In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, and of the opening of The International Civil Rights Museum, the North Carolina Collection shares this document from its collection.
Day: February 2, 2010
This Month in NC – Piedmont Airlines’ First Passenger Flight, February 1948
Take flight into our most recent installment of This Month in North Carolina, which discusses the origins of Piedmont Airlines in Winston-Salem, NC. Tobacco and aviation are linked more closely than I’d ever imagined!
Piedmont Airlines’ inaugural passenger flight took place on Friday, February 20, 1948 at around 7 a.m. It left Wilmington, made several stops along the way to Cincinnati, OH, and then made the return trip home.
The photo above is from the Hugh Morton Collection of Photographs and Film, and shows two of Pidemont Airlines’ DC-3s parked in a WWII hangar they were using as a base. The photo is dated to ca. 1948, the same year as their first passenger flight.
Homefront fashion: pajamas suitable for flying
“I hope when I wear them that I do not start counting ten and jump!”
— President Franklin D. Roosevelt, writing on Feb. 2, 1943, to thank N.C. Gov. O. Max Gardner for his Christmas present — pajamas custom-made from nylon parachute cloth manufactured at Gardner’s textile mill in Shelby.
Gardner devised the gift to tout the value of synthetics research, which had invented nylon for parachutes just in time to offset the Japanese monopoly on silk.