September 5, 1949: Bill Odom's P-51 took a wrong turn and ended an era
For twenty years, Cleveland was the unquestioned center of American aviation. The National Air Races came to Cleveland Municipal Airport (now KCLE Hopkins) in 1929 and stayed — through 1939 and again 1946–1949 — as 100,000 people a day filled the grandstands and the world's top aviators competed for the Thompson Trophy on a 10-mile pylon course. Jimmy Doolittle won the Bendix and Thompson in 1932 in a Gee Bee Model R-1 he later called the most dangerous airplane he ever flew. Roscoe Turner became a household name. Amelia Earhart organized the inaugural Women's Air Derby and presided over the founding of the Ninety-Nines. Then came Labor Day, September 5, 1949. Bill Odom was flying "Beguine," a modified P-51 Mustang owned by Jacqueline Cochran, in the Thompson Trophy race. He took the wrong line on a pylon turn, tried to overcorrect, and went into a nosedive over the Cleveland suburb of Berea. The Mustang struck a house. Odom died, along with a young mother and her infant son inside. The races never returned to Cleveland. Closed-course pylon racing in America went dormant until the Reno Air Races started in 1964. Burke Lakefront Airport, by then two years old on Lake Erie landfill, became the new home of Cleveland's aviation tradition — the Cleveland National Air Show debuted at Burke in 1964 and has filled the lakefront every Labor Day since. Today when you fly the approach over Lake Erie with downtown Cleveland rising in front of you and the Blue Angels overhead, you're landing at the heir to one of the most storied airports in American aviation.