Aviation pioneer memorialized
DeLloyd “Dutch” Thompson at the controls of a Wright biplane in 1910
Celeste Van Kirk / Obsever-Reporter Lisa Salandra-Zimmermann of West Middletown, with her 6-year-old daughter Margaux, look over information about the life of Delloyd "Dutch" Thompson during a plaque dedication cermony at the Washington County Airport on Monday, July 13, 2015.
David Molinaro-Thompson speaks at a plaque dedication ceremony for his grandfather Delloyd “Dutch” Thompson at Washington County Airport Monday.
DeLloyd “Dutch” Thompson probably would have been embarrassed by a ceremony held in his honor at Washington County Airport.
Politicians and historians called him a visionary, an aviation pioneer and one of the most important figures in Washington County history. Indeed, the Washington native was all of those things, but he never boasted about the times he set altitude and speed records, or when he became the second person to perform a loop with an airplane and sky-write in the early 20th century.
Bronze plaques in his honor – displayed most recently at the LeMoyne House in Washington – were restored Monday to their original home in the county airport’s terminal. Had it not been for the efforts of Thompson’s daughter-in-law, Margaret Thompson, they would have been sold for scrap years ago.
“Somebody told me that I’d better go out and rescue these plaques because they were in the boiler room out here at the airport ready to be melted down,” she recalled.
Thompson died in 1949 at the age of 60. That same year, more than 5,000 people attended an air show at the county airport in his honor. The bronze plaques were hung on the airport’s gate, but 20 years later, the airport had expanded beyond its boundaries. The plaques were relegated to an administration building, and later cast aside.
Margaret Thompson gave them to the Washington County Historical Society, which donated the plaques back to the airport.
County commissioners and fellow aviators spoke of Thompson’s many accomplishments during the ceremony. He invented a maneuver called “The Undertaker’s Drop” in 1913 and became the second aviator in the world to fly an airplane upside-down the following year. Several months later, he set a record in Kansas City when he flew to 15,600 feet, breaking the previous record by more than 3,000 feet.
“He didn’t have any respirator,” said historical society Director Clay Kilgore. “He went up in a rickety wood plane, and he had an altimeter with him.”
He also built his own plane and predicted that the future of aerial warfare would involve heavy artillery and bombs. In 1916, during the middle of World War I, he flew over Washington, D.C., and dropped firecrackers and brown bags that bore the message, “This bomb is harmless. Suppose it had contained nitroglycerine. Wake up and prepare.”
The plaques commemorating Thompson’s accomplishments are not merely a symbolic gesture, said David Molinaro-Thompson, one of Thompson’s grandchildren, as well as a history and humanities teacher at Bethlehem-Center High School.
“History does not survive on its own. Like democracy, it is a human construct that requires our attention, our time and care to keep it alive,” he said. “Otherwise, it dies, and the fact of the matter is once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.”
He said his late father, Bob, had great humility like his father before him, and he didn’t share many stories of Dutch’s accomplishments. Many of the stories he knew were told, and retold, by a group of elderly men who frequented a barber shop in downtown Washington.
The men often recalled the sense of wonder they felt while watching Thompson fly overhead and perform tricks no one had ever seen before.
“Even as a child, I could understand that they were recounting something truly special, a revered moment in their lives,” Molinaro-Thompson said. “Because he wasn’t just a marvel. He was our marvel – Washington’s own.”
He added, “These guys, these men that were decades older than I was, were almost like children again the way they spoke about him … When I think of Dutch, I’m as likely to remember the look in those old mens’ eyes, their smiles, the look of their awe and wonder – all these years later.”