WORLD WAR II
VeroBeach100.org City of Vero Beach 1919-2019 43
airport and was a pilot for the Los Angeles
Dodgers, said his father, B.L. “Bud” Holman,
met the flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker
in Detroit after World War I when he was
working for General Motors.
“Eddie Rickenbacker, after World War
I, came back to Detroit and was involved
with Rickenbacker Automobiles,” Bump
said in an interview for the WQCS radio
oral history project.
Rickenbacker also was launching Miamibased
Eastern Airlines. Bud, meanwhile,
moved to Vero Beach to launch a Cadillac
dealership. That was in 1925.
Bump wasn’t sure how his father persuaded
the airline to come to Vero Beach.
“He knew all these guys, Eastern pilots
and executives, and they liked to come
here and hunt and fish with him. They said,
‘We need to put a fuel stop somewhere,’
and he said, ‘We’ll put in a fuel stop for
you.’ He put in three grass runways, and
Eastern operated on the grass runways.”
PAVING THE WAY
Holman’s friendship with Gen. Henry
“Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps,
didn’t hurt either.
“They were out hunting and fishing,”
Bump said. “The general said, I think he
was a colonel then, anyway, he was telling
about flying their B-18 bombers around
the world to show how powerful we were.
My dad said, ‘Well, why don’t you leave
from here on your round-the-world trip?’
He said, ‘We’ve got to have paved runways,’
and my dad said, ‘Yes, I know.’ ‘Why don’t
you pave some runways?’ So he did.”
Holman said everyone expected the
Army Air Corps to get the airbase.
“All of a sudden, the Navy flew into town
one night and the next day they had it!”
he said.
The training was extremely hazardous,
especially in the early years when pilots
were learning to fly dive bombers.
“They had terrible airplanes,” Bump said.
“They lost eight of them in the city limits in
one night. The main target was out at Blue
Cypress Lake. They had a target right in the
middle of the lake, so they had a hell of a
time fishing pilots out of the lake. “
Sig Lysne, one of the first dive bombers
to be trained in Vero, remembers seeing
targets drawn on rafts in the lake. In Gross’
book, Lysne said pilots would ascend to
10,000 feet before heading toward the
target at a 70 degree angle, and a speed of
300 miles per hour.
“You’d start to pull out at about 1,500
feet,” he said. “If you waited any longer, you
were flirting with the ground.”
NIGHTTIME FLYING ANTICS
Later, with the advent of radar, the Navy
started training pilots in night-fighting
aircraft. Pilots in
Vero often flew
east over the Bahamas
at night
to practice with
instruments.
“They had
pretty experienced
pilots so
you didn’t have
near as many
accidents,” Bump
said. “We lived
two or three
blocks south of
the airport. You
could hear those
engines running
out there all night. Every once in a while
one of them would taxi up on another and
you’d hear chop-chop-chop. They’d chop
the tail off them.”
Suzan Phillips, longtime local resident,
was living with her parents in their beachfront
home in Riomar. She remembers pilots
buzzing their home as they flew back
to the air station in the newly produced
Grumman F7F aircraft.
“These boys went out at night and
they came back at 4 o’clock in the morning
right over our house because I knew
a couple of them,” she said in a radio
interview. “My father would get furious! >>
COURTESY OF VBNAS FILES, ARCHIVE CENTER, IRC MAIN LIBRARY
Navy F6F fighter pilots learned to fly a Hellcat fighter during training at the naval station.
German U-boats sank a number of ships off the
coast of Vero Beach during the early days of the war.
B.L. “Bud” Holman was
instrumental in the conversion
of the municipal airport
into a naval air station.
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