In 1932 Ripley's told the country that the birthplace of aviation had no airport. James M. Cox and an old running mate in the White House fixed it in seven months.
A Pirep featured story · KDAY James M. Cox Dayton International, Dayton, OH
In 1932 Robert Ripley's syndicated Believe It or Not cartoon told newspaper readers across the country that Dayton, Ohio, the birthplace of aviation, had no airport. The barb had teeth. The field ten miles north of downtown near Vandalia had been founded in March 1928 as Dayton Airport, Inc. by a consortium of local industrialists; E.G. Beichler of Frigidaire, Frederick Patterson of National Cash Register, and Charles Kettering, General Motors' research chief, all put their names on it. The Depression bankrupted the company, the runways were still grass, and the new generation of all-metal airliners needed pavement. Dayton was about to be passed over by the national airline network.
The man who answered was James M. Cox: three-term Ohio governor, publisher of the Dayton Daily News, and the Democratic nominee for president in 1920. His running mate that year had been a 38-year-old New Yorker serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By 1936 Roosevelt was in the White House, and Cox worked the connection in the right order: first he secured assurances in Washington that if the City of Dayton owned the field, Works Progress Administration money would follow. Then he went after the purchase price. In February 1936 he called the region's businessmen to a Saturday luncheon at Dayton's Biltmore Hotel, Edward Deeds and Beichler beside him, and by April 29 the committee, with money from as far out as Middletown, Piqua, and Troy, had reached the $65,000 goal. They bought the airport and sold it to the City of Dayton for one dollar.
The WPA sent nearly $750,000, and the deadline was not negotiable: December 17, 1936, thirty-three years to the day after Wilbur and Orville left the sand at Kitty Hawk. Nearly five hundred men spent the next seven months pouring 150,000 square yards of concrete. Three 3,600-foot runways and their connecting taxiways were finished on schedule, and the dedication ceremony opened Dayton Municipal Airport on the anniversary itself.
The city added Cox's name to the field in 1952. Today it flies as James M. Cox Dayton International, the runways lengthened many times over; what began as a syndicated insult ended as a municipal airport, delivered by two old running mates to the city the Wright brothers came from.