Chicago Tribune, Sunday, May 24, 1998 OBITUARIES
        George Grundy, 99, final aviation Early Bird pioneer
     LEESBURG, Fla.-George D. Grundy Jr., the last of the world's
 earliest fliers, died Tuesday in a Leesburg nursing home. He was
 99 and had been the sole surviving member of the Eary Birds, aa
 international organization of aviation pioneers.
     He buzzed his share of people and livestock on Staten Island,
 taught flying for a while, flew for a couple of silent movies and
 even did some wing walking at air shows.
     But for Mr. Grundy, aviation was little more than a youthful
 fling before settling down in his father's real estate business and
 becoming a fixture on the squash courts at the New York Athlete
 Club.
     Still, Mr Grundy qualified as an aviation pioneer an aviation
 pioneer with luminaries such as Orville Wright, Glenn Curtiss and
 Thomas Sopwith simply because he made his first solo flight on Sept.
 17, 1916, three months before the cutoff for membership in the
 Ear1y Birds.
     The organization, which once included 598 men and women who had
 flown so]o -- some in hot-air balloons -- before Dec. l7, 1916, was
 formed in Chicago in 1928. The date, the 13th anniversary of tbe
 Wright brothers' first flight, was chosen as the cutoff because by
 the next anniversary hundreds of new fliers had been attracted to
 aviation by the entry of the United States into World War I.
     Some of them, indeed, were trained by Mr. Grundy although, to
 hear him tell it, it did not take much training to turn out a pilot
 in those days. As a teenage instructor at his father's school, Mr.
 Grundy charged $1 an hour for a 10-hour course.
     As a flying school pioneer, the senior Grundy was strictly a
 businessman, one who opened a popular dance studio at the old Grand
 Central Palace, although he did not dance, and later created the
 Staten Island Aviation School, although he never flew.
     The younger Grundy made his solo fIight a few months after his
 18th birthday in a wooden two-seat Benoist biplane and later flew
 a series of other planes, sometimes taking passengers aloft for a
 fee.
     Because of an inheritance from his grandmother, Mr. Grundy was
 spared the need to make a living. but he coutinued putting in an
 appearance at his father's office for years before retiring to
 Florida.
     On his 99th birthday last year, Mr. Grundy, by then one of only
 two surviving members of the Early Birds, was presented with an
 Early Birds pin that had orbited the earth aboard the space shuttle
 Atlantis a month earlier. The other Early Bird survivor, Walter J.
 Addems, died in November.
 New York Times News Service
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