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This Week in History
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West Palm Beach
World War II
We’re continuing our military theme of the past few weeks. G. Paul Baker of suburban Lantana wrote May 10 to ask if we’ve written about the area’s military bases. Of course, we’ve described them extensively through the years. But it’s been a while, so let’s revisit a 2000 column:
America’s entry into World War II brought terror to South Florida; German U-Boats, unimpeded by an inadequate U.S. defense net, sank 24 ships, 16 of them from Cocoa Beach to Boca Raton between February and May 1942.
The Florida attacks killed hundreds of men and sent millions of dollars in cargo and oil to the bottom of the Atlantic. They also brought fear to civilians who worried about shells landing on them.
But the attacks helped lead to a buildup that was a boon to the state, still reeling from the real estate crash and the Depression. The number of military bases in Florida increased from eight in 1940 to 172 in 1943; the influx of soldiers who later returned to live contributed to the increase in Florida’s population from about 2 million in 1940 to nearly 3 million a decade later.
Boca Raton Army Air Field was a giant radar training base, with more than 100 bombers and about 16,000 troops. After it was returned to the state, part became Boca Raton Airport and the rest Florida Atlantic University; the school’s unusually wide parking lots are former runways.
A large part of Palm Beach International Airport was Morrison Army Air Field; about 45,000 fliers trained at or left from the field, and about 6,000 planes passed through in the eight months before D-Day.The Breakers in Palm Beach became Ream General Hospital. Germans worked in sugar fields at prisoner-of-war camps in Belle Glade and Clewiston. In southern Martin County, tens of thousands received secret radar training at the Southern Signal Corps School at Camp Murphy; the land later became Jonathan Dickinson State Park. Farther north, the Stuart and Fort Pierce municipal airports were used as military facilities, and the military established Hutchinson Island Navy Base and the Fort Pierce Amphibious Training Base.
Patients are entertained on Nov. 26, 1943, at Ream General Hospital at the Breakers in Palm Beach. The resort was used as an Army hospital from December 1942 to mid-1944, according to the state Department of Veteran’s Affairs. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: airports, hospitals, World War II
Last week we honored our area’s military dead. That gives us a natural transition to this week’s column. David McCampbell, considered the top Navy fighter pilot ever, spent most of his life in Palm Beach County.
McCampbell died in 1996. The terminal at Palm Beach International Airport is named for him.
During seven months in 1944, he notched 34 kills and destroyed 24 planes on the ground in the battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf.
His nine kills in 90 minutes at Leyte Gulf set a record in aerial warfare history for a single mission that is believed to stand today. He is the nation’s top Navy ace and fourth-leading ace, behind three Army Air Force pilots.
About a decade before his death, in July 1987, a staff historian for the Naval Institute came from Annapolis, to record a series of interviews covering his entire life and background.
The raw transcript runs 650 pages, according to Sue Sweeney, of the Naval Institute Foundation:
“McCampbell’s is one of nearly 70 histories currently in varying stages of completion. Our first priority is to record the interviews, capturing the story for posterity.
“In a perfect world, we would then be able to line up funding to finish all the labor-intensive follow-up work — transcribing, proofreading, footnoting, adding an annotated index, copying, and binding the volume — while the interviewee is still alive to see the completed history.
“To our regret, we were not able to accomplish this before we lost Captain McCampbell.
“If, as we hope, the Naval Institute can line up the necessary support in the next few months, we believe we can finish the work and release the McCampbell history by year’s end.
“Because the Naval Institute is a nonprofit organization, our 41-year-old history program must rely on gift income to accomplish projects.”
If you want to honor McCampbell by helping the Naval Institute finish the work of telling his story, contact Sweeney at ssweeney@usni.org or (410) 295-1054.
David McCampbell recorded 34 kills and destroyed 24 more planes on the ground in seven months in 1944. (Navy photo)
Tags: airports, place names, World War II
Question: Who is James L. Turnage? The street that surrounds the airport is named after this individual.
— Mike Anderson, West Palm Beach
Answer: The official mailing address for Palm Beach International Airport is 1000 James L. Turnage Blvd., and that’s the airport’s inner perimeter road.
But who was he?
We turned to Ed Zorzi, a retired longtime employee of the county’s aviation department. And we tracked down Turnage’s daughter Lucile Hemann, in Newhall, Calif., and granddaughter Alice Turnage in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Soon after the federal government turned ownership of Morrison Field over to Palm Beach County, either just after World War II or after it had re-appropriated the field during the Korean War in the early 1950s, Turnage was the superintendent for the airport’s water plant and eventually became superintendent of maintenance.
In the 1940s, Turnage’s wife, Lucille Tinnin Turnage, was the area’s first “Welcome Wagon hostess.” The program provided packages of goodies to newcomers, a practice that became impractical as the county exploded in growth.
Later, she owned and operated Lucille’s Catering Services of the Palm Beaches.
James Turnage retired in the late 1970s; soon after, the airport named Terminal Road for him.
For decades, the elder Turnages spent their falls near Gatlinburg, Tenn. James died at 81 in May 1984, Lucille at 91 in October 1995.
Lucile Hemann, who attended Palm Beach High in the 1950s, also gave us Turnage’s 4-page 1960s handwritten history of the airport.
When it opened in the early 1930s, he wrote, “Eastern Airlines occupied the lobby and a small office on the north side of the lobby. U.S. Weather was located in the office in the east side.”
He said several locals bought planes, and “the majority of the pilots and owners of these aircraft had passed on. A few of them are still with us. They were great, and gracious. It was indeed a pleasure for me to know them.”
Readers: Our Jan. 28 column on Zora Neale Hurston said she was raised in Eatonville, north of Orlando, America’s first all-black town when it was founded in 1887. Gael Hammer of West Palm Beach correctly noted that Nicodemus, Kan., was settled in 1877. We should have made the distinction that Eatonville was the first to be incorporated.
Staff file photo by RICHARD GRAULICH/2009
Palm Beach International Airport named its inner perimeter road for James L. Turnage, a longtime airport employee. Turnage ran the airport’s water plant and later became superintendent of maintenance before retiring in the 1970s.
Tags: airports, place names
She was the Amelia Earhart of Palm Beach County: Adventuresome and daring, with a tragic end to her short life.
Grace Morrison — secretary to a glamorous Palm Beach architect and weekend flier — championed the creation of a Palm Beach County airport in the 1930s, when the forerunner of today’s international airport was a small strip with a windsock called Lightbown Municipal Airport.
Flying was so new to Palm Beach County that the first landing marker and aerial beacon went up in 1929.
Morrison began pressing to improve the primitive facility — first contacting local officials, and when that failed, the federal government.
On Dec. 13, 1932, John Demarest of Hypoluxo sold 440 acres of land to an association formed to build a new air terminal. Six weeks later, runways were staked out. The total cost of the “modern” airport was estimated at $180,000.
“When completed, the new airport will be one of the best in the entire south,” Palm Beach Life magazine reported on Jan. 28, 1936.
On Dec. 19, 1936, the airfield was dedicated. It had expanded to 598 acres and was paid for by the county, the state and two federal agencies.
The airport was dubbed Morrison Field. But Grace Morrison was not there.
She had been killed just months earlier, on Sept. 5, near Titusville, while driving her brother to college.
The first plane to depart, an Eastern Airlines DC-2, carried 14 passengers. The first official landing at the airport carried three men, among them Grace Morrison’s boss, architect Maurice Fatio.
– Eliot Kleinberg, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
What was the first plane to fly over Palm Beach County? That happened in 1911, long before there was an airstrip here. The plane took off from what is now Currie Park.
For more on Palm Beach County history, get your copy of Palm Beach County at 100: Our History, Our Home.
Tags: airports, place names
We wrote March 26 of George Wright, for whom West Palm Beach’s Municipal Athletic Field was renamed in 1927.
It became Connie Mack Field in 1952 and now is the parking garage at the Kravis Center.
At the time, we knew only that Wright was city manager in the 1920s and had pushed for the stadium to open on time. We asked for help. Debi Murray to the rescue!
Murray, chief archivist for the Historical Society of Palm Beach County, dug up Wright’s obituary.
Turns out, he died in September 1926, even before the field was named for him.
He was found in bed in a local hotel, dead of an apparent heart attack, and “had been ill for some months,” an article said.
Wright had come from Jacksonville in 1920 to work as an accountant for the fledgling city and had been appointed manager in 1922, the obit said.
He served “until his resignation was asked” in March 1924.
The article said he stayed on after that with the city’s engineering department, which might explain why he still was involved when Municipal Athletic Stadium hosted its first event, a football game, in October 1924. The first baseball game was played in December.
Wright, survived by his wife and son, was buried in Jacksonville.
Update: Our April 23 column on Woolworth’s and its lunch counter prompted pioneer and longtime reader James Williams to send us a 1940s menu from the Hut, the iconic downtown West Palm Beach diner that operated where Phillips Point now stands.
The prices always are amusing:
A hamburger: a quarter. Soup: 50 cents. Coffee: a dime. A Cuban sub: 45 cents (someone had crossed it out in pencil and wrote in “.50.”
Costliest item: Two eggs, ham, toast, coffee: 70 cents.
Update: Our May 28 column on Claude Pepper caught the eye of Dan Liftman, aide to U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar. Dan notes that Claude Pepper’s total 41 years in Congress were surpassed by Strom Thurmond’s 48 in the Senate and the 53 years that Jamie Whitten of Mississippi served in the House.
Tags: airports, place names
