Life was anything but easy growing up on Cutler Street during the early 1940s. At the time, the bustling street in Schenectady’s Mont Pleasant neighborhood was crowded with low-income and immigrant families. Poverty was common, and there was seldom time to do anything but work.
Rocket bombs, Corsair airplanes, stars of aviation and speeches — they were all part of the General Electric Co’s Air Research Show on June 21 and 22, 1946.
“Timed to the lightning-like arrival of three jet-powered P-80 Shooting Stars, firing of the bombs at the signal of General Electric’s President Charles E. Wilson will officially begin dedication ceremonies of the company’s new flight test center,” read the Schenectady Gazette. Posted on June 22, 2009.
Above: The smiling man in the cockpit of the Bell Aircraft P-59 Airacomet “Mystic Mistress” is J. Lawrence Murray. Murray was the Gazette’s aviation editor in 1946, and took a 500-mph test flight on the “comet” on June 20, 1946 — before the opening of the GE Air Research Show. Murray later became a high-ranking official for the State University of New York at Albany. He died in 2004.
Among the VIPs at the show were, from left, Chester H. Lang, GE vice president; H.F. Guggenheim, chairman of the New York City Airport Authority; Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle, an aviation hero from World War II; and Roy C. Muir, GE vice president.
David C. Prince, General Electric's vice president in charge of general engineering, talks with Igor I. Sikorsky during GE’s Air Research Show in June 1946. Sikorsky was manager of the Sikorsky Aircraft Division of the United Aircraft Corp.
Above: Navy airplanes were on display during the GE Air Research Show at the Schenectady County Airport in June 1946. Corsairs stand in the foreground; Tigercats are in the rear.
