History fans plan Albany hangar restoration

Local historians are developing a plan for a city-owned hangar where, they hope, Albany elected officials will see more value in a regional museum than the potential income pulled off of renters storing airplanes between flights.

Debra Plymate stood with some friends in the 95-year-old hangar in early May and talked about the literal, descriptive signs visible from the air — aviation marks showing a north-south route over the Willamette Valley.

Plymate is based out of Independence, where her Oregon Department of Aviation official father helped build the state airport where she lives with a runway on one side of her house and a highway on the other.

“We have a plane in the hangar, and a car in the garage,” Plymate said.

She’s an avid aviator, a flight instructor and a member of fraternal organizations that promote pilots who are women. Plymate wore a windbreaker covered in silhouetted aircraft, place names, all stitched and embroidered in shiny thread on aviation-related patches.

In an industry that’s barely 120 years old, Plymate is a close proxy to some of those who helped build up Oregon aviation.

Plymate talked about a flight plan made with a student in early May that would take her aircraft over a broad, rusted metal roof in Tangent where markings in faded white paint direct flyers north to Albany.

Debbie Origer began researching the hangar after hearing a presentation about Evelyn Burleson, who ran a flight school out of Albany and managed general aviation as the airport’s fixed-base operator in the late 1930s.

Origer said she’s passionate about the hangar as a catchment for the stories of women in mid-Willamette Valley aviation.

Clearly so was Burleson, who actually lived in the hangar for a few years.

“So we have a special connection there,” Origer said.

To people who know her story, Burleson’s figure soared over the Albany region. She wrote about her adventures in a column — Wings Over Willamette — for the Albany Democrat-Herald.

She trained everyday folks to fly in the Civil Pilot Training Program, part of the nationwide effort to build up skills and technology and stockpiles of weapons ahead of United States war against Axis forces in the South Pacific and Europe.

In October 1941, Burleson flew an overwing Taylorcraft monoprop plane from Canada to Mexico — more than 1,500 miles nonstop in an aircraft not built for the trip.

Photos in the museum on May 6 showed Burleson in the cockpit of the tiny tube steel and linen-skinned aircraft exhausted and laughing just after the flight, the passenger seat behind her occupied by a large aftermarket fuel tank.

Just two months later, the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu.

Origer couldn’t recall which of the markings were scrubbed from the flight line at the public airport and the surrounding roofs in response. Was it the compass rose? The numbers indicating which runway?

“I think it was the air markings,” Plymate said. “I don’t think the compass rose would have been the threat to security that air markings were.”

Photos from the air show the Albany hangar by itself in an unpaved field. Looking west, Waverly Lake is visible in the background and not much of anything else.

Other buildings crop up later, sometime between the photos showing groups of smiling cadets and flying clubs. Grass fields disappear and neighborhoods of houses and the buildings of Kohl’s and Costo appear over the decades, hemming the air strip in.

At some point in the 1950s, airport operators picked up and moved the hangar east, closer to the present-day flightline, to make room for Interstate 5.

Now some are trying to find a home for the photos, documents and airframes that delineate Albany’s aviation story.

The hangar today serves general aviation. Renters can lease space from the city of Albany.

At a presentation on May 8, Origer was among others who pitched another use for the hangar: Allow it to remain a working aviation space, but as a public venue rather than a source of rent from plane storage.

Origer and Plymate are with a women’s flying club founded in 1929. The same year operators built Albany’s hangar, and around the same time Oregon formally commissioned Albany Municipal Airport.

The story goes Amelia Earhart and 98 of her friends formed the Ninety-Nines in 1928. They were barnstormers and freight haulers who flew 50-horsepower aircraft.

An executive at New York-based Tiffany & Co. designed the group’s badge, a pin bearing interlocking numerals 99.

Edith Foltz, the first woman to hold a high-ranking state leader position in the National Aeronautic Association, helped found Oregon chapters of the aviation club including a Portland-based chapter.

Organizers called the chapter encapsulating the rest of the Willamette Valley the Oregon Pines Ninety-Nines.

That group will host the Northwest region of the club in 2029, when both the Ninety-Nines and hangar turn 100.

Mark Baxter didn’t have to travel far from his home base of Corvallis to make the Albany open house in early May.

He looked through the open hangar door to the flightline, where an underwing aircraft was touching down. Baxter described the wheat field where a 12-year-old Charles Langmack put down a biplane, the first use of what would become Albany’s airport.

“Right there, where that plane landed,” Baxter said. “Langmack taught himself to fly. And that’s incredible to me.”

Langmack and his brothers taught others to fly at Albany Municipal.

By the time the state formally recognized the airfield, Langmack may have been the first formally recognized pilot in Oregon.

“Let’s put it this way — his pilot’s license was signed by Orville Wright,” Baxter said.

Baxter describes himself as a history nut. He’s on the board of the Oregon Aviation Historical Society.

He flies a 1941 Taylorcraft he restored, similar to the 1940 plane that Burleson used in her nonstop international flight.

Baxter is restoring another 1940 Taylorcraft, just a few serial numbers removed from Burleson’s that was destroyed in a fatal crash in the mid-20th century.

As he turned his eye from other efforts elsewhere in the state, he found Albany was central in Oregon’s early aviation scene. That uncontrolled, unpaved strip in a farmer’s field likely is the oldest continuously used airport in Oregon.

“I’ve lived here all my life and how did I never know this,” Baxter said.

Baxter said preservationists are trying to get a nonprofit started that could receive funding through Oregon’s State Historic Preservation Office. The office is aware of the efforts. So is Albany’s City Council.

It’s too early to say, but another organization like Albany Regional Museum could annex the hangar.

The airport was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. And the hangar and 59ish acres under it are one of Albany’s four historic districts.

A sign names the field Historic Albany Municipal. But otherwise, there isn’t a lot of public invitation to interact with the space.

“I don’t think they really get the history that’s here,” Baxter said.