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.