Aviation School, North Island, San Diego, Cal. Picture shows Major John Purroy Mitchel, S.R.C.A.S., Ex-Mayor of New York City and his classmates being instructed on the airplane motor at North Island, San Diego, Cal. (Major Mitchel – is standing on the right near the display) Date: 3/14/1918.

John Purroy Mitchel: The "Boy Mayor" of New York who died in WWI

By Harry Kidd
via the National Archives' Unwritten Record blog web site

This post was written by Harry Kidd. Harry is a volunteer at the National Archives working on textual and photographic digitization projects. Harry is a former Navy photographer himself and came across this story while researching military photographers.

John Purroy Mitchel (1879 – 1918) was a native New Yorker. Trained as a lawyer, he gained wide recognition as a reformer who began investigating corruption, incompetence, waste and inefficiency in the city government in 1906. With the support of the anti-Tammany force, he was elected president of the Board of Aldermen in 1909 where he enacted fiscal reforms.

In 1913, based on his efforts to improve the efficiency of government operations, he was nominated as the Republican candidate for mayor. At the age of 34 he was the second youngest person elected mayor and often referred to as “The Boy Mayor of New York.”

Mitchel served as mayor from 1914 – 1917. After failing to win re-election, he enlisted in the Army Air Service as a flying cadet. He completed training in San Diego and was promoted to major.

On the morning of July 6, 1918, Mitchel was returning from a military training flight to Gerstner Field, Louisiana when his single seater scout plane went into a nose dive and crashed. The former mayor was unfastened in the plane and fell to his death at age 38.

Read the entire article on the Unwritten Record blog here:

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