No coffee or tea, just history

ATLANTIC CITY - It's where they coined the word

air-port

, way back in 1919, when planes were a newfangled mode of passenger transport.

But in an only-in-Atlantic City twist, when town fathers finally named their 12-year-old airstrip in 1922, they christened it Bader Field, not airport, after Mayor Edward L. Bader.

Bader Field closed two years ago, decades past its heyday of aviation firsts and VIP sightings.

State and local officials are now awaiting bids on the 143-acre city-owned property, which could sell for more than $1 billion and launch a new era of high times. Yet what could be a financial gain for this seaside resort feels like a loss to those who would like to see Atlantic City's history preserved.

"It's the habit of Atlantic City to just tear down something old to make way for something new," lamented historian Robert E. Ruffalo Jr., an author of Atlantic City: America's Playground.

"The old hotels have been demolished, the diving horses are gone, the Steel Pier isn't what it once was," Ruffalo said. "And now Bader Field will be among what we've lost historically."

Developers consider the tract among the most valuable along the East Coast. Situated between the busy transportation corridors of the Atlantic City Expressway and U.S. Route 40, it could accommodate up to three new casinos within a half-mile of Atlantic City's famed Boardwalk.

In simpler times, the focus at Bader was in the air, not on the land.

Flimsy aeroplanes, like the biplanes the Wright brothers flew, set several records in 1910 during a first-of-its-kind Air Carnival.

During the 10-day show, Walter Brookins a Wright-trained pilot, became the first aviator to fly at a height of one mile - 6,175 feet in fact, above an awestruck crowd on the beach. And Glenn Curtiss set a world record by flying 50 miles up and down the beach in one hour and 14 minutes.

Curtiss then demonstrated the first aerial "bombing" of a moving target, by dropping oranges alongside a yacht that was plying the ocean waters. Impressed military officials vowed they had seen the future of warfare, said Allen "Boo" Pergament, another local historian.

"I'm too logical a person to believe that Bader Field and many of the other old Atlantic City landmarks could be preserved forever," Pergament said.

But whatever is built on the airport site, he said, "some sort of marker or indication should be made about the rich history that occurred there."

Pergament believes that, sometimes, history is salvaged in bits and pieces, and he has amassed an amazing collection of Atlantic City memorabilia to prove it.

He has stuffed several rooms of his Margate home with old brass street signs, red "flash glass" souvenirs that were sold on the Boardwalk in the early 1900s, and china settings from grand old Atlantic City hotels such as the Traymore, Marlborough-Blenheim, and Chalfonte-Haddon Hall.

Yet there is virtually nothing, except references in old books, to commemorate Bader Field.

Every U.S president from Theodore Roosevelt through Gerald Ford flew into Bader. Charles Lindbergh in his Spirit of St. Louis landed there, as did Amelia Earhart in one of her planes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

In 1933, the first two African American pilots to make a transcontinental flight began their voyage at Bader.

The airport was where the Civil Air Patrol was formed shortly before the United States entered World War II. The unit there was the first to be armed and the first to draw blood when it bombed a German U-boat 25 miles off Atlantic City in 1942.

By the late 1940s, the airport was already outmoded. Hemmed in by marshes, Bader was unable to lengthen its runways. But pilots of single- and twin-engine planes still used it, as did an airline called the Allegheny Commuter, which operated daily commercial flights to Philadelphia and New York.

Within the next 30 years, the South Jersey Transportation Authority pumped millions in federal and state money into Atlantic City International Airport, established in 1942 as a naval air station, about 15 miles away in Egg Harbor Township.

When casino gaming came, the South Jersey Transportation Authority used the new airport as a base for casino-junket flights and high-rollers' private jets. Eventually, Spirit Airlines established commercial service from Atlantic City International to Florida and elsewhere.

Without a way to accommodate jets, Bader went into a tailspin. Politicians continually called for its closure and threatened to end funding for runway upkeep.

By the 1990s, the control tower, repair facilities and fuel tanks were removed. All that remained was one large blue hangar and aging runways behind Atlantic City High School's football stadium and Sandcastle Stadium, the minor-league baseball park now known as Bernie Robbins Stadium.

The windswept airfield settled into a humble existence servicing private planes until it closed in August 2006.

But what of the celebrities whose arrivals and departures are so much a part of Bader folklore?

For privacy and convenience, Bader was the perfect place for stars such as Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and other members of the Rat Pack to use when they dropped into Atlantic City. Anecdotes, not archives, are all historians have to document their patronage.

"There really are no publicized records of Sinatra or others like him ever using Bader," said H.V. Pat Reilly, founder of the New Jersey Aviation Hall of Fame in Teterboro and author of From the Balloon to the Moon: New Jersey's Amazing 200-Year Aviation History.

"But that doesn't mean they didn't. And that's the point," Reilly said. "Bader wasn't like the big commercial airports in Philadelphia and New York, and the people who used it liked it that way."

Ruffalo said he heard one story involving Sinatra in the late 1960s promising Bader workers that when he returned late one night, they would play a game of softball on a nearby athletic field.

The airport workers and others are said to have waited hours for Ol' Blue Eyes. Finally, just before dawn, the crooner arrived with a swarm of minions carrying cartons of shrimp, lobster, and other delicacies to share with the group.

"And then," Ruffalo said, "they all supposedly played a game out on the field as the sun came up."

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