Museum to remember local daredevil pilot on National Aviation Day

MARENGO — The Iowa County Historical Society will celebrate the 85th anniversary of National Aviation Day with its 2024 Summer Lecture “Eugene Ely: Iowa’s Daredevil Aviation Pioneer.”

The lecture, by historian David V. Wendell, will begin at 2 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 18 at the Historical Society’s Pioneer Heritage Museum, 675 South Street in Marengo.

President Franklin Roosevelt signed Presidential Proclamation 2238 declaring Aug. 19 in 1939, and in every year thereafter, National Aviation Day, in remembrance of the birth of Orville Wright in 1871.

Iowa maintains a strong aeronautical heritage with the Wright Brothers, according to Wendell. They spent much of their childhood in Cedar Rapids where their father introduced them to the intrigue of flight by presenting them with a Penaud Flyer that spun, by rubber band, into the sky, teaching the fundamentals of aerial physics.

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In 1903, the Wright brothers designed and built the Wright Flyer in 1903, the first manned heavier-than-air plane to achieve sustained controlled flight.

A year later, after graduating in engineering from what is today Iowa State University, Eugene Ely, of Williamsburg, began earning a reputation as a speed demon, racing motorcycles at tracks and off road in the Midwest, according to Wendell.

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Not content with speed on the ground, Ely taught himself how to fly in a Curtiss Pusher biplane. Less than a year later, in 1910, he became the first person to land a plane on an aircraft carrier.

Three months after that, Ely become the first pilot to ever take off from a ship at sea, taking off from a platform built over the bow of the USS Birmingham in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

Ely died in October of that same year in an airplane crash in Macon, Georgia. Nevertheless, in his short 24-year life span, Ely proved the value of Naval aviation and charted the path for today’s nuclear powered aircraft carrier fleet.

Wendell maintains the world’s largest collection of hand carved and painted model aircraft signed by pilots and aviators from World War I to present times, he says.

His model of the Curtiss Pusher, which is the type of plane flown by Ely on and off the aircraft carrier, as well as a detailed scale replica of the Wright Flyer, is centerpiece of an exhibit honoring Iowa County’s aviation legacy currently on display at the Pioneer Museum in Marengo.

Decorated pilots and aviators of the nation at wartime, including fighter pilot and Ace Francis Dubisher and B-24 bomber navigator Burns Byram, will also be honored in recognition of the 80th anniversary of their heroic flights in World War II.

The lecture and admission to the Pioneer Heritage Museum Complex is free. Contact (319) 642-7018 for more information.