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EARLY BIRD PLAQUES

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The Committee would also like to know where you learned to fly, name of Aviation School or Flying Instructor, preferably both, the name of plane, name and type of motor, number of flying hours to your credit and any other information about yourself that you would like to have filed away in the Early Bird Archives. Such information will be useful and cherished by future generations.

Knowing that all members could not be expected to live the full fifty years after having made their FIRST SOLO flight, the Board of Governors decided that any paid up member having attained his seventieth birthday, could apply for and receive a plaque, instead of waiting the fifty years after his first solo, provided the Committee is furnished with the date of that important first flight which qualified him as an Early Bird.

The names of quite a number of lost birds appear in the "Gone With The Wind" column. Information about any of these missing members will be greatly appreciated. It may be too late for us to present plaques to all of them.

The first Fifty-Year Early Bird plaque to be awarded was presented to Charles F. Willard, on May 21, 1960, in Oklahoma City, commemorating Oklahoma's first airplane flight in Oklahoma City in 1910. However, Mr. Willard made his first solo flight on July 30, 1909, at Mineola, Long Island, on the first Curtiss plane called the "Golden Flyer". This was the first commercial aeroplane ever sold and Glenn Curtiss delivered it to the New York Aeronautic Society at their flying field on the old abandoned Morris Park race track in the Bronx, New York City, in 1909. This sale marked the real beginning of the aviation industry. Charles F. Willard was the first person taught to fly by Glenn Curtiss and he became the first barnstormer.

ENP

JUN 1 1960