Why the Thunderbird School of Global Management isn't on Thunderbird Road, Glendale, Arizona


The Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona, is on 59th Avenue and Greenway Road, which is a mile north of Thunderbird Road. If you ever wondered why, all you have to do is to do some time-traveling.

Let's go back to Glendale in 1940. Now let's go waaaaayyy north of Glendale, out into the middle of a bunch of empty desert. We're standing in the middle of a square mile bounded nowadays by Thunderbird Road, Greenway, 59th Avenue and 51st, and it's been dedicated as Thunderbird Field. No, not because of Thunderbird Road, it was just because it was a cool name. Really. And the main buildings, which were at the northwest corner of the field, were designed to look like a Thunderbird from the air. You can still see it, although a lot of other buildings have been added. Take a look at Satellite view and you'll see it. The Thunderbird is flying towards the northwest.

Flying over Thunderbird Field in 1942. You're looking northwest.

Thunderbird Field in the 1940s. You're looking southwest.



Inscription on the plaque at the top of this post:

"The last of the Helmet and Goggles.

Thunderbird Pilots Memorial.

This memorial is a symbol of man’s love for his flying machine and fond remembrances of the fellow pilots who shared in the joy of mastering the Stearman PT-17. I stands as the mark they leave on the grounds of Thunderbird.

No longer do these men wear a helmet & googles, or stand on the lower wing of a biplane, or strap themselves into an open cockpit, or feel the blast of the prop on their face or breathe the burning exhaust of aviation gas. They were the last of this era of aviation history.

An executive order committed the United States to build 50,000 planes and to train 100,000 pilots for war. The response to the training was answered by the civil aviation community, resulting in clearing a square mile of desert land to be know as Thunderbird Field, where flying began in 1941, ending with the war’s end in 1945.

The students were military cadets. The airplanes were military PT-17s. The instructors, known as the Thunderbird Pilots, were civilians, flying more than one million hours to train over 16,000 cadets from the United States, Great Britain, and China."
If you liked this article, and would like to see more, please consider supporting history adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! You make this happen!

Click here to become a Patron!
History adventuring posts are shared there daily including "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona. Discounts for seniors, students, teachers, and veterans.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more