A Tiny Piece of Airmail History

I have always thought the airmail stamps, especially from its birth in the United States are cool.  The old aircraft depicted, the Zeppelins, etc were all fascinating to this young mind.  However, their prices were all too outrageous for me to be able to collect.

Shown here is a 1928 one I have always wondered about.  I mean, I get the airmail and the plane but what was that tower?  Never knew, never really thought to figure it out, until last week.

My oldest daughter and I decided to drive down to the Mt. Rainer area on Friday to see my sister whom had hopped in for a short visit with my mother.  We stopped a little place called Spiffy's, at the junction of I-5 and Wa-12.  It is a small place, good place to fill up the car and the tummy at the same time.  And, there was a little phamplet called "Have A Good Day" on the table with the image of this stamp series on the cover!  So, I picked it up and learned about the picture on the stamp!  Cool.

It seems that in the 1920's, the US Department of Commerce wanted to establish an airmail route from Salt Lake City, Utah to Los Angles, California.  And if you have ever flown through that region, you know that there is a whole lot of "same" to be viewed.  Yeah, it is mostly flat, mostly desert, mostly a good place to just close your eyes and ignore as you fly over it!

So, the Aeronautics Branch of the DOC was tasked with figuring out how to do this.  In the end, they built markers for the route between these two points.  There was a 70 foot concrete marker set into the ground, over which was built a 51 foot tower with a rotating beacon light on top!  Not a bad idea!  So, any aircraft could easily follow the path between these two cities!  First flight was in 1926.

Unfortunately, I could not find any actual photographs of the towers from when they were standing.  But, you can see from this sketch that there was an arrow pointing the direction to go, a tower with beacon and a shed at the base of it.  I should imagine that the shed either held batteries or a generator of some type to power the beacon.

Of course, with the invention of radar and its refinement during World War II, and the birth of air traffic controllers, such a system was no longer needed.  The beacons were abandoned, the towers and sheds fell into disrepair and eventually just fell.

Today nothing is left of this early aviation history, except for the arrows.  Yeah, concrete last a long time and those 70 foot pads with arrows can still be found in the Utah, Nevada and California deserts!

In this photo, you can clearly see the pad the shed sat on, the pad for the beacon tower and the arrow - show the pilot the way to proceed to find the next arrow.

So from a famous stamp, to a greasy spoon outside of Winlock, Washington - comes a piece of history I never had heard of before...

Have A Good Day is a publication of Tyndale House Publishers, 351 Executive Drive, Carol Stream, IL  60188