Maude Tait, who was born in Chicopee,
Massachusetts, in 1901, once beat Amelia Earhart in an airspeed race. She was
one of the most successful and prominent pilots in a time when the word aviatrix called to mind a dashing figure
in slacks climbing into an open cockpit of a wooden biplane, wearing a leather
flying helmet, goggles, a long white silk scarf, and a smile as big as the sky.
She was courageous, she was intelligent, and she was professional. An aviatrix
had to be all these things to be successful.
Her father, James Tait, grew up on his parents’
farm on Chicopee Street. He and his three brothers eventually became very
successful when they took over the farm in adulthood and established a dairy
distribution business and also became a manufacturer of ice cream. They owned property in Springfield, and also in Agawam. They owned dairy farms and milk
processing plants, and their sales territory spread out across New England and
New York. Some of their milk and ice cream products were used on the White Star
and Cunard steamship lines.
By the 1920s they employed over 500
people. However, in an interesting and perhaps, inexplicable to us, turn of
events, the Tait brothers sold their business in 1928 in order to launch
themselves into a new industry: the young and vibrant and promising aviation
field. A farm in Springfield between Liberty Street and St. James Avenue became
their launch pad for an adventurous new endeavor. They established the
Springfield Airport with the intention of making Springfield an important
aviation center, a hub in New England flight and manufacture of this new mode
of transport.
Air travel was not yet common; indeed,
only the very brave would risk their lives strapping on a parachute and hopping
into one of the wooden crates. But visionaries, like the Tait brothers, foresaw
a day when air travel would be a popular mode of transportation, perhaps even
surpassing trains. Travel by automobile was not yet even considered a rival,
because most roads in the U.S. were still poorly kept or even unpaved. A car
trip across the country in those days before interstate highways or even paved
roads, was at best inconvenient and at worst, dangerous.
The Tait brothers found another band of
brothers to join in their new enterprise: the five Granville brothers.
Originally from New Hampshire, the brothers Zantford, Robert, Mark, Tom, and
Ed, were largely self-taught mechanics who, with the lauded Yankee ingenuity of
the time, fashioned themselves into aircraft mechanics, designers, and even
pilots; they wanted to set up a plant to produce their famous design of Gee Bee
racing planes. “Gee Bee” or GB stood for the initials of Granville Brothers.
Zantford, the oldest, was the leader of the group. But there was another notable
member of their band, and she was the daughter of James Tait: Maude.
Maude attended Springfield’s McDuffie
School for Girls among other seminaries, and began a career as a schoolteacher
in a one-room schoolhouse in the town of Hamden, and also in East Longmeadow.
She taught school until 1928 when her father and the Granville brothers set up
shop on the old farm that was now the Springfield Airport. She had taken flying
lessons in 1927 from Roscoe Brinton of the Curtiss Flying Service. Brinton
would team up with another associate of the Granville Brothers, Lowell Bayles,
to form a new flying service in Springfield. By 1928, when the Taits’ and the Granville
brothers’ new enterprise “got off the ground,” she had achieved her pilot’s
license as well as gaining a commercial pilot’s license. She was the first
female to become a licensed pilot in Massachusetts and Connecticut to fly solo.
In 1929 she set an unofficial altitude record for women at a height of 16,500
feet. An era of stunts and personalities, she flew an airplane over a football field and dropped the football from her cockpit for
the kickoff at the Silvertown professional football season opener.
Two years later she would break Amelia Earhart’s
speed record at 214.9 mph in her Gee Bee Sportster.
Maude Tait with Gee Bee Model Z
The Granville Brothers planes were built
for speed and they used designs that were far ahead of any other plane of their
time. Indeed, planes flown by the military in their fledgling air services were
slower than the Granville Brothers planes. The distinctive snub-nosed Gee Bee
some called a flying engine, and indeed was far advance of the skills of most
pilots of the day.
The pinnacle of this happy band of
pilots, designers, mechanics, and their Tait investment backers, and the
adventurous Tait daughter, was the 1931 Cleveland Air Races.
Bob Hall was their chief designer; he and
Lowell Bayles, and Zantford Granville, and Maude Tait, swept the championships
in the week-long flying events. In those golden days around Labor Day 1931,
Springfield was the capital city of aviation and the sky was the limit. Maude Tait
for her part, won the Aerol Trophy race for women. She set a new record in the
Gee Bee Model Y Sportster—and beat Amelia Earhart’s record by 10 mph. She
missed hitting the men’s existing record only by 1 mph.
That was the high point. Unfortunately,
the worst years of the Great Depression now set upon the country, and for those
with dreams of starting a new business or expanding industry, it was extremely
difficult to set plans in motion, or even to meet payroll. The Granville
brothers engaged in these airspeed races not only for the prestige and the
publicity to interest buyers for their planes and backers for their
manufacture, but they needed the prize money just to keep things going.
It wasn’t enough. By 1934, the Granville
Brothers closed shop and the Springfield Airport though it continued for still
many more years, would eventually be replaced by a shopping plaza in 1959.
Aircraft industry went elsewhere, and the plot of land, with its air strips of
dirt and grass, was never big enough to accommodate the larger planes of the
future, especially as it was hemmed in by residential neighborhoods on all
sides.
A Gee Bee model returns for display at the Springfield Plaza, 1982, photo by J. T. Lynch
A Gee Bee model returns for display at the Springfield Plaza, 1982, photo by J. T. Lynch
Maude Tait married attorney James
Moriarty in 1932. She had plans to participate in the 1932 National Air Races
but mechanical difficulties sidelined her plane. That was the end of her
competitive flying career. She would occasionally be seen flying her Gee Bee
over the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts through the decade of the
1940s, but otherwise lived a quiet and private life. She died in Springfield in
1982, at 81 years of age.
We might wonder why the dream and the
excitement of flying was so quickly extinguished, but the Great Depression had
its chokehold on most people, and very few were able to continue their dreams
in that desperate era. There was another reason, however, and it was even sadder,
and more tragic, for two of her pals in that tight-knit Springfield Airport
gang died in their Gee Bee planes. Only a few months after the glorious 1931
Cleveland Air Races, their friend and partner Lowell Bayles flew one of the Gee
Bee planes to Detroit, Michigan, in an attempt to establish a world speed
record. It was December, and he flew the Model Z Super Sportster. Lowell Bayles
was clocked at 314 mph, breaking a record; but on the return run, he crashed.
A few years later, in 1934 Zantford
Granville also met his death in one of their Gee Bee planes. We might well
imagine that the venture collapsed because the money was gone, but we can well
imagine, too, that the heart and soul of the enterprise was gone as well with
the deaths of Bayles and Zantford Granville.
On that glorious day in 1931 when the
Springfield Airport gang flew home after their streak of victories at the
Cleveland Air Races, the scene occurred which still lives in the memories of
the lucky remaining few who were there. For five days, the feats they achieved
at the Cleveland Air Races were splashed all over the headlines of the
Springfield newspapers. When it was time for them to come home, a crowd of over
100,000 mobbed the Springfield Airport to watch their heroes fly home. They
flew home to a dirt and grass field, with that old ramshackle hangar that had
used to be a dance hall, flying the fastest planes in the world.
They came in, one by one, first it was
Lowell Bayles flying the plane christened the City of Springfield. An announcer called their names over a
loudspeaker and the crowd cheered. Next it was Maude Tait in the red and white
Senior Sportster, followed by Bob Hall, and finally, Zantford Granville. When
Maude landed, cheers erupted, and people in cars parked on the edge of the
field sounded their horns. Maude’s parents ran up to her taxiing plane and
everybody rushed it, and she was handed a bouquet of flowers. There was a band
and they were taken in a parade down Liberty Street down to City Hall. That
evening there was a banquet at the Hotel Kimball. It was the high point of
Springfield aviation in a time when people needed something to cheer about.
