Pioneer female pilot's mural, depicting Long Island's early aviation history, coming to Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale

She was a groundbreaking aviator who learned to fly after hearing tall tales from a pilot who’d crash-landed on her grandfather’s golf course in Warren Township, New Jersey.

Later, she was one of the original women to pilot bombers, transports and fighter planes from factories to military bases in both the United States and England during World War II.

And, not long after that, she was taught to paint frescoes by Diego Rivera, the famed Mexican muralist and husband of artist Frida Kahlo.

In 1934, Manhattan socialite Aline Rhonie undertook a mammoth four-year project inside Hangar F at the old Roosevelt Field airport complex — a 1,400-square-foot mural chronicling the roots of aviation on Long Island from 1908 to 1927.

That piece, which for the past decade has anchored two workshop walls at a branch of the Vaughn College of Aeronautics near LaGuardia Airport in Astoria, Queens, will begin making its way this month to the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale — a home not far from the historic airfield where it was painted.

Curators plan to have the mural become a featured interactive exhibit in a new museum building they hope to begin constructing soon. No specific date has been announced yet for when the mural will go on display.

"It’s one of the only surviving artifacts from Roosevelt Field, the airfield," Cradle of Aviation curator Joshua Stoff said as he stood before the mural last week. "It documents a unique period of Long Island’s history and ... this is literally one of the few things left from that time — one of the only surviving artifacts from what was the most famous airport in America, maybe the world, in the 1920s and '30s."

As editor-in-chief of Metropolitan Airport News, Julia Lauria-Blum said: "This is an amazing documentation of aviation on Long Island visually brought to life in color. It’s not just the aircraft, it’s the stories of the people behind the aircraft ... It has personalities, there’s humor in it."

It even includes one pilot’s sidekick, a cigar-smoking dog.

An early aviation pioneer

Born Aug. 16, 1909, in York, Pennsylvania, Aline Rhonie Hofheimer grew up privileged in New Jersey and was one of the earliest attendees of the exclusive Dalton School in Manhattan. Her grandfather, Nathan Hofheimer, was one of the first major investors in General Motors.

Known as Pat, Rhonie married Richard Bamberger, an heir to the Bamberger’s department stores acquired in 1929 by Macy’s. Following a 1930 divorce, she was briefly married to Westbury native Reginald Langhorne Brooks, a nephew of American-born Lady Nancy Witcher Astor, England’s first female seated Member of Parliament.

"She’s one of those early women pioneers we think of in aviation, so she’s just been a great role model for our students," Vaughn president Sharon DeVivo said. Founded in 1932, Vaughn has a highly diversified enrollment of about 1,300 students, studying all areas of aviation — including engineering and technology, airport management, aeronautical sciences and air traffic control.

But, DeVivo said, "Unless you have a sister, aunt, grandma in aviation you’re not going to know about the opportunities [for women] ... For her to be one of those early pioneers is just terrific for the next generations to know about."

She earned her private pilot’s license at age 21 in Reno, Nevada. She got her transport license in 1931 and during the 1930s, flew out of the Roosevelt Field complex, where she kept her many planes. She later got a pilot’s license in the United Kingdom and, in 1938, became the first American licensed as a commercial pilot in Ireland.

Rhonie was one of nine original members of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, which became the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots. Created at the start of World War II by her friend, legendary aviator Jacqueline Cochran, with assistance from Gen. Henry Arnold and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the original WAFS included another of Rhonie’s friends from Roosevelt Field — Syosset native Betty Gillies, who was later appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the first Federal Aviation Administration women’s advisory committee.

Rhonie also drove an ambulance in wartime France and ferried planes during the war for the British War Relief Society, later fundraising in the United States to build canteens for Allied pilots fighting on the front lines.

And Rhonie flew myriad military aircraft — among them the A-20 Havoc, P-38 Lightning and P-51 Mustang — as well as dozens of types of private planes. She had twin-engine and seaplane pilot ratings. She even flew gliders.

Chronicling Long Island aviation history

In 1934, Rhonie became the first woman to fly solo from New York to Mexico City. While there she learned to paint frescos from Rivera.

Returning to Long Island, Rhonie used her skills to chronicle the history of Roosevelt Field, a central place in the world of aviation long before Charles Lindbergh lifted off in the Spirit of St. Louis en route to the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927.

From 1934-38, Rhonie, in the dank chill of winter and the stifling heat of summer, worked along the ground and on scaffolds, according to a 2015 account in Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine, "applying four coats of cement, goat’s hair, and coarse marble dust, all mixed with slaked lime, to the wall" in daily preparation for painting her fresco.

The Golden Age Aviation Mural was unveiled at a gala attended by hundreds at Roosevelt Field’s Hangar F on Oct. 15, 1938. 

The work measures 12.5 feet high by about 100 feet long — historians believe additional panels perhaps in storage might bring the mural to 126 feet in length — and features 268 planes and hangars, as well as more than 600 pilots and personalities associated with Roosevelt Field.

That history begins in 1908, five years after the Wright Brothers flew the first powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville and Wilbur Wright flew from Roosevelt Field and are featured in the mural. So is aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss.

Earle Ovington, who became the first airmail pilot when he flew a satchel filled with 640 letters and 1,280 postcards from Garden City to Mineola on Sept. 23, 1911, tossing it overboard from 500 feet because there was nowhere to land, is painted with his Bleriot XI.

Prominent is Belgian champion cyclist Helene Dutrieu, the "Girl Hawk," who, in 1910, became just the fourth woman in the world to earn a pilot’s license. She was also the first female military pilot ever.

The first licensed female pilot in America, Harriet Quimby, learned to fly on Long Island and is featured. Quimby was the first woman to fly across the English Channel, one day after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

Amid the gallery of history-makers are: Amelia Earhart, Thomas Sopwith, Roland Garros, Giuseppe M. Bellanca, Walter Fairchild, Chance Vought, Lincoln Beachey, Gen. Billy Mitchell, Igor Sikorsky, Rene Fonck and Admiral Richard Byrd, first to fly over the North Pole.

Included is one of the first licensed flight instructors on Long Island, Shakir S. Jerwan.

Little-known is that during World War I, Jerwan taught future Guatemalan President Jose Miguel Ramon Ydigoras Fuentes to fly. It was Ydigoras who allowed the CIA to train the Cuban exile force used in the failed 1961 invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

Saving the mural

Roosevelt Field closed in 1951 to begin construction of the Roosevelt Field mall.

Fearing her mural would be lost when Hangar F was slated for destruction in 1960, Rhonie brought Leonetto Tintori, a noted art professor from Florence, Italy, to Long Island to save her work.

Detailed in a 1960 booklet titled "The Pre-Lindbergh Era of American Aviation: A Fresco Mural by Aline Rhonie," Tintori did so in an elaborate process using "special glues" applied on cheesecloth and nylon netting, peeling the sealed artwork off in paneled sections, while taking off "only the thinnest possible layer of paint mixed with marble."

These sections were then applied to lightweight, laminated Masonite panels attached to wooden backing.

As that booklet noted: "Over 90% of all flying in the United States from 1908 to 1927 was done on Long Island, and every plane which research proved had flown in the area was faithfully depicted according to its importance at that time."

Rhonie suffered from chronic asthma and, compounded by emphysema, she died Jan. 7, 1963, in Palm Beach, Florida at age 53.

Following her death, Long Island Early Fliers Education Foundation, now based at the Bayport Aerodrome (Rhonie was Fliers member No. 35; current president Mark Loiacono is No. 690) took out bank loans to purchase the mural from the Rhonie estate, hoping to make it, as Rhonie once hoped, the centerpiece of an aviation museum in Nassau County.

The mural was first stored at Sands Point Preserve. Later, Loiacono said, it was lent to Vaughn College.

Now, Loiacono is thrilled to see it headed to the Cradle of Aviation.

"All the things the early aviators, the early barnstormers did?" Loiacono said. "Back then, it was to take your life in your hands to go flying and preserving that iconic piece of Long Island aviation history — of Long Island history — is important because of that."

Said Stoff: "This mural is Aline Rhonie trying to piece together the story from talking to people who were actually there, telling her this person flew this airplane and this historic event happened at Roosevelt Field. It’s almost like an oral history of the period that ended up as a mural ... That’s fascinating."

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”