By Dick Foster
Denver Rocky Mountain Denver Rocky Mountain News Southern Bureau

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Lindbergh tested mountain wind currents

COLORADO SPRINGS -- Its long, glass and steel buildings and soaring silver chapel spires don't look 40 years old.

Even at the millennium, the Air Force Academy retains the look of a modern, space-age institution poised for the future.

Colorado Springs' coup 41/2 decades ago in landing the prestigious institution at the foot of the Rocky Mountains created one of the state's most memorable landmarks.

World War II had convinced U.S. military and political leaders that air superiority, more than land and sea power, would be the final arbiter of future wars.

President Harry Truman made the Army Air Forces, formerly the Army Air Corps, a separate, co-equal branch of the armed forces in 1947: the U.S. Air Force. Two years later, he created a board to scout locations for a new school to train future Air Force officers.

On April 1, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill creating an Air Force Academy, but he did not name a site.

The presidents' actions set off fierce competition among cities and states to land the new school.

Until World War II, the Springs had been a quiet resort town of 45,000, trading on its location at the foot of famous Pikes Peak.

The war brought a new economy. Camp Carson opened in 1942 and grew to a garrison of 43,000 soldiers. After the war, the Army post downsized, and there was talk of closing it. Springs civic leaders perceived a bleak future.

Population rapidly declined. Houses, apartments and stores stood vacant. A new service academy could be a political and economic savior.

To lobby for the project, a "who's who" of Colorado Springs formed a chamber of commerce committee. The panel, accomplished in business and with an entree to Washington's military brass, was led by chamber President John Love, later a three-term Colorado governor. Another member was Thayer Tutt, the son of Charles L. Tutt Jr., who co-founded the Broadmoor hotel with Spencer Penrose.

Thayer Tutt had served at the Pentagon as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Forces during World War II "and knew all the top people," he recalled in 1981.

His Broadmoor was a trump card among military and political leaders who had visited Camp Carson during the war.

"A whole new generation had become acquainted with the fabulous Broadmoor," historian George Fagan wrote. "In the minds of many people, especially military people, Colorado Springs and the Broadmoor were synonymous."

Tutt already was coaxing his Pentagon contacts to bring the fledgling Continental Air Defense Command to Colorado Springs. It relocated from New York in 1951 and grew into NORAD, the worldwide system that warns of airborne attacks on North America.

Colorado Springs wasted no time making its case for the Air Force Academy. Truman barely had created the site selection board before a 2-foot-wide, 18-inch-long volume landed on his desk with artists' sketches of a proposed south Colorado Springs campus near Camp Carson.

The board didn't like the site, Fagan recalled. Happenstance would reveal a much more beautiful setting to the north.

While board members laid over in Colorado Springs for a flight back to Washington, Lt. Col. Arthur Boudreau, the board's recorder, took a Sunday drive. Just north of town, he noticed the mountain range and foothills west of the highway.

"I was impressed by the beauty and the grandeur of the area," Boudreau said. He told the Colorado Springs committee that this site might be acceptable to the selection board.

In the midst of prolonged political debate over the academy, the board was disbanded in 1952. When Eisenhower created the academy in 1954, a second site committee was formed and the process began anew, narrowing 580 sites in 45 states to three.

Civic officials in Lake Geneva, Wis., one site, overwhelmingly opposed the academy, worried that it would ruin their resort area. The other, Alton, Ill., on the Mississippi River, was divided, so Colorado Springs Ford dealer Soland Doenges, a member of the chamber committee, grew a beard, donned sunglasses and stalked Alton's public debates, stirring opposition to the academy.

At the same time, Colorado Springs was busy smoothing the way with local ranchers who owned the land along the Rampart Range north of town. Most agreed to sell if the site were chosen. The state sweetened the offer with $1 million for land purchases, in effect giving the Air Force its desired 18,500-acre site.

One nagging question remained: Would the mountains or their wind currents hamper flight training?

Famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, a member of the new site committee, rented a light plane, flew over the site with committee members aboard and pronounced it fit for flying.

On June 24, 1954, Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott announced the selection of Colorado Springs as the site.

Nearby Lowry Air Force Base would serve as the academy's temporary site until the new school was constructed. Lowry welcomed the first Air Force Academy class on July 11, 1955.

Much about the new campus was controversial. The design by architects Louis Skidmore, Nathaniel Owings and John Merrill of Chicago was criticized severely by Congress and others as bland and industrial. The chapel drew its own special scorn, many calling its design inappropriate.

But the design survived. Today, visited by 800,000 people a year, the chapel is the most popular manmade tourist attraction in the state.

The campus was completed in August 1958 at a cost of $142 million. The first academy class, formed at Lowry in 1955, graduated from the new campus in 1959.

The new school presented its first diploma to its most important and unyielding advocate -- Dwight Eisenhower.

The supreme allied commander of World War II had become president of Columbia University after the war. He and University of Colorado President Robert Stearns were chosen in 1949 to review the nation's service academies. Their board recommended establishment of an Air Force academy.

Eisenhower loved Colorado, his wife Mamie's home state, and came often to fish and golf. While recuperating from a heart attack in Denver in 1955, he moved White House operations to Fitzsimons Army Hospital.

"I was on the board when they decided that there should be an air academy," he said. "And behind the scenes and clandestinely and not saying anything about it, I was very anxious that the academy be in the state I love so much."

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images available at the Colorado Historical Society (303) 866-2305.

Online: InsideDenver.com, keyword "2000."

On TV: Sunday at 10 p.m.: Colorado History: The heavens opened, and the river roared. It was one of the most terrible nights in state history.

September 14, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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