Santa Claus was coming to town — specifically, to Corning. But Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen were getting some rest a hundred Christmases ago. On December 22, 1913, Santa was arriving by “aeroplane.”
This was rather daring on the jolly old elf’s part, for on December 22 the airplane was exactly ten years and five days old… still a relatively untested technology. And indeed the ecstatically-awaited arrival was delayed several hours when Santa Claus’s pilot Frank Burnside had to set down in Campbell for repairs. They had flown all the way from Bath, which was standing in for the North Pole. Those 11 miles still passed for a respectable flight in those days.
As a contemporary account put it, “more than 3000 children and many adults lined Market and Bridge streets and even covered the tops of the city’s highest buildings [including the Glass Works and the train station]…. For nearly three hours the crowd waited, and then, just as the greater part of the throng had started homeward, disappointed, Santa… blew into the city, riding on the clouds, just after 4:15.…
“Santa was flying high — 1200 feet or so — and when his machine was first seen against the face of a snowy white cloud far up the valley, it was mistaken by many persons for a bird. As Santa came nearer to the city he rose higher and higher, but once over the city he began to drop down gradually so as to get nearer the boys and girls. Circling twice over the Northside business section, Santa then made a long detour over the Southside, passing southeast of the city, and then returning to the vicinity of Denison Park, where he volplaned easily and gracefully to the earth. The ‘kids’ were on hand to greet him almost as soon as he landed — snowy whiskers, twinkling eyes and all.”
After flying 21 miles in an open-cockpit airplane, he probably had a red nose, too. But that didn’t deter him from touring local businesses, where he handed out a hundred pounds of candy and trinkets.
The Corning Business Men’s Association arranged the trip for $200, and a next-day trip to Hornell was also planned, but had to be scrubbed due to bad weather. Airplane and pilot both came from the Thomas Company in Bath.
Glenn Curtiss in Hammondsport of course dominated the aviation field both locally and nationwide, but Thomas was another significant manufacturer. The Thomas brothers were British subjects but born and brought up in the Argentine. One took a job with Curtiss and the other with General Electric until they figured they’d learned enough to strike out on their own. In Bath they made airplanes of their own design, to the general Curtiss pattern. Their flying school was the first one to be chartered by the Board of Regents, and was famed for its low tuition. On rainy days, you could work some of it off in the plant.
But low prices did not mean cut-rate instruction, and numerous first-rate early aviators got their start at the Thomas school, in wintertime even flying off the ice of Lake Salubria.
Oneonta boy Frank Burnside was one of their success stories, and Thomas hired him to stay on as an exhibition pilot. In those days most airplane sales, even to militaries, were for experimental purposes — a very limited market. Much of the money was in exhibitions… hiring out to do demonstration flights at fairs and celebrations and such. Frank had spent the Fourth of July that year doing flights in Nevada at Ely (second man to fly in that state), exploits which last month saw him inducted into the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame. Then he came back to Bath to set an American altitude record. He married locally and made his home in Bath throughout a stellar career with Thomas, Curtiss, and the US Air Mail. Besides his Nevada honors, he’s also in the OX-5 Aviation Pioneers Hall of Fame and the Steuben County Hall of Fame.
Weather grounded him after Santa’s flight, forcing him to spend the second night of his married life minding the airplane in Corning. He prudently dismantled and removed some key components “to keep the youngsters from wrecking the machine,” which certainly would have qualified them for a whole truckload of coal in their stockings.
Santa Claus, “whom some uninformed persons thought resembled Charles D. Brown,” allowed as how he would probably stick to reindeer. But between Frank and Santa, they’d certainly given the children of Corning a Christmas to remember. Any photographs of the day out there, in old albums or cigar boxes? We’d love to see them!