What airport?

Arnold

Arnold

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Arnold
This should not be too hard since the building is still there. Here are some clues. The year is 1959 and that is my mother (age 22) leaning on the Buick. I was 2 at the time. My father was doing graduate work on a project at North American Aviation for the summer and so the whole family moved to LA for the summer. His degree is in Mechanical Engineering but the work is all math. (I pulled it from the MIT library once a long time ago. My two years of calculus was insufficient to understand what I was looking at.) Turns out it was some of the early work on inertial guidance systems.

At the time the family did not include my youngest sister. By the time my dad was 23 and my mom was 22 they had three children. I'm a twin and the older of my two sisters was born 15 months after my brother and I were. So that is another change in just fifty years, few middle class kids today would even consider marriage at 19 or 20 (my brother and I were born 14 months after they married so don't even go there) never mind three kids by 22.
 

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That looks exactly like the old sea plane base in Miami near coconut grove. It is now a restaurant. But there are no mountains in miami so perhaps Palm Springs?
 
Arnold said:
This should not be too hard since the building is still there.
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Santa Barbara, KSBA.

image001.jpg
 
AdamZ said:
That looks exactly like the old sea plane base in Miami near coconut grove. It is now a restaurant. But there are no mountains in miami so perhaps Palm Springs?
Click to expand...


No mountains, yeah well that and the long story about why my family was on the west coast for a summer.

Palm springs, that is an interesting guess. I think there may be a photo from my trip there with my parents and cousin back in 1979 give or take couple of years. As I recalled we used and AA-5B for the trip.
 
Arnold said:
Ding Ding Ding we have a winner, boy that was fast.
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I figured it had to be southern California and an airport big enough to support two airlines but not huge like KLAX. Santa Barbara was actually my first impulse then I did some Googling...
 
AdamZ said:
That looks exactly like the old sea plane base in Miami near coconut grove. It is now a restaurant. But there are no mountains in miami so perhaps Palm Springs?
Click to expand...

That seaplane base was called Dinner Key Coast Guard station in its later years. Earlier on Pan Am used it as one of its premier ports of call.

Ben, who spend the first 22 years of life within a mile or so of there, Haas
 
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