Foil: 3 Panel: 2 Column: 2 Line: 38

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Ms. Norma B. Granville

This young farm boy gifted with an unusual intuitive and innovative genius left the farm m his teens to repair automobiles in a garage near East Boston airport which be haunted due to his insatiable curiosity about why planes were so badly damaged when they bad to make emergency landings in bad spots. In order to demonstrate his innovative ideas to remedy those situations, be catted his four brothers from the farm to help build his own plane. This was the beginning of the Granville Brothers Aircraft and the first ship was a biplane with many novel innovations. It was called the Model A Gee Bee. The initials stood for Granville Brothers. It was the first plane ever built in Boston that would fly! This led the group to Springfield, MA to build these planes, but soon they were making sleek low wing monoplanes called Sportsters. With the help of the engineering skills of his aeronautical engineer, Bob Hall, they designed a racer for the Cleveland air races, it was a tremendous success winning all five of the contests it entered including the prestigious Thompson Trophy. It was the racer named "The “City of Springfield". The following year he was joined Pete Miller who became his chief engineer and they put their talents to work resulting in the production of the sisters ships #11(R1) and #7 (R1). Jimmy Doolittle flew R1 and won the Thompson Trophy following which he set a new land air speed record of 296.967 mph, the fastest plane in the world. The depression and extremely bad luck with plane accidents took their toll on the company which finally closed, but Granny and his two engineer partners opened a consulting office in New York City where they received the order to design and build a plane for Jacqueline Cochran to fly in to fly in the England -Australia race. This ship was named the "QED”. Shortly thereafter while trying to land on the Spartanburg airport, which was under repair, Granny bad a fatal crash. That effectively ended the short but illustrious Granville Brothers Aircraft Association.
Granny was a true pioneer during this golden age of aviation. His vision always looked to the future. These racers were far ahead of the times and contributed greatly to the advancement of aerodynamic design.