Arnold Palmer was nine years old when the world's first official airmail pickup happened at his hometown field; he learned to fly off the same runway
A Pirep featured story · KLBE Arnold Palmer Regional, Latrobe, PA
The field opened as Longview Flying Field in 1924, outside the western Pennsylvania town that would become famous for Rolling Rock beer and Arnold Palmer. On May 12, 1939, it hosted the world's first official airmail Air Pick Up; Palmer, nine years old and growing up less than a mile from the runway, watched it happen.
The pickup apparatus was the invention of Dr. Lytle Adams, a dentist and part-time inventor who developed it with help from Boeing engineers and then quit dentistry to promote it; All American Aviation of Pittsburgh flew the service. Small towns could never justify a regular airline stop, so the system let an airplane take the mail without landing: a transfer line slung between two poles, a Stinson Reliant trailing a hook and boom, the sack snagged and winched up through the fuselage while the airplane flew on. For the next decade, the red Stinsons worked routes across the Northeast, serving towns no airline would ever land in.
Palmer learned to fly off the same runway. He flew his own airplanes out of Latrobe for the rest of his life, decades of Lears and Citations, and the field was renamed Arnold Palmer Regional Airport on his 70th birthday in 1999. He died in 2016; the statue out front holds a golf club.
All American Aviation left the pickup business after its decade and became, through several name changes, US Airways; in 2013 US Airways merged into American Airlines. The mail catch a nine-year-old watched beside a Latrobe runway was, by corporate succession, a founding moment of one of the country's biggest airlines.