Bergstrom's Bomber Base

Austin's airport is a converted bomber base, and the runways beneath the airliners were laid out in 1942. It opened that September as Del Valle Army Air Base, on three thousand acres leased from the city, and in March 1943 it was renamed for Captain John August Earl Bergstrom. He was an Austin man, serving as an administrative officer with the 19th Bombardment Group at Clark Field in the Philippines, and he was killed there on the eighth of December, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, in the attack that destroyed most of the American air strength in the Pacific. He was the first Austinite to die in the war. His former employer, Austin National Bank, pressed the case for the name, and their congressman, Lyndon Johnson, took it to the Army Air Force. It became Bergstrom Air Force Base in 1948 and spent the Cold War flying reconnaissance aircraft and later fighters, closing on the thirtieth of September, 1993, when the land reverted to the city. Austin's old airport, Robert Mueller, was hemmed in by neighbourhoods and could not be extended, so the city moved out here, and Austin Bergstrom International opened in May 1999. Everyone in Texas says the name several times a year without thinking about it. It belongs to a man who was thirty four when he was killed and who never came home.