From The Vicksburg Post
Dedication of aviation room at Tallulah museum set for today
By Paul Bryant
[11/4/06] TALLULAH - A 19th-century house in the middle of town holds artifacts and memorabilia on Teddy Roosevelt's bear hunt, the 1927 flood that ravished Madison Parish and America's first black woman millionaire.
Today, the Hermione Museum will dedicate its aviation room, saluting the late pilot Merle B. Gustafson and other flyers who contributed to aviation in Madison Parish.
“Gustafson was a famous pilot in the Confederate Air Force,” said Geneva Williams, the museum's director. “He is a legend around here.”
Dozens of photographs of World War I pilots who went to Tallulah to help eradicate the boll weevil line the room. Models of planes used over the parish hang in corners. One of Gustafson's Air Force uniforms is on display.
Gustafson “was really well known all over the country and loved in the aviation community,” Williams said. “He was a featured aerial performer at many air shows throughout the country. In addition to this, he was also owner of a local crop-dusting service for many years.”
According to wikipedia.com, Gustafson began his air show career in the 1960s in a North American AT-6 Texan. Later, he began flying more advanced aircraft, such as the North American P-51D Mustang.
In 1975, Pennzoil filmed a documentary about his life, called “The Country Boy,” and the oil company used segments of the footage in commercials the following year.
Nine years later, though, Gustafson was killed in an accident not related to aviation.
“He was welding on a shrimp boat,” Williams said.
Gustafson moved to Tallulah in 1939 from Devils Lake, N.D. He graduated from Tallulah High School in 1951 and attended Louisiana Tech University before entering Spartan College of Aeronautics in Tulsa, Okla.
After graduating from Spartan, Gustafson returned to Tallulah, where he flew a crop duster and farmed.
His son, Steve Gustafson, still lives in Madison Parish. A farmer, he is also one of four pilots who performs with AeroShell Aerobatic Team, and owns Scott Airport.
Steve Gustafson was out of town and could not be reached for comment.
“One thing people don't realize is that Madison Parish has a long, rich aviation heritage,” Charles Michael Finlayson, a Madison Parish historian, said. “People locally have forgotten about it, and it is largely unknown by people outside this area.”
Finlayson is one of several Hermione volunteers who has helped create the aviation room.
“Half the pictures in there are the ones I gave them on loan,” he said. “The room has turned out pretty nice.”
Williams said volunteers hope the aviation room stays open beyond its two-year schedule.
“We're going for two years, but maybe it will stay longer. This will probably be a continuing exhibit.”
The Hermione house was built in 1855 and used as a hospital by forces under the command of Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. It is one of four Madison Parish structures still standing that were built before the Civil War, museum literature says.
It originally stood near Milliken's Bend, the site of a battle in Grant's campaign for Vicksburg. In 1997, it was donated to the historical society and moved to downtown Tallulah, where it stands today.
Aviation in Madison Parish
Now the world's second-largest passenger airline, Delta began as Delta Air Service. It was charged with eradicating the boll weevil, a tiny insect from Mexico that was destroying cotton crops in 1907.
The federal government intervened, and the U.S. Government Experiment Station was opened two years later in Tallulah. Dr. Bert Coad, a noted entomologist, was sent to the experiment station to direct the test against the pest in 1916, according to notes by Madison Parish Historical Society member John Earl Martin. Helping in the fight was C.E. Woolman, then the parish's agricultural extension agent.
Scott Airport, on 100 acres about five miles east of Tallulah, was developed as a base for Air Corps pilots to test application of pesticides from the air - an entirely new idea. The airport building was built by Standard Oil Company in 1923 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
After Coad learned of experiments using U.S. Army Air Corps planes to apply a chemical to fight the sphinx moth on catalpa trees in Ohio, he asked for and received Air Corps help to try similar experiments against the weevils.
The station, which closed in 1973, employed about 100 people. It was “in some respects the only one of its kind; and in any case is believed to be the largest of its kind in the country,” county resident William M. Murphy wrote in 1927.
Scott Airport later became the first municipal airport in Louisiana and was state-of-the-art for its time, Martin wrote. The Army also used the airport as a refueling stop on the route between air bases near San Antonio, Texas, and Montgomery, Ala., Williams said.
A 1923 refueling stop in Tallulah by an airplane-manufacturing executive led to a key meeting.
“George B. Post, vice-president of Huff Daland Airplanes of Ogdensburg, N.Y., landed his airplane in Tallulah en route to a business meeting in Texas,” a story in Delta's Sky magazine on the airline's 50th anniversary said. “Upon meeting Coad and Woolman, he became intrigued by the dusting experiment and saw it as a possible new market for selling airplanes, which, until that time, were primarily used by the military.”
On Post's initiative, Huff Daland began manufacturing crop dusting planes. It formed a separate division, Huff Daland Dusters, that was first based in Macon, Ga. The division was soon moved to Monroe, La., where Woolman took over as field manager.
Under Woolman the business succeeded, and he expanded it to Peru, in South America, to take advantage of the reversed seasons there.
“In 1928, Woolman returned to Monroe from Peru, only to find a representative from the New York office trying to sell the dusting division to bail the parent company out of financial trouble,” the Sky story said. “Recognizing that the crop-dusting business made a substantial contribution to the community, a group of Monroe businessmen joined with Woolman and bought out the Huff Daland interest.”
It was then the company was renamed “Delta Air Service.”
The company “inaugurated its first U.S. passenger service on June 17, 1929, with five-passenger ‘Travel Air' airplanes,” Sky said. Its first passenger flight was between Dallas and Jackson with stops in Shreveport and Monroe.
The route was extended in June 1930 to Atlanta, which was already the South's fastest-growing city and is known worldwide as Delta's key hub.
Coad joined the company as chief entomologist in 1931 and ran its crop-dusting operation until it was discontinued 35 years later.
Woolman became president of the company, and its name was changed to Delta Air Lines in 1945.
Delta discontinued its crop-dusting operation in 1966, the year Woolman died. Coad also died in the late 1960s.
Scott Airport remains an agricultural-flying center, as the home of Ag-Aero Inc., a crop-dusting business once owned by Steve Gustafson. The Louisiana State government funded renovations to the field's 3,000-foot runway in about 1998, he said.
Delta Air Lines now flies to 461 cities in 96 countries.
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I sure miss ole Merle
Robbie
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I wish I new where I could get a copy of "Country Boy" myself.
] and would like to find at least one other. I'm not sure if anyone can help me by providing any additional information but if anyone could I would greatly appreciate it. 
