HISTORY

Club History

The club was started in ... {STAY TUNED, MORE TO COME}.

Majors Field History

Majors Field was named for Lieutenant Truett Majors, the first Hunt County native to perish in World War II, began operations on June 26, 1942, as a training center for the United States Army Air Forces. Lt Majors was killed in the 1942 Battle of the Philippines in January 1942. Greenville was chosen as a site for the USAAF basic flight-training center due to the efforts of the influential politician Sam Rayburn, the base was formally dedicated and named on 5 January 1943.

Majors Army Airfield was assigned initially to the Gulf Coast Training Center (later Central Flying Command), the airport was at one point the home to approximately 5,000 pilots, support personnel, and civilian employees. Majors also was a major training base for Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP)s. Flying training was performed with Fairchild PT-19s as the primary trainer. Also had several PT-17 Stearmans and a few P-40 Warhawks assigned.

In addition to training United States Army pilots, the airfield was the training site for Escuadròn 201 of the Mexican Air Force. The training center was reassigned to Second Air Force on 30 November 1944 as a group training center, primary for the assignment of replacement personnel to combat squadrons in Overseas theaters.

Majors AAF was inactivated on 18 July 1945 after the defeat of Germany; the city of Greenville then took ownership of the property, then leased the site to TEMCO (later LTV, E-Systems, Raytheon and currently L3Harris Technologies). {source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majors_Airport}

W5NNI - Carlton Smith <SK> History

W5NNI belonged to the late Carlton Duval Smith who was one of the leading men at the MSTF before the 1980's. Carlton was a great guy, very sharp technically, kind, humble, cheerful, funny and he sort of took me under his wing. He had a love of ham radio, and once in blue moon he'd wander down to the ham trailer and get on the air with some ham friend(s) of his.

Although never really active in the company ham club, he was very supportive of our activities, and happy to make the right connections on a patch panel in the MSTF building to get the ham shack wired up to the big rotatable HF LP and one of the big vertical monopole antennas. While he was short of stature, about 5'6", he was a giant in the things that mattered. A man of faith, he was an active member of Crestview Christian Church in Greenville.

Sadly, his life came to a sudden end. He suffered a massive asthma attack while at MSTF late in the afternoon of Friday April 7, 1989 from which he never recovered. After a week in ICU, he passed away April 14, 1989. He had just turned 62. A native of Hunt county, he was born in Quinlan on March 31, 1927.

The idea of picking up Carlton's old call sign for the club had been considered for several years by one of our members, so when recent discussions began about getting a shorter call sign, that member suggested W5NNI. He was pleased to see that the club leadership enthusiastically jumped on it. Victor Paul - WB0TEV was able to track down and exchange email with Carlton's son Barton Smith - N6HDN who recently retired from IBM out in California and we got his blessing to pick up his Dad's old call sign. Carlton's widow Emma Smith still lives here in Greenville and provided us some of this historical information.