Appalachian Figures
On a hot July evening in 1935 a little Curtiss Robin monoplane drifted out of a hazy Mississippi sky and settled onto the grass outside Meridian. Two men climbed from the cockpit, unshaven and hollow eyed, and forty-odd thousand people surged forward to greet them. For twenty seven days the brothers Al and Fred Key had circled above the town in their airplane Ole Miss, kept alive by a steady stream of fuel, food, and spare parts winched up from another plane. Their marathon flight set a world endurance record that still stands for a conventional airplane and it saved Meridian’s struggling airport from being plowed back into cotton.
For Meridian, the Keys became hometown heroes. For the U. S. military they helped prove that in-flight refueling could work safely. For historians, though, Al Key’s story begins not at Key Field but in the red soil and hard history of neighboring Kemper County, a rural place better known in the early twentieth century as “Bloody Kemper.”
Kemper County Roots
Algene Earl “Al” Key was born on a farm in Kemper County on 8 February 1905, the eldest son of country doctor Elmore Benjamin Key and Mary Ola Love (often recorded as Mary Ola Olivier) Key. Census and genealogical records show the family anchored in Kemper’s countryside, part of a network of small farms, crossroads stores, and country churches that tied the county together before the paved roads and power lines arrived.
Kemper County itself carried a grim reputation in those years. Historians and journalists alike have noted its nickname “Bloody Kemper,” a reference not to colorful courthouse politics but to a long record of mob violence and lynching that left deep scars on Black communities. That was the world in which young Al grew up: a largely agricultural county, racially stratified and often violent, where access to opportunity depended heavily on family position, land, and education.
Within that landscape the Keys stood out for education and professional status. Elmore Key practiced medicine in the county, and Al would later attend Hattiesburg Normal School and Mississippi A & M College, today the University of Southern Mississippi and Mississippi State University. Yet his imagination seems to have been captured less by textbooks than by a new technology roaring overhead.
In a later interview, remembered through the Mississippi Moments radio series built from his 1973 oral history, Al recalled how Army training planes out of a nearby World War I field sometimes lost their way and dropped out of the sky into the family pasture. Watching the biplanes land and take off from Kemper County soil convinced him, in his own words, that he wanted to fly.
Learning to Fly in the Interwar South
Like many small town Southerners who caught the aviation bug in the 1920s, Al and his younger brother Fred had to look far from home for formal training. Both earned their pilot’s licenses at the Nicholas Beazley Flying School in Missouri, one of the region’s better known commercial flying academies.
By the end of the decade the brothers were back in Mississippi, working as barnstormers and mechanics and gradually edging into the new world of municipal airports. Around 1930 Meridian opened a modest field with a grass runway, hoping to land a spot on the expanding airline map. The city hired the Key brothers as co-managers, and Al and Fred moved with their wives into an apartment above the terminal.
The timing could hardly have been worse. The Great Depression slashed passenger traffic and tax revenues. By 1934, city leaders were openly discussing shutting the airport down and returning the land to cotton. For two Kemper County farm boys who had worked their whole adult lives to reach the cockpit, the idea of watching their field vanish under a plow was unbearable.
Planning a Flight No One Could Ignore
Faced with unemployment, the brothers decided that if Meridian would not come to the airport, the airport would go to Meridian. They proposed a stunt that newspapers and radio stations could not resist: break the world record for sustained flight over the city and force people to look up.
The existing endurance mark stood at twenty three days, set by the Hunter brothers of Chicago. To beat it the Keys needed not only stamina but a safer system for in-flight refueling. Working with local mechanic and inventor A. D. Hunter and with pilot James Keeton, they borrowed a Curtiss Robin J-1 Deluxe, a high wing monoplane powered by a 165 horsepower Wright Whirlwind engine, and began modifying it for a month in the air.
They added a one hundred fifty gallon fuel tank and built a narrow catwalk along the wing so that one brother could crawl out and service the engine in flight. They cut a sliding hatch into the cabin roof so supplies could be lowered down from the refueling plane. Most important, Hunter helped them design a “spill free” fueling nozzle that would not allow gasoline to flow unless it was firmly seated in the receiving tank. If the hose slipped, the flow stopped instantly.
This simple mechanism, born from the need to keep a farm boy’s airplane from catching fire over Meridian, would influence military aviation for generations. The Army Air Corps adopted versions of the valve during World War II, and Air Force historians note that later refueling tankers, including the KC-135, still rely on an evolved form of the same basic idea.
June 1935: Twenty Seven Days over Meridian
After two failed attempts in 1934 the Keys tried again the following summer. On 4 June 1935, at 12:32 p.m., they lifted off from Meridian’s grass strip in the now renamed Ole Miss while a small crowd and a radio audience listened in.
For almost four weeks Ole Miss traced looping patterns above the town and surrounding countryside. The brothers took turns at the controls and on the catwalk, snatching short naps in the cabin and eating meals hauled up from the refueling plane, which Hunter and Keeton flew on carefully timed rendezvous. Their wives, Louise and Evelyn, cooked much of the food that dangled beneath the second airplane on the end of a rope.
The flight was not a serene cruise. Thunderstorms buffeted the little monoplane, grime and fuel fumes inflamed the brothers’ eyes, and more than once the Robin came uncomfortably close to colliding with its refueling partner. At one point an electrical fire broke out in the cabin. Yet day after day, listeners across Mississippi heard radio bulletins on their progress and sometimes live broadcasts of the rumbling engine overhead.
A history of Mississippi broadcasting preserves one of the most vivid primary glimpses into the moment the record finally fell. On 1 July 1935, Hattiesburg announcer Bob McRaney was reading baseball scores over station WPFB when a ticker tape message arrived: “Flash… Key Brothers ended their successful endurance flight at 6:05 P.M. Official number flight hours 653 hours and 35 minutes.” McRaney saved the tape, which is still displayed with photographs and clippings in the lobby at Key Field.
The official figures were astonishing. Over twenty seven days the Keys remained aloft for 653 hours and 34 minutes, covering an estimated 52,320 miles, roughly twice the circumference of the earth. The Wright Whirlwind engine turned more than sixty one million revolutions and burned some six thousand gallons of fuel and three hundred gallons of oil.
When Ole Miss finally landed at 6:06 p.m., somewhere between thirty and thirty five thousand people crowded along the field to cheer. Within weeks Meridian’s leaders not only abandoned plans to close the airport but officially renamed it Key Field in honor of the brothers whose flight had put the town “at the center of the aviation universe” for 39,214 minutes.
Today the little Robin hangs in the “Golden Age of Flight” gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D. C., its fuselage still painted with the “Key Bros. Endurance Plane” markings and the tally of hours that no other conventional aircraft has surpassed.
From Key Field to Combat
The record flight was only one chapter of Al Key’s life. By the late 1930s he was helping organize the Mississippi Air National Guard, one of the earliest state air units in the country.
When the United States entered World War II, that Guard squadron quickly moved into federal service. Military records compiled by the Air & Space Forces Magazine and later biographical summaries show that Al served as a heavy bomber pilot in both the Pacific and European theaters, eventually commanding the 66th Bombardment Squadron of the 44th Bomb Group, which flew B-24 Liberators from England.
In December 1942 he led one of the many hazardous missions against targets in Nazi occupied Europe. Contemporary newspaper coverage and his Distinguished Service Cross citation credit him with extraordinary skill and coolness in bringing a badly damaged bomber back from that raid, saving his crew and aircraft. By war’s end he had accumulated a Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and seven Bronze Stars, along with British decorations for his role in joint operations.
Fred Key also served as a bomber pilot, flying one hundred combat missions and logging roughly five hundred combat hours in the Pacific. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service.
Mayor of Meridian and Keeper of Key Field
Al remained in uniform after the war, moving into higher command and staff roles as the Army Air Forces became the U. S. Air Force. At the time of his retirement in 1960 he was a full colonel and deputy commander in the Air Force’s communications and airways system based at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.
Back in Mississippi he shifted from military command to city politics. In 1965 Meridian voters elected him mayor, and the Clarion-Ledger marked what it called a “real red letter day” in his life by reminding readers of his Kemper County roots, world record flight, and wartime record. He won reelection in 1969, serving until 1973.
Those mayoral years unfolded during a bitter era of school desegregation fights and economic shifts in Mississippi, and researchers interested in that side of his story will find rich material in his 1973 oral history for the University of Southern Mississippi. In that interview he reflected on everything from organizing the Mississippi Air National Guard to his time as Meridian’s civil defense director and mayor, along with portraits of other state politicians and pioneer aviators he had known.
Al died in Meridian on 17 July 1976, two weeks after an automobile accident. His obituary noted the arc of his life from a Kemper County farm to the cockpit of war time bombers and the mayor’s office, and it reminded readers that the airport where he had once lived in an upstairs apartment still bore his family’s name.
Fred had preceded him in death in 1971, after decades running Key Brothers Flying Service at Key Field and training new generations of Mississippi pilots.
Memory, Artifacts, and a Kemper County Legacy
For all its national significance, the story of the Flying Keys is still rooted in Kemper and Lauderdale counties. The National Park Service’s writeup of the Old Terminal Building, Hangar, and Powerhouse at Key Field notes that the complex is listed on the National Register of Historic Places not only for its role in the record flight and World War II training but also as a rare surviving example of an early municipal airport built largely by local labor.
Inside the modern terminal, the Key Brothers Aviation Museum displays photographs, plaques, and a model of Ole Miss alongside the original Whirlwind engine and the ticker tape from that July 1935 radio bulletin. The James H. Keeton papers preserved in regional archives add a support pilot’s perspective to the story, with correspondence and documents from the man who flew the refueling plane.
Back in Washington, the Smithsonian’s Curtiss Robin hangs as a national artifact, yet the Mississippi Encyclopedia entry on Al and Fred Key reminds us that the flight itself grew out of very local concerns: two working pilots trying to keep a small southern airport open during the Depression.
For those interested in the Kemper County angle, local history compilations such as Kemper County: Sesquicentennial Celebration, 1833-1983, as well as county level theses and genealogical collections, provide glimpses of the wider world that shaped the Key family’s early years, including the violent racial climate summed up in the phrase “Bloody Kemper.”
Taken together, the artifacts at Key Field, the Ole Miss in the Smithsonian, and the oral history tapes in Hattiesburg show how a boyhood fascination with biplanes landing in a Kemper County pasture could ripple outward. The same farm kid who watched wayward trainers touch down on his father’s land helped pioneer mid-air refueling, flew heavy bombers against Axis targets, and came home to serve as mayor of the town whose sky he once circled for nearly a month.
For Appalachian and upland-South historians, Al Key’s life offers a reminder that rural counties along the region’s margins were not only sending young men into coal camps and cotton fields. They were also sending them into the sky.
Sources & Further Reading
Al Key oral history interview, vol. 83, 1973, Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, University of Southern Mississippi.University of Southern Mississippi
Mississippi Moments Podcast, MSM 681, “Colonel Al Key – From B-17 Pilot to Bomber Project Officer,” compiled from the 1973 interviews.Mississippi Moments+1
Bob McRaney, History of Radio in Mississippi (c. 1970s), especially chapter on the 1935 Key Brothers endurance flight and preserved ticker tape.World Radio History
“Algene Earl Key,” Namesakes: Key Field ANGB – Algene Earl Key, Air & Space Forces Magazine special issue (2017).Air & Space Forces Magazine
Military decorations and wartime service summaries in “The Flying Keys” and “Al Key” entries on Wikipedia, drawing on War Department general orders and York Daily News-Times coverage of his Distinguished Service Cross.Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2
National Park Service, “Old Terminal Building, Hangar and Powerhouse at Key Field,” National Register of Historic Places documentation.
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum artifact file: Curtiss Robin J-1 Deluxe Ole Miss (A19560041000).Geneanet
Family tree of Al Key (Algene Earl Key) with parents Elmore Benjamin Key and Mary Ola Love Key, Geneastar / Geneanet.Geneanet+1
Kemper County genealogical and local history collections, including Kemper County: Sesquicentennial Celebration, 1833-1983, Kemper County Historical Association.Mississippi Encyclopedia+1
Lauderdale County Archives, “People and Events During World War II (1939-1945)” and “Now As I Remember…,” for wartime training at Key Field and local recollections of Fred and Al Key.Lauderdale County Archives+1
James H. Keeton Papers, 1934-1988, Archives West, for documents and correspondence from the pilot of the refueling plane during the endurance flight.Air and Space Museum
David L. Weatherford, “Al and Fred Key,” Mississippi Encyclopedia (online edition).Mississippi Encyclopedia
“Kemper County,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, for background on the county’s social and economic history.Mississippi Encyclopedia
“Al Key” and “The Flying Keys,” Wikipedia, for synthesized timelines and bibliographies pointing back to newspapers and military records.Wikipedia+1
“The Key Brothers,” MadeInMississippi.us, drawing on Meridian Regional Airport history.
Key Brothers and Key Field coverage from Meridian Star and WTOK-TV, including modern anniversary articles and features on the Key Brothers Aviation Museum.
Stephen Owen, The Flying Key Brothers and Their Flight to Remember (Golden Anniversary ed., 1985), for a book-length narrative based on interviews and local records.Mississippi Encyclopedia
Discussions of “Bloody Kemper” and racial violence in Kemper County in Reconstruction and twentieth century Mississippi, including M. B. Connolly’s thesis on Reconstruction in Kemper County and modern journalistic accounts.ODU Digital Commons+2The Marshall Project+2