The Hudson Valley Regional Airport

The short, stubby control tower indicated that this was a controlled airfield and that it provided takeoff and landing clearances. The long, white Passenger Terminal failed to produce a single, suitcase-carrying traveler, but that the sizeable parking lot in front of it was about half-full meant that there was some activity here. Oddly, in this day and age, there was no charge to use it. A few tailwheel airplanes, affectionately known as "tail draggers," were parked in the distance, but the pair of Piper pistons – a single-engine Saratoga and a twin-engine Seminole – were parked on the ramp outside of the terminal. Is this where airliners used to park? This was the Hudson Valley Regional Airport, located south of Poughkeepsie.

A Cessna 172 Skyhawk, subjected to its run-up, filled the air with its almost ear-splitting grind. But when its pilot was satisfied that its systems were fully functioning, it taxied parallel to Runway 33, which was interspersed by the otherwise green-velvet patches of grass, and executed its takeoff in the direction of the billowing windsock on this sweltering July day, leaving silence.

Silence says nothing, except, perhaps, to communicate that what is, is not always what was. Where did the airline service go? Possibly an even more important question is: Where did the original airport go?

Red Oaks Mill Airport

Airports of a century ago were not the mega-complexes from which wide-bodied airliners accommodating 300 to 500 passengers gathered before or after their continent-slinging journeys. Any flat parcel of land, devoid of trees, was sufficient for the rudimentary fabric-covered and wire-braced biplanes to touch down, generating public interest and hoping to exchange revenue for rides in an aerial profession known as "barnstorming." In many ways, the Hudson Valley Regional Airport got its start this way, but not exactly at this location and not by its present name.

Located at the intersection of Route 376 and Spackenkill and Vassar roads, it was typical of the post-World War I airfields, whose plowed paths served as runways and sported nary a structure, except, perhaps for a hangar. The one here, on property originally owned by Fred Cleveland, measured 80 by 100 feet and the 1,500-foot runways were oriented toward the west and the southeast. Trees in its northeastern corner precluded takeoffs in that direction.

"The airport was established in 1927 amid nationwide excitement that was generated from that year’s New York-to-Paris nonstop solo flight by Charles Lindbergh," according to Anthony M. Musso in his "Red Oaks Mill Airport" article in the Poughkeepsie Journal.

John Kelsey Sague, Poughkeepsie’s major, ensured that the city leased the land from Cleveland, officially designating it an airport, and John M. Miller, Sague’s son-in-law, a barnstorming pilot and a Pratt Institute graduate with a mechanical engineering degree, managed it between 1931 and 1933.

Having personally witnessed Lindbergh’s departure from Long Island’s Roosevelt Field in the "Spirit of St. Louis," he often performed in air shows and set cross-country flight records of his own.

"There were weekly air shows (at Red Oaks Mill) and I remember one in particular," according to pilot Charles . . .