Embry-Riddle Celebrates 40 Years in Daytona Beach

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Embry-Riddle Celebrates 40 Years in Daytona Beach

Daytona Beach, Fla., April 15, 2005 -- On April 25, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University celebrates the 40th anniversary of its relocation to Daytona Beach from Miami, a move that helped the school go from near extinction to its present status as the world’s premier aerospace university.

Begun in 1926 at Lunken Field near Cincinnati, Ohio, Embry-Riddle over the years established locations at several Florida airfields during World War II, with headquarters at Tamiami Field in Miami. When it became necessary for the then Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Institute to leave Miami, a Daytona Beach civic group took note.

“We heard that a flying school wanted to leave South Florida,” recalls Gary Cunningham, then owner of Cunningham Oil and chairman of the Committee of 100. Made up of local businessmen and civic leaders, the group was interested in expanding the Daytona Beach economy beyond its reliance on tourism and agriculture.

Although Embry-Riddle did not fit the Committee of 100’s industrial profile, Embry-Riddle’s president, Jack Hunt, promoted the potential value of his institute and what it could do for Daytona Beach. “Hunt’s enthusiasm was infectious,” says Cunningham, who set to work trying to bring the school to his community.

“Embry-Riddle filled the bill of what we were looking for,” says attorney Phil Elliott, who was the committee’s vice chairman. “It attracted people of education, people who would contribute to the culture of the community. It brought fresh money in the form of tuition revenues from students. It used existing facilities and built in the community. While not an industry as such, education was in many ways better for what the committee was seeking.”

Several Florida cities, including Melbourne, Ormond Beach, Sebring, and Tampa, were rivals as the future site of Embry-Riddle. In fact, a deal had almost been made with Ormond Beach when negotiations fell through. Meanwhile, the aeronautical institute was required to promptly leave Miami.

Cunningham told Norm Hickey, then Daytona Beach city manager, “I have about 32 trucks loaded with Embry-Riddle, and nowhere to go. Do you have any place we can put them on the Daytona Airport?” Hickey committed several old WWII-era metal buildings and sent city employees over to clean them out.

Longtime Embry-Riddle faculty member Chandler Titus remembers that the institute’s entire engine and overhaul repair shop was packed in one box. “When we packed to come north, we brought everything that wasn’t tied down,” he says. “I remember unloading 55-gallon garbage drums with the trash still in them.”

Before long, business leaders realized the institute was suffering severe financial hardship. Cunningham and businessman Jay Adams worked feverishly, influencing about 70 friends and local business people to sign promissory notes of approximately $1,000 as collateral for a bank loan to Embry-Riddle in the amount of $75,000.

“Every day during that first year there was a reason it wouldn’t work,” said Committee of 100 member Fred Thelman. “A Harvard MBA student would say there is just absolutely no way. But, of course, it’s here!”

Within five years of the move to Daytona Beach, the institute was accredited and became a university. Embry-Riddle has evolved since then from a small, financially strapped institute with 239 students into a world-famous university that educates more than 30,000 students on campuses in Daytona Beach and Prescott, Ariz., at more than 130 teaching centers in the United States and Europe, and through distance learning.

Adams said, “Gary Cunningham, Jack Hunt, and many of the others who were involved are risk takers. While you may fail, you may also have a great success like this one. This is the sort of story that makes you realize risk taking is very much worthwhile.”

“I’m glad I had the opportunity to be a part of something as important as Embry-Riddle has been and will be to this community, the nation, and the world,” Elliott says. “I think it’s a world-class institution.”

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the world’s largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace, offers more than 30 degree programs in its colleges of Arts and Sciences, Aviation, Business, and Engineering and meets the needs of students and industry through educational, training, research, and consulting activities. Embry-Riddle educates more than 30,000 students annually in undergraduate and graduate programs at residential campuses in Prescott, Ariz., and Daytona Beach, Fla., through the Extended Campus at more than 130 centers in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, and through distance learning.