Often overlooked is that the North American "J" in the USN designation system, SNJ, PBJ, comes from Berliner-Joyce the orginal tenent of the still standing home plant of North American in Dundalk. North American got the "J" because "N" was allocated to the NAF and Berliner-Joyce was the oldest part of North American with a USN manufacturers letter designation.
Tom-
Forgotten Field wrote:
I don't know if people knew this, but the O-47 was designed and test flown in Baltimore Maryland at Logan Field near Dundalk. I was talking to a WWII veteran and when we got to talking about where he lived, he said he lived right across from the North American hangar at the field. Right before the war, North American maintained a servicing hangar in the old production hangar. This guy said for some reason, the O-47's that came in for servicing would be flown in on the the weekend, and on Monday morning, first thing, the factory people would move the plane to the rear of the hangar to work on it. This made it necessary to park it with one wing sticking out over the street car line that took all the Sparrow's Point Bethlehem Steel workers to work. He said on more than one occasion, the streetcar would be stopped by the wing for a period of time long enough to get the people on the way to work agitated. He said that it would get to the point that all the workers would pour out of the streetcar and start shouting in all these different languages at the people in the hangar. He said it was funny to hear Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian, and other Eastern European curses, the North American people shouting back at them to get back on the bus while pushing the airplane out of the way.
I thought it was a neat story. North American Dundalk also built the Curtiss SOC floats.
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