Lincoln Beachey shows off his daredevil flying skills at Niagara Falls on June 27, 1911. A century ago Beachey won a $1,500 prize in Orlando when he made the first powered airplane flight in Florida in a contest sponsored by the organizers of the Sub-Tropical Mid-Winter Exposition, now the Central Florida Fair. (Library of Congress)
Smell the corn dogs sizzling, the sweet aroma of cotton candy wafting over the midway? Yep, the Central Florida Fair returned Thursday and will rock and roll through March 7.
Its home has long been at the fairgrounds on West Colonial Drive, but for decades, the fair was a downtown event — at "Exposition Park" to the west of what’s now the Mayor Bob Carr Performing Arts Centre.
There, on sunny February days, Orlando schoolchildren could walk to the fair — an event so important that for many years public schools closed for the first day of it.
A century of fun
The fair traces its official founding to 1910, an even century ago. But its roots go back even further. In 1886, Orlando city fathers built a wooden exhibition hall on the shores of Lake Eola, where the Rosalind Club now sits. The aim was to have a kind of county fair to show off agricultural products and enjoy horse racing.
At their first event, the pioneers found their enthusiasm dampened by soggy weather. Lake Eola was so full after a rainy season that folks had to tiptoe into the hall on boards stretched across puddles of water.
Like so much else in Central Florida, the fair fell victim to the Great Freeze of 1894 and 1895, but after 15 years or so, agriculture and business had recovered enough for Central Florida boosters to turn their thoughts again to an exhibition promoting the area.
In 1910, the new Fair Association celebrated with a parade of flower-bedecked automobiles down Orange Avenue. But the organizers had higher aspirations to bring in the crowds, and their efforts made history.
Taking to the skies
The Wright brothers had taken to the air from the dunes of North Carolina’s Outer Banks only a few years before, in 1903.
With the kind of promotional zeal that runs deep in Orlando’s roots, the Fair Association in 1910 offered a whopping $1,500 to the first aviator who could stay in the air for five minutes during the exposition.
Pioneering pilot Lincoln Beachey of California, the 27th person to be licensed as a pilot in the United States, took the prize. It has been called the first powered airplane flight in Florida.
Beachey repeated his triumph for each day of the event, a dashing figure in his biplane built by the Wrights.
He went on to thrill crowds far and wide; his Orlando triumph was one of his first exploits. Soon, in 1911, Beachey returned to Florida for a show at Tampa and flew at night over the city, only a year after the first recorded night flight, in Knoxville, Tenn.
The no-nerves daredevil
Called the "man without nerves," Beachey made a daring flight over Niagara Falls, where he dipped under a railroad bridge and down the gorge.
In August 1911 he set a world altitude record of 11,150 feet in Chicago by climbing until his plane ran out of gas and glided back to earth.
Late that same year, Beachey emerged unhurt from an air-show crash, but two spectators were killed. He gave up flying for a while, but soon returned. Just after his 28th birthday, Beachey’s luck ran out. He survived a crash into the water near the Golden Gate, but drowned in the wreckage.
In Orlando, the no-nerves mantle was picked up by a local man, Carl Kuhl, who as a boy had seen Beachey’s 1910 flight at the fair.
Beachey’s 1910 Orlando triumph had ignited in Kuhl a passion for flying. After training in Jacksonville, he began a career in aviation and taught many other pilots in both World Wars.
In 1917 Kuhl thrilled Orlando fair crowds with flights in his military tractor biplane.
"His frills, curves, turns and twists awed spectators," historian Eve Bacon wrote, "— especially when, at the beginning of his return to earth, he exploded a bomb, and with smoke pouring from a smudge pot, he dipped and looped-the-loop with death-defying nerve."
In those days of early flight, our fair soared into history.