For two decades the National Air Races made Cleveland their September home. Lindbergh, Doolittle, and Earhart all flew in. On Labor Day 1949, a P-51 named Beguine cut a pylon too tight, rolled inverted, and dove into a house in Berea.
A Pirep featured story · KCLE Cleveland Hopkins International, Cleveland, OH
Cleveland Municipal Airport opened on July 1, 1925, on 1,040 acres bought by city manager William R. Hopkins with $1.25 million in bond money. One hundred thousand people came to the opening, watched night airmail planes land under searchlights, and heard speeches about Cleveland's future. The airport was the first municipally owned commercial field in the country. Over the next five years it added the first air traffic control tower (1929), the first radio-equipped tower (1930), and the first full-airfield runway lighting system (1930).
In August 1929, the National Air Races came to Cleveland for the first time. Over the next two decades the races made Cleveland their home more than anywhere else, twelve stagings in all, drawing Charles Lindbergh, Jimmy Doolittle, Roscoe Turner, and Amelia Earhart. The Thompson Trophy for closed-course pylon racing and the Bendix Trophy for cross-country dashes became the most prestigious aviation contests in America, and in a Cleveland September the airport was the center of the American aviation calendar.
The races resumed in 1946 after the war and ran four more years. In 1949, Bill Odom, a 29-year-old famous for long-distance records (he had flown around the world in under 79 hours in 1947), persuaded Jackie Cochran to buy him a radically modified P-51C called Beguine, its name from the Cole Porter song, the sheet music painted in gold down the fuselage. Odom had never flown a pylon race in his life; on Saturday, September 3, he entered the Sohio Trophy and won it. Two days later, on Labor Day, he started the Thompson and took the lead. On the second lap he cut inside the third pylon, corrected too hard, rolled inverted, and went into a house at 429 West Street in Berea, killing himself, Jeanne Laird, and her infant son Craig.
Berea and the surrounding suburbs barred pylon racing from their airspace within weeks. The 1949 race was the last ever held in Cleveland; the National Air Races went dark and were not revived until Reno, Nevada, in 1964. The airport that had hosted the greatest pilots in America was renamed two years later for William R. Hopkins, on his 82nd birthday.