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158.1

RUSSELL HOLDERMAN
Early Pilot and Flying Instructor
1895-1981

Russel Holderman was born in 1895. From about the age of eight, "I was a nut on aviation," Mr. Holderman is quoted in the book Getting Off the Ground by George Vecsey and George C. Dade.

The family moved from Buffalo, New York, to the Bronx around 1908. Holderman's father was in the construction business and work was more plentiful in New York City than in the northern part of the state. As a boy young Russell traveled by elevated train and bus to Belmont Park, Long Island, New York, where he could be near his heroes, the aviation greats of that time--the Wright brothers, Hamilton, Curtiss, Moisant and Grahame-White.

At age fifteen he attempted his first flight in a homemade glider. In 1910, on the corner of 177th Street and Third Avenue in the Bronx, there was a hill leading down to a baseball diamond. At this spot young Russell suffered the only injury he ever received in flying--a broken collarbone and two broken ribs. He first soloed successfully in a glider at Obert Heights in Staten Island, New York, July 1912. (About this time, Holderman's parents bought him a motorcycle, hoping that it would replace ideas of flying. Instead he became a speed and stunt rider!)

Russell Holderman had his first flight in a powered airplane in 1911 when his father paid George Beatty $10.00 to take the boy up for a ride. After that experience there was no stopping Russell's enthusiasm, and his father asked Fred Schneider, a builder of airplanes who later ran a flying school, to give the boy lessons. Russell Holderman's