 1930.

"My father, Arthur Halvorsen of Glen Cove, who is now deceased, is standing second from the left [in the photo that ran in Newsday]. To his right, in white, is George Daley, also of Glen Cove, who has been deceased for quite some time."

According to Lalonde, her father, who died in 1986, worked in Glen Cove at the Columbia Ribbon & Carbon company, and owned his own plane around 1930. "It was just a hobby," she said. Her copy of the photo, which is dated 1930 on the back, captures the aviators in a slightly different pose from the photo that appeared in Newsday (the original photo caption in Newsday dated it as around 1936). Her photo is also the mirror image, and it appears, based on the flaps on the overcoats, that the Newsday photo was reversed when printed.

Meanwhile, Arthur C. Liese, the owner of a gallery and bookshop in Pennington, N.J., shed light on the circumstances surrounding the picture. Liese, whose father, Henry, was active in aviation on Long Island during that period and has a large historical archive, says that most of the men in the photograph were parachute jumpers who were taking part in a promotional event sponsored by the Irvin Air Chute com.pany, a leading maker of parachutes.

"Every Sunday, one jumper would parachute to the ground. On one particular Sunday in 1930, the jumpers documented in your March 19 issue performed a mass jump. Perhaps 20 jumpers departed from the open cockpit Sikorsky biplane," says Arthur Liese, whose father has several photographs of the event, including one of the parachutists -- the preferred word at the time -- boarding the large biplane.

As for the Curtiss Fledgling airplane owned by the Safair Flying School shown in the original photo, Liese says that was merely a backdrop for the photo and not used in the jump. The Safair school, according to copies of a flier for the school provided by Dolores Brown Perno of Bay Shore, was headquartered at Curtiss Field in Valley Stream. (Perno, now 81, used to ride in planes there as a teenager.)

The school offered a variety of flying courses, including a four- to six-week "sportsman" flying course that in 1933 cost $318.

Related topic galleries: Long Island, Photography, History