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On the
Occasion
of the
60th/90th Anniversary –
We Salute
By Jean West Rudnicki
As the U.S. Air Force strikes up the band across the country commemorating its 60th Anniversary, the little airfield of Ellington, tucked quietly amid an ever-expanding Clear Lake community, prepares to mark an anniversary of its own – its 90th.
Ellington served as one of the first U.S. Air Force Bases in the nation when that branch of the armed services was originally established in 1947, but Ellington’s history stretches back thirty years earlier to the dawn of U.S. military aviation, and it continues today despite having been closed on eight separate occasions in the intervening years. It is, in fact, the only airfield from the original era still in operation.
Though few of us who live in its shadow today realize its past glories, it was one of the largest aviation training bases in the nation during both World War I and II, and at one time during those turbulent years accommodated more than five thousand personnel. It was a small, self-contained city complete with one hundred and sixty buildings including five mess halls, seventy-four barracks, a premier medical facility (the thirteen buildings represented the most modern medical complex in south Texas at the time), six concrete runways, five control towers, and two 42,000 sq. ft. steel hangers along with adjoining apron and tie-down system for even more airplane parking space. The base trained men and women during the Korean War, the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, and continues to train service men and women today. It is home to the Texas Air National Guard 147th Wing, the Texas Army Reserves and the Coast Guard; it plays a significant role in Homeland Security; and still serves as an auxiliary training site for NASA’s astronaut corps – all of which is separate from the civilian Saluteside of Ellington, owned and operated by the City of Houston Aviation Department and is the site of the annual Wings Over Houston Airshow.
Ellington’s story is linked to the tide of our nation’s peace and wartime
activities. The base was established in 1917 when the U.S. Army was just beginning to realize the strategic potential of the “new,” powered
aircraft. Over the next nine decades the airfield, which covered more than twelve hundred acres, approximately twenty-five miles south of Houston, would swell and shrink in size as the country’s soldiers went off to war and then returned home. All the while it racked up a long list of “firsts,” and a multitude of impressive statistics not the least of which is its own longevity. It endured a fire that razed it to the ground in 1927, and then spent several quiet years as leased pastureland,
returning to its roots (both literally and figuratively) before rising to glory yet again when its country called it back into service in the early 1940s. It would find another major rebirth in 1947 as Ellington Air Force Base with the newly formed Air Force until its closure and re-designation to Ellington Field in 1974.
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