Just try to resist this memory-tugging aerial photograph of York Whitehull Airport and York Valley Inn and Playland and …
This photograph from a mid-20th-century York (Pa.) Chamber of Commerce publication shows popular landmarks of that day. In the lower right part of the photo, that’s what is known today as the Playland pool beside the roller skating rink. Both are gone. That’s York Valley Inn, long since dismantled and moved to Susquehanna Memorial Gardens, across the Lincoln Highway from the pool. And surrounding the inn is the York Valley Airways, later York Whitehull Airport. The old Valley Canvas building, then part of the airport, stands today. The airport land is now occupied by the old York Mall, now Wal-Mart. Also of interest: First York Airport’s administration building stands today and Just try to resist studying this memory-tugging photograph and U.S. 30 Drag-O-Way, Part III: ‘We would watch the dragsters on trailers head for Thomasville’.
Gerald A. Young, 76, considers the time he spent around the York Whitehull Airport as a youth as a fun but important time for him.
George Whiteley III – of the Dentsply Whiteley’s – flew out of the East Market Street airport.
“George was a great influence on me,” he said in a recent phone conversation… .
Gerald called after reading about York’s airports in my York Sunday News column.
According to John F.M. Wolfe’s “Profile of Aviation,” Whiteley and Earle Hull contributed their names to the York Whitehull Airport, successor of Valley Airways in Springettsbury Township. The airport operated under both names from 1944 to 1952.
Hull also befriended young Gerald Young.
Hull was a stunt pilot, and Young pestered him to ride along when he did spins, loops and rolls.
Hull took him up with the provision, “You’re not going to get sick in my plane.”
Young agreed, knowing that he would have to clean up such a mess.
As Hull maneuvered his plane, he told Gerald, “Keep it in, red head.”
Gerald did, but he remembered that experience 60 years later.
“From the ground, it looked great.”
Other posts with aerial views:
– Just try to resist studying this memory-tugging photograph
– Just try to resist studying this memory-tugging Sears photograph, Part II
– Just try to resist this memory-tugging photo of North York’s White Oak Park
– Just try to resist this memory-tugging aerial photograph of York Whitehull Airport and York Valley Inn and Playland and …
– So, can you find long-gone Springwood Park in this aerial photograph?
– Camp Security area of Springettsbury Township from the air
– Columbia-Wrightsville Susquehanna River bridges from the air.
– Just try to resist this memory-tugging photograph of northwest York, Pa.
“The Record of the York Chamber of Commerce in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” the source of the photograph for this post, courtesy of Joe Stein.
