Octave Chanute, the so-called Father of Aviation, lived from 1832 to 1910. He got his start as a civil engineer working for railroad companies in Illinois. He designed several bridges and stockyards around the Midwest. After his retirement in the 1890s, he began experimenting with gliders. Sometime around 1900 a young bicycle salesman from North Carolina wrote him asking for advice. Wilbur Wright used some of the design elements Chanute developed, including trussing and the biplane form. Chanute visited the Wright brothers to watch and advise them on some of their early flight experiments.
Wilbur later said of Chanute: "If he had not lived, the entire history of progress in flying would have been other than it has been."
Seven years after Chanute's death, a fledgeling branch of the Army Signal Corps, known as the Army Air Service, established an installation in Central Illinois known as Rantoul Aviation Field. Located in Rantoul due to the proximity of the Illinois Central Railroad and the War Department ground school at the University of Illinois, Rantoul Aviation Field soon received a new moniker: Chanute Field. This small field was fated to become the one of the US military's preeminent technical training facilies.
In 1919, the airfield closed, utilized only as a dumping ground for surplus war material, but in 1921 the Army reopened the field as a technical training facility. Around this time (1926), the tiny Army Air Service became the Army Air Corps. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Army Air Corps became the US Army Air Forces (1941). Chanute Field provided training to thousands of recruits during World War II, young airmen who looked much like the two in the pictures below:
The US War Department authorized, in 1941, the formation of a black air squadron. Almost three hundred recruits reported for duty at Chanute Field. After receiving technical training there, they transferred to Alabama for flight school. History knows them as the Tuskegee Airmen.
Chanute served as the primary training site during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Here are Vietnam-era Air Force Uniforms (the Army Air Forces became the independent branch known as the Air Force in 1947):
My dad trained at Chanute during a cold winter in 1963. He slept in the original wooden barracks built after World War I. He said he would wake in the mornings to find his blanket covered in snow that had blown in through holes in the walls. In the 1970s, they tore down those barracks and replaced them with dorm-style brick buildings.
This display replicates the bunks where Dad slept:
Illinois winters did not prove very hospitable to a Gulf Coast boy. Dad said he would smoke a cigarette and stare wistfully at US Route 45, the border-to-border highway that runs through Rantoul, Urbana, Champaign, and ends in Mobile. Here's a picture of Route 45 and the Illinois Central Railroad (Remember the folk song that goes, "riding on the City of New Orleans..." The City of New Orleans was a nightly passenger train that operated on the Illinois Central).
During the 60s, Chanute became the primary training center for the Minuteman program. Nukes! The museum still has some of the training silos on display:
And here's a missile, the Minuteman LGM-30A. L means silo-launched, G means ground-targeted, and M means guided missile. This rocket carried a W56 warhead with a 1.2 megaton yield (that's 100 times the size of the Hiroshima blast):
The War Department recommended Chanute for closure in 1988 and officially deactivated the base in 1993.
The Air Museum opened the next year and contains several exibits with hundres of pictures and artifacts from Chanute's long history, including over 40 preserved aircraft and aircraft maintenance vehicles.
Here's little Josephine next to a EC-121 Warning Star, a surveillence and radar plane used during the Vietnam War, a forerunner of the modern AWACS. See the seagull decals next to the cockpit window?
According to the Internets, the former Air Force base has seen a successful transition to civilian use. Driving around the base, the word successful seems a bit ambitious. Rantoul Products uses two of the hangars to manufacture parts for Jeep Wrangler and Dodge and other buildings are used as a motel, a restaurant, and the most depressing retirement home I've ever seen. Most of the former fancy-schmancy (see also Greek Revival) officers' homes are now privately owned. Lincoln's Challenge Academy, a school for at-risk youth operates in multiple buildings on the former base.
That said, many of Chanute's old buildings looked abandoned and in disrepair, grass growing in the parking lots. Here are some buldings around the base:
And your Parting Shot. A copy of an Application to Date a Soldier. Questions include: Do you cook? Do you make whoopie? Are you married? If so, does your husband travel?
Very interesting! I bet Dad will want to go see this again..... as a civilian, of course! :)
ReplyDeleteThe old man retired as a Chief MSGT and he and my mother spent the remainder of their lives in this freezing, hostile burg. Of course, once Uncle left, the locals were in mourning. No Mamma, No Poppa, No Uncle Air Force.
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