Mary Haizlip
“Argggh,” said Crosson. “I hate ‘you can’t miss it’ ’cause it jinxes so you do!”
They took the tight turn out of the airport in a skid, much too fast for the fog and growing darkness, and headed toward the field the line boy had described. No one wanted to talk about their fears that they would find a wrecked airplane and injured pilot. There were a couple of fence posts down and some airport types looking toward the dark outline of an airplane in the field. It was an enclosed cockpit airplane, high wing with two seats side-by-side—a Monocoupe. Thaden knew Haizlip would be flying a three-place open-cockpit American Eagle biplane. Phoebe Omlie was the only pilot entered in a Monocoupe. She had to be the “dope smuggler.”
The women rushed to find Omlie, who was overwhelmed to see them. She was detained by the sheriff, who knew nothing about flying, much less women pilots. She needed some supporters.
“I’ve been flying around trying to locate the airport in the dark,” she said, “but the lights were apparently off. Since I was low on fuel, I picked out a dark spot, hoping it was a hay field, and landed. What a blessing that the field was fairly smooth, with no potholes to fall into. I taxied up to the lights of a house, and a farmer and his boys helped me tie the airplane down for the night. About that time, the sheriff arrived. He’s accusing me of running dope, but he’s having a heck of a time finding any!”
Thaden had to giggle at Omlie’s predicament. One of the most admired and experienced women pilots in the country had become the victim of mistaken identity and was in trouble with the law. By that time, the sheriff recognized Amelia Earhart, and fortunately her fame helped smooth the way for Omlie. Earhart told the skeptical officer that the women were in town for a transcontinental air race, “and this woman will most likely win it, ’cause she was the first female transport pilot licensed in this country and the most accomplished of us all.” She went on, “The only reason she landed at this out-of-the-way pasture is because the lights aren’t on at the airport, which is only six miles away. We all vouch for her good character, and insist that you release Mrs. Omlie and go look for your smuggler elsewhere.” Aware of Omlie’s political connections with the top level of the Democratic Party, Thaden, with a twinkle in her eye, suggested to the lawman that he could also check with Franklin D. Roosevelt for an additional character reference. With a harrumph, the sheriff washed his hands of the whole thing and faded into the night.
Phoebe Omlie actually started her aviation career as a parachute jumper in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1921 at the age of eighteen. Her inauspicious inaugural jump left her hanging, unhurt, by her parachute shrouds from a tree. Three months later, she made it into the flying circus with a jump from 15,200 feet—almost three miles high and a world record. The teenage girl partnered with Glenn Messner, daredevil of the air. Together, they did any aerial stunt they could think up. Omlie wing-walked, stood on her head on the wing, hung by her teeth, changed planes in mid-air, swung on a trapeze, and perfected the double parachute jump. After the first chute opened, Omlie would cut it loose, free fall, then open the second chute.
By age twenty, Omlie had become the first woman to head up her own flying circus, a means to an end to save enough money for her own aviation business. Omlie learned to fly in 1922 and married her flight instructor the same year, not an unusual happenstance between a female student and her revered mentor. They settled in Memphis, established a commercial aviation business, and Phoebe, with an astonishing two thousand flying hours, became the first woman to hold a transport license. The year 1927 brought the great Mississippi River floods. Ground transportation was all but gone, and the Omlies gained both fame and gratitude for their aerial support for stranded citizens.
Two serious crashes failed to persuade Phoebe to quit flying. Once, when teaching someone how to fly, she was unable to get a “frozen” student off the controls. The two rode out a spin clear to the ground. Phoebe suffered fractures of the arms, legs, and skull, and she never quit. In 1928, a control problem led to a crash, and her legs were broken again. She walked with a cane during the 1929 air derby, but at least she was walking.
Phoebe Omlie
Phoebe’s dilemma with the local sheriff left the elusive Mary Haizlip, the original object of the hunt, still missing. But within a few hours, word arrived that she was, in fact, in Los Angeles, but without an airplane. Like Thaden, she had left Tulsa for the race start, but flying a stock model American Eagle with the newly approved Wright model J-6-7 radial engine. She encountered strong winds at Tucson, then landed, dragging a wing and bending the propeller, not an unusual event in the early years of aviation. The promised delivery of a replacement airplane had not materialized, and she was frantically tracking it down. Mary Haizlip, another early female transport pilot, had received more than a modicum of attention from the press, though they mistakenly and consistently referred to her as Mae.
Though Mary Haizlip and Marvel Crosson had never met, Louise Thaden was friends with both, and Crosson was happy to accompany Thaden out in the foggy darkness to look for their sister pilot. Of Marvel Crosson, one usually heard “Marvel and Joe” or “Joe and Marvel.” People described both Crosson and her pilot brother with “coal-black hair and flashing smiles.”
The Crosson kids grew up on a Kansas farm. Joe was coming up on eleven and Marvel was fourteen when they saw their first airplane. They never got over it. When the family moved to San Diego, Joe and Marvel each worked and saved $150—an enormous amount of money in those days—with which they bought the motorless wreck of a Curtiss N-9 seaplane. The two hid it behind their house and scrounged junkyards for parts to replace the floats with wheels. Next, they bought an old OX-5 engine for it from a boat dealer. When they tested the engine in the backyard, they simultaneously tested their mother’s love and patience by plastering her chickens up against the fence. Turned out of the yard, Marvel and Joe got help carting the airplane to the airfield where, surprisingly, it actually flew. Both Marvel and Joe soloed their hybrid craft, and they barnstormed together for several years before seeking their aviation fortune in Alaska.
In 1925, the Crossons actually got paid to fly. They were true pioneers in the brutal flying of the far north. Subsequently, just two months prior to the air derby, Marvel made the front page of the New York Times Pictorial magazine for setting a new women’s altitude record four feet short of 24,000 feet. Soon, Marvel became the first woman to apply for entry in the transcontinental air race and made a practice run over the entire route. Familiarity with the route and her vast flying experience made her a formidable competitor in her Speedwing Travel Air. Marvel Crosson’s plane had been the first of the racers’ planes off the assembly line and flown at the factory, and her brother Joe came out to get it. She got the fastest of the lot, a clipped wing single seater with one of the new Wright J-6-7 engines, clocked at 168 miles per hour. It was an exciting time to be flying, since her plane was one of tremendous innovation in aeronautics.
Marvel Crosson
The years between the wars were the golden years of aviation. By the year of the Women’s Air Derby, the old, war-weary Jennies were being deliberately destroyed. Airplanes had been dramatically improved, and prices fell below $1,000 for a trainer, so that ordinary people with flying fervor could own an airplane and learn to fly it. Ninety-six aircraft manufacturers delivered more than six thousand airplanes in 1929. The majority were open cockpit, but enclosed monoplanes were increasing in popularity. Production had increased 50 percent above the year before, and by the end of the year, more American plants were manufacturing airplanes than automobiles.
The armistice expressly forbade certain aviation activity in Germany, and as a result, the Germans were excluded from the development of powered aircraft. Instead, Germans were making extraordinary progress in innovative aerodynamics and glider flight.
American development of the dependable radial air-cooled Wright Whirlwind engine revolutionized aircraft propulsion. Ground-adjustable propellers l
ed to more efficient flight regimes. Next, the controllable-pitch, constant-speed propeller was developed, which could be adjusted in flight by the pilot to climb or descend as required. (A malfunctioning constant-speed prop took some blame for Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed accident in Hawaii on her first attempted flight around the world.)
More streamlined aircraft came next. Commercial cross-country travel had become a combination of flying, then transferring to a train at night, then back on an airplane the next morning. The first regularly scheduled carriage of passengers at night by air reduced their plane/train ride time by 75 percent. There were 27 major transport lines in 1929, and 80 big corporations were now so attuned to airplane travel that they approved employee expense accounts for business travel by air. The Department of Commerce issued 282 approved type certificates that year for aircraft designs meeting the government’s engineering requirements.
Looking ahead, in October following the air race, Lieutenant James Doolittle took off, flew, and landed successfully flying “blind,” with no reference to the ground. He utilized two-way radio communication and could follow a radio beacon to his destination. A Heinkel seaplane, catapulted from a ship, inaugurated the first ship-to-shore mail service. The General Electric Company was experimenting with an instrument called a radio altimeter that gave the exact height of the airplane above the ground. Westinghouse Electric produced a siren that turned on floodlights for a landing field through sound waves caught and amplified by a megaphone.
And it wasn’t all “winged” aircraft. Back in Cleveland, the Navy dirigible Los Angeles was moored to a mobile mast for the duration of the National Air Races. Successful demonstrations of airplane hook-ons to a trapeze apparatus hanging under the dirigible stunned the crowd. The idea was that the airship could be a refueling base for airplanes at sea. Excited spectators at the air races were convinced there could be no more fruitful time for aviation than 1929. The women air racers now gathering in Clover Field agreed.
Will Rogers and his sidekick, Wiley Post, were wandering around kicking tires to the delight of the racers who considered the two their own. Will Rogers was a Cherokee Indian whose ancestors had made the forced march in 1838 called the Trail of Tears in which one-quarter of the Cherokee Nation perished en route to the Indian Territory. Rogers liked to say, “My ancestors didn’t come on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.” Rogers was born in 1879 in the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma (in Choctaw language, okla homma meant “red people”).
Young Rogers’s father put together a cattle ranch, eventually totaling sixty thousand acres, where Willie reveled in ranch life, especially wrangling horses and swinging the lariat. In fact, that hobby led to Rogers’s expulsion from several boarding schools. Eventually, the U.S. government gave in to settlers pushing westward into the territory, and they bought out the Cherokee Strip. Each Indian got five annual payments of $367.50 in cash, and Rogers and his father together received just less than 150 acres of land. Their large ranch was now a small farm. Several blocks of land, on varying dates, were opened up to settlers who ran to make land claims upon a pistol shot signal. The “Boomers” ran at the shot. A few “Sooners” stole out early. This is the reason Oklahoma is called the Sooner State.
Rogers joined Texas Jack’s Wild West Circus billed as “The Cherokee Kid, Fancy Lasso Artist, and Rough Rider,” swinging the lariat for pay around the world. He eventually made the jump from Wild West shows to vaudeville with his novel act. The complexity of his rope tricks showed up later in his silent film, The Ropin’ Fool, in which he completed fifty-three different tricks. Discovering that his audiences loved to hear him talk during his act with his drawl and self-depreciating humor, Will Rogers became a humorous talker who spun a rope.
During Rogers’s gig with Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic, the popular humorist decided to talk about what he read in the papers. It was a huge hit, and with evolving topics, he had a new act every day. He worked for Florenz Ziegfeld for ten years on a handshake oral contract. And then it was time for the movies, which is why Will Rogers lived down the road from Clover Field, where the 1929 air derby started. His comments on the political events of the day (“Well, all I know is just what I read in the papers.”) had led to Rogers’s newspaper column and eventual syndication.
Will Rogers
After World War I, Will Rogers developed a great interest in aviation and concern about the government’s disinterest in commercial aviation. He began to fly constantly, one time even through a snowstorm with derby participant Blanche Noyes. He was fearless and determined to “see everything” from the air.
His friend Wiley Post had lived in Oklahoma working as a roughneck in the oil fields. An oil field accident in which Post lost his left eye brought $1,700 in compensation, money with which he quickly bought an airplane. Wiley Post learned to fly without depth perception, and he flew for two Oklahoma oil men—one bought a new Lockheed Vega (like Amelia Earhart’s) and named it the Winnie Mae after his daughter. The Wiley Post–flown Winnie Mae became one of the most famous airplanes in history, and today it hangs in the Smithsonian.
Post flew around the world in eight days for a world speed record, then he did it again. He also developed a pressure suit to be worn on high-altitude flights. Will Rogers saw to it that Claremore, Oklahoma, his hometown, built a landing field so that Rogers and Post could fly in and the town could pay allegiance to Oklahoma’s famous flyer.
Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post
The two Oklahoma boys who loved airplanes wouldn’t have missed the start of the women’s race. They volunteered to fly the route, carrying officials and extra luggage for the racers. They were the chief cheerleaders.
As the host airport operator for the start of the race, Clema Granger held off her own racing ambitions until the next year. She would do anything for her fellow women pilots, she reflected, but this organized mayhem was almost over the line. Mary Haizlip hadn’t made it in yet for the start of tomorrow’s race; besides, the clouds were too low to expect to see her tonight, and the sun had already fallen into the sea. Two entrants, Marjorie Crawford and Patty Willis, had withdrawn, and Jim had just taken a call from Kansan Mabel Waters saying that she wasn’t going to make it. The famous Irish pilot, Lady Mary Heath, had decided to enter some of the closed course competition at the terminus in Cleveland instead of flying the women’s race, so she wouldn’t be coming in either. The race sponsor, the National Exchange Club, was changing the route even at this late date, raising the volume of rumbles among the racers. Members of the press were underfoot everywhere. The takeoff banquet was late, there were airplanes to fuel, and somebody, as far as she knew, would have to get that dangerous “dope smuggler,” Phoebe Omlie, out of jail. Other than that, things were running pretty smoothly.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 1929
Banquet
Claremore, Oklahoma, is just waiting for a high-tension line so they can go ahead with locating an airport.
Yours, Will Rogers
Syndicated newspaper column
Get that goddamned midget ape outta here before I make a rug out of ’im.” Pancho Barnes had spied an official’s pet dog, and she was not impressed. Hosts and guests who gathered at the race headquarters’ hotel evening gala were stunned in surprise. Little did they grasp that Pancho Barnes’s singular flair was just unfolding.
In fact, to the jeweled and coifed National Exchange Club wives who came to fête the women air racers, the choice between gaping openly and impolitely at Barnes or simply letting a discreet glimpse suffice was a difficult one. Each of the racers was of an independent bent, but most conformed to a gentrified banquet dress code. However, Barnes was traveling light, with only her flying clothes, and she appeared at the banquet in jodhpurs and a beret, puffing as usual on her trademark black cigar. The fact that she was basically in her own hometown and had plenty of clothes in her closet was irrelevant.
“This is a solo pilot race, so ain’t no bare-ass copilot dog gonna help any son-of-a-bitch pilot who c
an’t keep the shiny side up and the pointy end headed east,” exclaimed Barnes, unleashing a continuing string of colorful and creative insults.
Florence Leontine Lowe “Pancho” Barnes came by her aviation genes through her grandfather, Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe, called by some the founding father of the U.S. Air Force.
As a fifteen-year-old, Thaddeus had served a mundane apprenticeship to a shoemaker in Boston, but his inherent curiosity and brilliant mind led to auspicious inventions. At a young age, Thad became entranced with hot air balloons, and his first effort in that direction was to send a cat up in a kite. The cat returned alive but enraged.
In 1857, Thaddeus constructed his first balloon and was soon taking passengers aloft for a tethered ride at a dollar each. Then he offered the thrill of free ballooning. He loved the quiet journey, the view of the earth below, and the dogs barking in confusion at the conversations coming from above.
Pancho Barnes. This photo is inscribed to 1929 air derby competitor Opal Kunz.
Thaddeus studied the upper air with its currents flowing like the sea, and he began preparation for a flight across the Atlantic Ocean, convinced that it could be done. He confidently petitioned the Smithsonian Institution, with backup evidence of charts and tables, to support his flight. Moving forward, a practice flight seemed in order, so Thaddeus shipped his balloon to Cincinnati, announcing a test flight to the East Coast to prove the feasibility of his planned ocean crossing.
The aeronaut had risen out of Cincinnati in his balloon named Enterprise, riding the air currents eastbound to twenty-two thousand feet. Nevertheless, unable to hold its altitude, the balloon barely made it over the Blue Ridge Mountains. When Thaddeus eventually spotted the Atlantic Ocean, he was satisfied that he had successfully completed his test flight and landed on what turned out to be Pea Ridge on the North Carolina–South Carolina border. He was in a lot more trouble than he could have imagined. While Thad was busy planning his test flight, six southern states led by South Carolina had seceded from the Union. On April 20, 1861, three days after Virginia seceded, northern-born Thaddeus Lowe dropped from the sky deep in the backwoods of Carolina.
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