History
Kinston Jetport originally was built in 1944 by the United States Navy. It opened in October as a United States Marine Corps flying training airfield known as Marine Corps Auxiliary Airfield Kinston, being an auxiliary to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. Naval Aviation Cadets received V-5 flight training along with basic flying indoctrination at the airfield until the facility was closed on 31 October 1945.
As a result of the Cold War and the expansion of the United States Air Force, Kinston Air Base* was reopened on 17 October 1950 by the USAF Air Training Command, as a contract flying training school with T-34 Mentor, T-6 Texan and T-28 Trojan aircraft. In May 1952, the Air Force renamed Kinston Airfield as Stallings Air Base in memory of Kinston natives Lt Bruce Stallings, a P-51 Mustang pilot killed in March 1945, and his brother, Lt Harry Stallings, a B-29 Superfortress navigator killed in April 1945.
In April 1957, ATC proposed that the contract training program at Stallings AB be closed. The recommendation was approved in September and on 1 October, flying training ended at Stallings. The base was formally inactivated on 27 November 1957.
Read more about this topic: Kinston Regional Jetport
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“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)