Two fields, two names: the settlement of 1941

1940 — 1941

How Fort Wayne got an airport named Smith and an airport named Baer: In 1940 the War Department came to Fort Wayne. The city's north field stood on a list of some thousand airfields the Army Air Corps had evaluated, and the early federal intention, as the News-Sentinel's history tells it, was to take the municipal airport itself. Fearing the loss of civilian access, Fort Wayne's leaders took options on some 700 acres southwest of the city; in January 1941 the War Department said it would build in Fort Wayne if it could take possession by 1 February, and thirty local businessmen signed notes totaling the $125,000 the city needed to assemble the land. The government signed a lease at one dollar a year and invited the community to suggest a name. The citizens supplied two: "General Anthony Wayne Field," for the fort-builder, and "Smith Field," for the Bird Boy. Army policy settled it another way: airfields were named for deceased military aviators. Paul Baer — Fort Wayne's own, the first ace of the U.S. Air Service, nine confirmed victories and seven unconfirmed before the Germans shot him down and held him prisoner in 1918 — had been killed on 9 December 1930, when his Loening amphibian struck a river junk's mast taking off from Shanghai on a mail and passenger run; he was buried at Lindenwood that January. The new Army airfield was officially designated Baer Field on 14 June 1941, and because a living name could not stay on the old field while the dead man's name went on the new one, the municipal airport took the other citizen suggestion and became Smith Field, for the airmail pioneer who had also died in the service of the mail. The ace's own record — the Lafayette Escadrille, the Distinguished Service Cross, the disputed arithmetic of "sixteen victories" against the nine confirmed in the modern accounting — is told in the War Heroes section; the base he named, its $10 million construction and its hundred thousand wartime personnel, is told in the Military section. What belongs to the airport record is the exchange itself: Fort Wayne is one of very few American cities whose two airports are named for two hometown flyers, and it got them both in a single compromise.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Smith Field (2002) and the Smith Field article history it supports — the DLAND evaluation list, the citizen land purchase, the $1 lease, the suggested names, the designation of the new Baer Field on 14 June 1941.
2. The News-Sentinel, 1940s history series, "Government built airport for city" (egen.fortwayne.com) — the 1 February 1941 deadline, the $125,000 borrowed from four banks, the first landing that August.
3. The History Center, Fort Wayne, virtual exhibit on Paul Baer's aviator's goggles; ACGSI, Paul Frank Baer page; Flight Journal, "Paul Baer: America's First WWI Ace" — the combat record, the 9 December 1930 Shanghai crash, the Lindenwood burial of 3 January 1931.
4. Military and War Heroes — Baer Field as an installation and Baer's combat record, cross-referenced and not retold here.