Extraordinary story of ACU’s Historic Campus
Eighty-five years ago, this August, a famous talent agent and an exceptional test pilot were having dinner in Los Angeles. In the 1930s, flying was less than 40 years old, but it was all the rage in Hollywood. Their dinner conversation led them to buying a small flight school at a remote airport called Sky Harbor in Phoenix. But Leland Hayward and Jack Connelly had something bigger in mind – an application to the US Army Air Corps (USAAC) to build a civilian primary pilot training field.1
War was already being fought in Asia and in Europe, and the US Air Corps was only turning out 300 pilots a year. The anticipated need for training new pilots was great (the demand eventually hit 70,000 in 1943). USAAC General Henry “Hap” Arnold began recruiting the best civilian flight school owners to build primary flight training schools across the US, not only for US soldiers, but international military pilots too. The hitch? Current US Congressional policy was neutrality, and no government funding was available.2 Being an agent and producer, Hayward turned to where the money was – his clients and industry colleagues. Actors Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, Robert Taylor, Janet Gaynor, songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, and various other actors, directors, and producers, all donated to building on land bought in Glendale, Arizona.
One famous donor was the 1941 Best Actor Oscar winner, Jimmy Stewart. Hooked on flying since he was a kid in Pennsylvania, Stewart was sworn into the USAAC as a private in 1941, commanded a B-24 squadron in Europe, eventually becoming Brigadier General Stewart in the reserves after the war. Although he never trained on the newly named Thunderbird Field, he was a big supporter of those flight cadets – both during and after the war. He later said “I just felt that the war would inevitably involve America and it was important to prepare places where the Air Force could train pilots…The profit was in what the facility achieved, which was the training of thousands of pilots… It was a valuable enterprise, and I was proud to be a part of it.”3
Watch for next month’s “Flash Back” for the continuing story of Thunderbird Field.
1. Judd Minter. “Operations Begin” Thunderbird .Vol. 1 No 1, March 1943.
2. H. H. Arnold. Global Mission. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949.
3. Michael Munn. Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013.
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