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Henry Malcolm Carberry, known as Mal Carberry, was born July 15, 1904 in Los Angeles, California.
As a boy he lived on a farm and worked there as a paper boy. He left home at the age of sixteen
to travel to San Francisco, California. Mal worked for Eddie Rickenbocker Motor Sales as a
mechanic and later as a shop manager. By the age of twenty-one, he had his own auto repair shop
called the Mal Carberry Company.
Mal learned to fly in the mid to late 1920's. He earned his pilot license in 1928 and began
flying commercial airlines for Continental Airlines in 1929. Mal flew the San Francisco to Los
Angles route in a Ford Tri-Motor airplane which was an eight hour trip.
After Mal's career as an airline pilot he moved on to become a crop dusting pilot. He flew
crop dusters in Imperial Valley, California; the Phoenix, Arizona farmland area; and even down
into Mexico. He was one of the first pilots in the United States to perform crop dusting at
night.
While working in Arizona he met and married Martha Marie Busch in August of 1936. During this
period of time in Mal's life, he also had the Cessna Airplane Distributorship for the entire
West coast. While traveling across the desert on their honeymoon, Martha Carberry named the
distributorship Air-Oasis. Mal would take the train to Wichita, Kansas and fly the new
planes back to Chandler Field in Fresno, California.
After Mal and Martha were married they lived in Brawley, California where he crop dusted
during the winter farm season and then come to Fresno in the summer to work in the Central
Valley.
By the early 1940's, Mal had so much crop dusting work in the central valley of California
that he built a large airplane hangar on West Belmont Avenue in Fresno. He moved Air-Oasis
as well as his crop dusting business, Carberry Crop Dusters, from Chandler Field to the new
Belmont Hangar in 1941.
In 1949, Mal began farming under the name of Air-Way Farms, Inc.
Mal sold the Air-Oasis distributorship in 1952, however, he continued running and developing
the farming and dusting operations until he passed away in May 1973.
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