Burbank Shrine Honors Early Aviators

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,7584844.story
THEN AND NOW

Burbank Shrine Honors Early Aviators

Portal of the Folded Wings, in a cemetery near Bob Hope Airport,
memorializes some of those whose varied contributions helped make
flight possible.

By Cecilia Rasmussen, Times Staff Writer
August 13, 2006

Once, they soared above the clouds to make history. Now, barnstormers,
daredevils and sundry architects of aviation rest beneath the Portal
of the Folded Wings, a seven-story shrine under the flight path of Bob
Hope Airport in Burbank.

The shrine, with a colorful tile dome and female figures stretching
their arms to the heavens, originally was built as an impressive
entrance to Valhalla Memorial Park cemetery.

Named for the palace of Odin, the Norse god of slain heroes, Valhalla
was founded in 1923 by two Los Angeles financiers, John R. Osborne and
C.C. Fitzpatrick. The Spanish Mission Revival entrance structure was
designed by architect Kenneth MacDonald Jr.

For the decorative stone castings, MacDonald hired Italian-born
sculptor Federico A. Giorgi, who had created 30-foot-tall statues of
elephants and lions for the 1917 epic film "Intolerance" and crafted
the exterior of downtown's Million Dollar Theater.

The gateway to the new cemetery cost $140,000 — $1.5 million in
today's dollars.

Its rotunda was dedicated March 1, 1925, with a concert by English
contralto Maude Elliott. Picnickers spread blankets on the surrounding
grassy expanse between three reflecting pools and flat cemetery
markers, which were a new concept at the time.

"It became a tourist attraction and was used for concerts that were
broadcast over radio station KELW by station owner Earl L. White,"
said Ron Dickson, docent of the Burbank Aviation Museum.
....

Pasadena aviation historian and enthusiast James Gillette, long
impressed with the rotunda's proximity to the airport and to Lockheed
Aircraft, conceived a plan to use the structure as a shrine to
aviation. With the support of other aviation pioneers, including World
War II hero Gen. Ira Clarence Eaker and the Rev. John F.B. Carruthers,
a Navy chaplain and research director of aeronautical history at the
Claremont Colleges, Gillette's plan took wing.

On Dec. 17, 1953 — the 50th anniversary of Orville and Wilbur Wrights'
12-second powered hop at Kitty Hawk — the rotunda was rededicated as
the Portal of the Folded Wings. During the ceremony, the cremated
remains of Walter R. Brookins were interred there. Brookins, the first
aviator to take a plane to an altitude of a mile, had been the
Wrights' first civilian student.

Today, more than 30 bronze plaques adorn the rotunda floor. The
honorees include Charlie Taylor, the Wrights' mechanic, who built the
engine that powered the first flight.

When sculptor Giorgi died in 1963, he was buried outside the
structure, near his masterpiece. Gillette was also buried outside,
near the shrine he helped found.
....

The shrine's most colorful resident is no longer the daredevil
pilot Jimmie Angel, who found the world's highest waterfall,
3,200-foot Angel Falls, in Venezuela. His ashes were disinterred in
1960, three years after his death, and scattered over the falls, The
Times reported.

But his plaque remained at the shrine for years — at least as late as
1969, when it appeared in a Times news photograph. On July 18, 1969, a
small twin-engine Piper Navajo plunged into the dome. The pilot and a
passenger were killed; one passenger survived.

The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the crash on pilot
error. Investigators found faulty spark plugs, carbon deposits in
engine cylinder heads and improperly secured cargo.

The crash was immortalized in Ripley's Believe It or Not.

Repairs to the building cost $70,000.


The building also houses the Burbank Aviation Museum.

Beneath the memorial tablets rest the remains of other aviation
pioneers, including:

• Augustus Roy Knabenshue (1876-1960), who in 1904 became America's
first dirigible pilot. He also founded a dirigible passenger service,
from Pasadena to Los Angeles, in 1912.

• Evelyn "Bobbi" Trout (1906-2003), who held numerous records for
endurance, mileage and altitude.

• James Floyd Smith (1884-1956), who built and flew his own plane in
1912 and invented the free-type manually operated parachute for the
Army in 1918.

• Hilder Florentina Smith (1890-1977), who became a parachute jumper
in 1914. Two years later, she became the first female pilot to fly out
of the bean patch that later became Los Angeles International Airport.
She was married to James Floyd Smith.

• Matilde Moisant, the second American woman to earn her pilot's
license — two days after her friend, journalist Harriet Quimby. In
1911, Moisant let Quimby be first because Quimby needed the extra
acclaim: She wrote about air races and the thrill of flight.

• John B. Moisant (1868-1910), who designed and built the first metal
plane. Matilde Moisant was his sister.



The Portal of the Folded Wings is open daily. A docent with the
Burbank Aviation Museum is on site from 1 to 3 p.m. Sundays.