The Saga of the F2G Corsair #74 Air Racer - Part 2: 74-Cleveland
By Rodney Williams
PART TWO – 74-Cleveland
Cleveland, Ohio/U.S.A. was the home of America’s National Air Races, which was held annual during the first weekend in September at the Cleveland National Airport. This weekend was one of our nation’s holidays which is still called “Labor Day”.
The races were started in 1929 and ran ten years without stopping. However, when Germany exploded the war in Europe in 1939 the Henderson brothers retired as managers of the races for other business interest.
When Japan bombed Pear Harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941 we entered the war with Japan and we included Germany as well.
“VE” day ended the war in Europe in May, 1945 and with “VJ” day ending the war with Japan in late August of the same year it was to late to resume the air races in September, 1945.
The races began again in 1946. Since my father Harry worked on the Corsairs at G.A.C. he would say: OK boys, let's go up to Cleveland and watch my planes race...off we went 4 years in a row.
There were no F2G Corsairs flying in 1946, but we did see Cook Cleland fly his colorful “F4U-4 Lucky Gallon” along with dozens of other WWII fighters.
In 1947, Cook Cleland purchase 3 F2G Corsairs and revised them for racing. His aircraft were registered with the race organization and had numbers of 74, 84 and 94. Another F2G showed up for the races with a race number of 18 and was owned by Ron Puckett.
Cook flew one of his F2Gs while his friends Dick Becker and Tony Janazzo flew the other two F2Gs. This was a sad day for all as we saw Tony crash Cook’s #84 F2G during the race near the airport. Tony died in the crash and the aircraft was a total loss.
The races resumed in 1948. Cook and Dick were flying the two remaining F2Gs, that he owned, namely #74 and #94. Ron Puckett showed up again with his #18 F2G racer.
In 1949 Cook purchased another F2G and painted it up real fancy with red and white colors and put the number 57 on it. Cook let one of his employees by the name of Ben McKillen fly it.
The races ended for good in 1949 when Bill Odem crashed a P-51C into a nearby home killing the lady and her baby.
If you access our “Society of Air Race Historians” (SARH), at (www.airrace.com) you can read all about the races from 1929 until 1949. They have posted many black and white photos, including some color shots.
The first two photos were taken from SARH, which shows the race course layout for the different years and a small photo of the attendees.
The first actual photo of #74 was taken by me in 1949, while the rest of the photos were gathered up by me from books and on the web.
Someone sent me this printed story called: “CLELAND ON CLEVELAND”.
I have enclosed two front pages of SARH’s bi-monthly newsletters, which relates the death of Cook and Dick in 2007.
Then someone sent me a photo of Cook and Dick together.
In the March/April 2008 issue of SARH, they offered a medallion in memory of both men, so I purchased one.
Another photo is an article about buying a DVD of the Cleveland Air Races. I got this advertisement in one of my SARH newsletters, but I never got around “tu-it” to buy the video. I’ll have to check it out and see if it’s still available.
One of the old time rules of photojournalism is: If you speak about something it’s best that you include a photo, thus I have added photos of the other racers.
My next ongoing story will be how #74 sat on Walter Soplata’s farm from the early 1950s for several decades until it was saved from the scrap yard by Bob Odegaard.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Enjoy,
Rodney
© Rodney Williams 2011
This article was published on Saturday, December 17 2011; Last modified on Saturday, May 14 2016