“The First Twenty-five Years”
The Columbia Aviation Country Club (CAA) was
conceived in the fertile brain of L.S. (Doc) White, Oregon’s foremost
evangelist of aviation, and born of a pent-up yearning to take to the air after
being grounded for four years during World War II.
Light planes, still a novelty, were suddenly
plentiful. All barriers were down, but pilots didn’t quite know what to do with
their newfound freedom. They felt the need to flock together like the birds of
a feather that they were.
Doc, a “doctor of finance,” with the look of eagles
in his eyes, knew what to do. He was still a student pilot when he led the
first See Oregon By Air Tour, September 17-20, 1946, but he made up in
enthusiasm what he lacked in experience. Tours to Mexico and the Arctic
followed in 1948. In May and June 1949, 50 planes and 150 aerial ambassadors
joined the Portland-to-Portland, (Maine) tour.
Doc and Wally Timm got the idea for the Columbia
Aviation Country Club when they stopped at Wings Field, Pennsylvania to visit
the Philadelphia Country Club (now long gone) on their way back from
Washington, D.C., where the tour disbanded. The club was incorporated October
8, 1949, with Harry Goble as the first president – but with no clubhouse. The Vanport
Flood of May 1948 supplied the answer. A lot of buildings, wrecked by the
flood, were still stranded in the mud at Portland-Columbia Airport.
The CACC, which owned much of the mess, turned its
back while club members, armed with hammers, saws, cranes and forklifts, spent
weekends and Thursday nights in an old-fashioned barn-raising bee. Bu October,
the first 20-by-50 foot unit, built from salvaged wreckage, rested on its
foundations just inside the old gate at the northeast corner of the airport. Art
Whitaker had tried to negotiate a lease on the site, promising to let the club
use it rent free, but the deal fell through, leaving the club with nothing but
squatters’ rights.
The second unit of the clubhouse, featuring the
classy Arizona sandstone fireplace donated by Doc Greene, had just been
completed and all was CAVU when along came the Korean crisis and the outlook
was suddenly zero-zero. The Air Force took over the field and announced that
they were taking over the clubhouse. But Stuart Symington, Secretary of
Defense, a friend of the CACC, ordered the local fighter jocks to lay off.
The local CO did, however, suddenly find it
necessary – for security reasons, of course – to build a prison wall around the
clubhouse, cutting it off from the airport. During the dark of the moon,
however, this Iron Curtain mysteriously banished from the scene and the club’s
horizon was restored.
The triumph of right over might was short lived, however.
In February 1959, a new development brought down the house, quite literally, a
board at a time – sold at auction to make way for the new north runway 28R-10L.
But by this time Frank Womack, the Great Arranger behind most of the club’s air
tours, had sweet-talked West Coast Airlines into “selling” the club its old
terminal building, the cozy building which the club called home, for $1.
By 1980 the club was too big for its britches. Membership
had grown from 100 to 235. By June 1981 contractors Ted Millar and Walt Swam,
loyal club members, had completed a 1700-square-foot dining room addition.
Several other members acted as sub-contractors supplying equipment and services
at or below their cost. Saturday work parties did the extensive landscaping
with Frank Schmidt and Gary Moeller donating the shrubs and trees. The necessary
$100,000 was raised by assessments. Now 150 could be easily seated for dinners.
In 1982 a new BBQ was built, partially paid for with money raised by selling
bricks with members names on them. Now two whole pigs can be barbecued at once
on the pit built by Mike Reese, Kip Kappler, Ken Parker, Dan Streimer, Virg
Viner, Jr. and others.
But the CACC is more than boards and bricks. It is a
brotherhood of flap-happy pilots ranging from private pilots to airline types
and military jocks, dedicated to the proposition that flying is fun, and that
flying is the key to progress in this fast-changing world. Flying safety is
always taken seriously, but reminders can be on the raucous side. Take the
HAFAS Award, for instance, Whit Pierson’s brainchild. No, two HAFAS’ do not
make a whole, a hole maybe, but not a whole.
The Honorary Association of the Fractured Airscrew
consists of a wooden Mooney Mite propeller chewed in half on some long
forgotten gear-up landing. It has hung line an albatross from the necks of
quite a few CACC pilots who bent their birds in lousy landings or couldn’t hear
the tower shouting at them because “the landing gear warning horn was making so
much noise.”
The club’s College of Aeronautical Knowledge, which led to
the annual Flight Profiles, described elsewhere, set the pace for the rest of
the county.
The club is probably best known for its more than 75
Oregon Air Tours. Those early air tours demonstrated the utility as well as the
fun of flying those first, slow, short-ranged puddle jumpers. They set new
records for numbers and distance, from the tropics to the Arctic Ocean, from
coast to coast and most points between. The Cuban Air Tour, with 100 planes and
250 aviators, covering 8,000 miles round trip was and still is the longest,
biggest air tour on record.
In 75 major air tours no one got a scratch, although Ralph
Service landed in a coal mine – all right, a strip mine – and Angus McKinnon,
flying one of his converted Grumman Widgeons, landed in Death Valley on a salt
bed as rough as the surface of the moon. Those air tours did more to promote
aviation than anything did since Lindburgh flew the Atlantic. But their time is
past. Today’s pilots with their fast, long-range sophisticated aircraft and
their instrument ratings no longer need to flock together.
CACC’ers still get together a couple of times a year for
mini-tours to Mexico or Canadian fishing holes, or the trip to Harlingen, Texas
to see the Confederate Air Force restage World War II, but the day of the major
air tour is long gone.
The club’s fame in aviation circles still lures truly
distinguished visitors like Col. Gordon Fullerton, Oregon’s own astronaut,
pilot on the third flight of the space Shuttle Columbia, which made the first
emergency landing in the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. Other well
known visitors over the past years include Lt. Gen. “Jimmy” Doolittle of WWII
fame; Astronaut Stuart Roosa, Apollo XIV; Georgi F. Baidukov, Co-pilot and
Alexander V. Belyakov, Navigator, two of the three crew members of the first
trans-polar flight that flew from Russia to Pearson Field, Vancouver, in 1937;
Pilot/Author Ernie Gann, Bob Hoover, Art Scholl and Ernie Brace, famous Marine
Corps Aviator.
As time marches on, fewer and fewer CACCers remember Doc
White, the catalyst who started it all. He was a prophet, not without honor in
his hometown. While serving on the Port of Portland, he predicted the boom in
airline traffic and fought for longer runways. He predicted that “airliners
won’t increase much in number but in size.” He predicted passenger trains would
be out of business by 1970. It is a measure of his modesty that although he was
the CACC’s sparkplug for more than 20 years, he never served as president. He
shunned the limelight. He died Sunday, January 25, 1970, in Honolulu of a
sudden heart attack.
Lev Richards
1970
Appendix A
“The
Second Twenty-five Years”
In 1994, CACC was asked to leave its home of the last 45
years at the Portland Airport by the Port of Portland. At this time the club
changed its name to Columbia Aviation Association (CAA) to more accurately
reflect its involvement with the aviation community. A search was started to
look for a new home for CAA for the next 50 years and beyond. After much study
and searching, a site was located at the Aurora State Airport. Land was
purchased from the Bennett family and through member donations, a beautiful new
clubhouse was built. The grand opening of the clubhouse was held on May 31,
1997 after a short construction period. This new facility with full kitchen,
bar, and meeting areas is one of the finest in the nation.
1999 marks the 50th anniversary of
Columbia Aviation Association. The club is currently compiling a “second
edition” of its history that will be made available at the 50th
anniversary celebration. This will present a more detailed description of the
club’s history.
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