MIAD (Miami International Air Depot) Going. Going. Gone.

The area where the Eastern Airlines Engine Overhaul shops were. Slightly right of center was where the plating shop was located

My brother John, has been taking pictures of the demolition of the Eastern Airlines maintenance hangars at MIA. A place where my dad worked for 30 years and my brother over 24. John's last years were spent working in the test cells. Somewhat fitting that it’s the last building to be demolished. Of course the walls the #3 test cell were 3 foot thick reinforced concrete. Don't know what they plan on doing with the space now available but it will never produce the history made on this site from just before WW2 until EAL went under. From DC-3s to the first jets, it all happened here.

I remember the times as a kid I'd get to visit Dad in the plating shop, or see Santa in one of the "Connies" on kid’s day near Christmas. EAL was a family company and many of our neighbors in the housing project where we lived in Hialeah, worked for the different airlines, EAL, PAA, NAL - now all gone. Later on I'd get to visit my brother while he was testing an engine in the test cell. I still marvel at the skill of him and his co-workers, on making sure an engine was ready to go on the line.

So many stories could fill a book or two, on the life and times where these building once stood. The sorrows and joys of ordinary people doing the very best job they could, to make an industry safe and trusted. Some stories are of great ideas made by ordinary people that saved the airlines millions of dollars. Others are of personal tragedy.

I remember one day my father coming home very distraught and on the verge of tears. This was way out of line for a man who had seen a tough life during the depression and definitely not the emotional type. Dad being foreman of the plating shop, was in charge of many of the chemicals used. Including cyanide “eggs” that was part of some plating process. These cyanide eggs were also used in welding, and often times, welders from that shop would come in and get these cyanide eggs for a particular job. You could not handle these eggs with your bare hands, as it would instantly poison you, so it was normally put in a paper cup to be carried back to the welding shop. On this particular day, a good friend of Dad’s who worked in the welding shop came in and ask Dad for a cyanide egg for a job. Something he had done dozens of times before. Dad got a paper cup and using tongs, put in the ‘egg’. Chit chatted with his friend for a minute or two. The man than stepped out of the shop and though the shop windows, Dad watched the man simply walk across the hall to a water cooler, fill the paper cup, and drink. He was dead before he hit the floor.

There were grand triumphs also. I remember my brother and I, carefully polishing our brand new blue 55 Ford station wagon, because Dad was going to meet with EAL CEO Capt. Eddy Rickenbacker at his home on one of the islands in Biscayne Bay. “Capt Eddy” was every ones hero back than. An Ace from WW1, he started Eastern, and was still its hard driving boss whom my Dad loved and honored. On this particular day, Dad was to present to Capt Eddy an idea he had come up with and that the “boss” was interested in. I forget the details now but it had the potential of saving the company thousands of dollars in aircraft tire ware. This particular scheme did not bear fruit, but some years later, Dad came up with a plating idea that saved the industry (not just EAL) tens of million of dollars. Dad never made a nickel off it, but he was modestly proud of it.

Things were tough money wise back than and Dad would make extra money by doing extra work out side of EAL. Dad was an excellent carpenter. He built a 2 car garage behind the house in Hialeah where a number projects were done. One I remember was the mammoth wooden “test clubs”. In the days of piston engines, when they had been overhauled, they were taken to a huge concrete room called a “test cell” to be tested before being put on an airliner. A “test club” was a huge wooden propeller used on the engine for cooling and simplicity. These would sometimes get damaged by loose tools or hoist chains not tied down during testing. They were gigantic! Some ten feet in diameter! Dad’s little green 48 Chevy truck could just barely carry it home. Once home, Dad would very carefully cut out the bad sections of damaged wood. He finished of the surfaces of the cuts so that they were almost glass smooth. He than cut the splice (called a scarf splice) so perfectly that it would just fit into the cut out section. Than using Weldwood plastic resin glue and clamps, when cured, the section would be stronger than original. Now came the shaping. Dad worked very carefully with different planers and draw knifes to get the original airfoil shape, before finishing it off with 8 coats of spar varnish. What he haul from the airport as “junk”, he sold back to the airlines, at a price that made them both happy.

That money lead to Dad’s first dabble in buying land and the infamous “Triple G Ranch” a.k.a. “Goolsby’s Gator Gulch”. But that’s another story for another time.

Hialeah back than was an airline company town. The pilots lived in the up scale area across the river in Miami Springs, but Hialeah was where the rest of us lived. There was the next door neighbor, Joe Canova and his wife Judy. He was a mechanic for PAA. They were a young couple and Joe looked just like a famous actor Cesar Romera. My earliest memory of them was the 1950 hurricane. Both our families had just moved into the new housing project. During the storm we heard screams from Judy as their roof (and than our) was torn off by the high winds. During the lull of the eye, they came over to our house and stayed. Being ‘Yankees” it was their first hurricane and needless to say, a little nervous. Joe worked his way up the PAA latter as a mechanic and than sign up to become a flight engineer. After he had finished training and had checked out, he’d tell me about his trips to far flung shores and adventures there. When I was 12, (1952) I had to do a “career book” for school. I decided to become a Pan American pilot. In this book I was to interview someone in that profession. Joe introduced me to Pan Am Captain O.H. Johnson. Years pass. Joe and Judy get a divorce. Joe bids back to mechanic and moves back to New York. In 1966 as a brand new Pan Am navigator, I run into Joe at Hangar 14 at JFK where he is happy as a lead mechanic. We had come full circle. I have that career book to this day. As amateurish as it looks and reads, I am proud of it. My kids can’t understand how I could have made up my mind as to what I wanted to do back than at that age. And I don’t understand how folks can’t ever seem to make up their mind about anything.

I often wonder what happen to those people who facilitated my dreams. We weren’t close “bosom” friends back than, but they were the ones who were there at those very spots in my life where directions were change. I remember some important advice. As a kid I had a bad nervous habit of biting my finger nails almost to the quick. One day P.L. Plotts, my science teacher and in the Naval Air Reserve out at Master Field, told me that the airlines when looking at prospective pilots, didn’t care for the ‘nervous types that bit their finger nails’. That very minute and for the rest of my life, I quit doing just that.

So now it’s gone, Hialeah has a foreign language and culture. The airlines that made south Florida the gate way to South America, and were the engines of upward standards of living for that generation that won a world war are gone. Eastern Airlines, National Airlines, Pan American, and Braniff. They are gone forever and many who work at the airport today, were not even born when these airlines ruled the skies. They don’t even realizes, they are standing on the graves of thousands, who made the industry.

The folks responsible for the demise of these great airlines and the torn lives of the men and women that put so much into their jobs, still are out there with heaps of praise and allocates next to their names. The likes of Borman, Swell. Lorenzo, Acker and the Union Chiefs; truth is they did a lousy job and in the end are not worth a pile of shit.

So take a last look at Eastern Airlines Test Cell Number 3.

And “remember for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”