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Nestled between two mountains, the Lavender and the Mt. Alto in the Northwest corner of Floyd County at Rome, Georgia, now stands the General Electric Medium Transformer plant. This plant was built around 1953, but our story begins back in the early forties shortly after the be- ginning of World War II.
I am now standing at the East end of the General Electric employees parking lot looking due West. I see a few cars on the well-paved lot and at night it is well lighted. While looking at this parking lot, I can remem ber a time when there was no pavement and no lights.
I can remember when it was the East-West runway for the old Rome Airport.
Facing East to West, the airport was located on the left of the runway about half of the way down.
Thinking back I can almost see the old vintage airplanes lined up on each side of the taxi strip going from the runway up to the airport. There were J-3 Cubs, Piper Super-Cruisers, Luscombs, Aronica Chiefs, Aronica Champs, and several two-winged 450 H.P. Steermans. The Steermans were used to dust crops and for aerobatics flying.
To be a small airport, it is my opinion that there was more action here than at any other airport in the state of Georgia.
I lived about half a mile East of the airport and when the wind was blowing from the West to the East, the planes would come right over our front yard at low altitudes. So low that you could recognize the pilots. The area where we lived was called "The Flat Woods," by a lot of people.
Since there was no main road there was no mail service. The closest the mail would come was to the road leading to the rear of the airport. I remember that when school was out for the summer, the best thing I had to look forward to was going to the mailbox. My dad did not want me to go anywhere near the airport, but when I went to the mailbox, I would slip over to the main part of the airport and hang around where I got to know some of the pilots.