But 1922 turned out to be yet another summer spent trying to make ends meet. They flew exhibitions across the upper Midwest: St. Paul, La Crosse, Grand Forks, Litchfield, Minnesota. The Hardins dropped out in late summer and the Omlies gradually drifted south: Caruthersville, Steele, Kennett, and Hayti, Missouri; Stuttgart, Arkansas; Dyersburg, Union City, and Dresden, Tennessee. They finished up at the Mid-South Fair in Memphis in the fall, discouraged and broke.107
Chapter Two
It was time to reassess their options. Two summers of barnstorming had failed to provide a viable income. The Omlies landed in Memphis in late fall, hoping the Mid-South Fair and local exhibitions would provide their last chance to make some money to see them through the winter, but bad weather kept them grounded as their meager funds trickled away. They had to hock their clothes and luggage to the Arlington Hotel where they were staying until they could resume flying and discharge their bill.1
They talked about settling down. Vernon wanted to make a living from aviation that didn’t involve stunting and daredevil flying. Like many barnstormers, his ultimate goal was to establish aviation as a legitimate business. Vernon, who had been briefly stationed at Millington’s Park Field during the war, recognized the potential for a warm weather base in the center of the country, and knew that the area’s reputation for being “air-minded” could accommodate a business like he envisioned.2
Air-mindedness was a kind of “air intoxication” that gripped Americans during the golden age of aviation in the early twentieth century. This romance with the endless possibilities of aviation is difficult to appreciate today when aviation is simply a transportation system. Air-mindedness embodied a sense of awe and mysticism, which gave rise to utopian hopes for the dawn of a New Age of progress and prosperity. So great was aviation’s impact on the national imagination that “Americans widely expected the airplane to foster democracy, equality and freedom,” wrote aviation historian Joseph Corn, “to improve public taste and spread culture; to purge the world of war and violence; and even to give rise to a new kind of human being.”3 The idea that somehow flying was divine, and aviation could lift people to a realm fundamentally different from the one in which they lived, literally swept its enthusiasts to flights of fancy about its potential to elevate human life to a metaphorical heaven.4 Almost since the advent of flight, certainly from the earliest days of exhibition flying, Memphis had been enthralled with aviation. Before the first decade of the twentieth century had passed, many of the most famous aviators in the world performed in the city.
Aviation in America was slow to get off the ground after the Wrights tested their flying machine on the dunes of North Carolina in 1903. Only five people witnessed their twelve-second flight, and the Wrights were secretive about what they were attempting to accomplish for fear that their ideas would be stolen before they could secure patents. As a consequence, the Wrights kept their developments shrouded in secrecy for five years, until 1908, when they demonstrated this amazing new technology to the military. Thus it was not until late in the decade that powered aircraft began to capture the public imagination.5 The first great flying carnival ever held in America launched the era of air meets and exhibition fliers at a ten-day event in Los Angeles in January 1910.6
Four months later, the National Air Meet came to Memphis. When Glenn H. Curtiss, the most famous flier of his time, took off from the back-stretch of the racetrack at the Tri-State Fairgrounds, few Memphians had seen powered flight. In Europe, by contrast, large crowds attended exhibitions and record-setting flights, particularly in France and Great Britain.7 Curtiss had established an international reputation the year before, challenging some of the world’s best fliers in a speed contest for the Coupe Internationale d’Aviation, a silver cup and cash prize of $5,000 awarded by James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the Paris Herald, during the world’s first air meet in Rheims, France, in 1909.8 Flying two laps around a 6.2-mile circuit, Curtiss beat France’s Louis Bleriot (just one month after Bleriot became the first man to fly across the English Channel) by 5.8 seconds, averaging an astonishing 46.6 miles per hour.9 Curtiss followed this with another win at the Grand Prix of Brescia, Italy, in September, easily winning the 50,000-lira prize.10
At Memphis, Curtiss roared off in Miss Memphis, his thirty-foot wide and thirty-foot long open pusher plane. The wings were held in place by a web of bracing struts and cross wires, the plane’s single seat placed in front of the exposed motor with virtually nothing underneath. He made a circuit at thirty feet off the ground, then climbed to seventy-five feet, turned and headed for the grandstand. “As the airship sped down the ‘homestretch,’” the newspaper reported, “the thousands leaped to their feet and cheered lustily.” There were three crashes during the meet, caused by a combination of wind, fragile aircraft, and a racetrack infield too small for safe takeoffs and landings: Curtiss crashed near the bleachers knocking a spectator off his feet, Charles Willard tore off a tire as he tried to land and crashed into a fence, and J. C. Mars’s plane caught a gust of wind and struck an automobile occupied by five spectators, one of whom was injured by the propeller.11 Undaunted, on the second day of the meet, Curtiss took his wife, Lena, for a plane ride in which she became the third woman in America to go up in an aircraft. “Thousands in the grandstand were brought to their feet with a vociferous roar of applause when the biplane raced past with the plucky little woman as its passenger.”12 From Memphis, Curtiss went to New York where he flew his Albany Flyer down the Hudson River from Albany to New York City, winning a $10,000 prize put up by the New York World.13
The largest and most spectacular of all the flying exhibition companies in 1910 was the Moisant International Aviators, Inc.14 The Moisant brothers, Johnny and Alfred, brought their flying circus to Memphis in December 1910, after being rained out in Chattanooga.15 The company chartered seven railroad cars to carry their eight planes, a Fiat racer, two dozen mechanics, thirty roustabouts, and eight aviators: Johnny Moisant, famous for flying the English Channel one week after seeing his first plane, and fresh from winning $10,000 in the Statue of Liberty race at an average speed of 60.6 mph, two miles faster than was thought possible for his 50 hp Bleriot biplane; Roland Garros, who had recently set an altitude record of 1,500 feet in the tiny 35 hp bamboo and silk Santos-Dumont Demoiselle, the smallest flying machine in the world, earning him the nickname “the Cloud Kisser”; Rene Barrier, a tall rangy Frenchman with a law degree and nerves of steel; Rene Simon, known as the Fool Flyer, who did an inside loop purely by accident, then tried for a month before he managed to do another; and the tiny Swiss, Edmond Audemars, weighing in at less than one hundred pounds, who specialized in flying Demoiselle formations with Garros.16 Three Americans rounded out the company: former stunt parachuter Charles K. Hamilton, scarred from head to toe from his various aviation misadventures; John J. Frisbee, an ex-balloonist and parachuter; and Joseph Seymour, who was both a flier and an auto racer whose stunt was to race his high-powered Fiat against the planes.17
Despite high winds and freezing temperatures, the fliers spared no effort to put on a good show. This indeed was “the kind of crowd pleasing that killed pilots.” Exhibition aviators took enormous risks to keep flying despite the weather. Crowds that attended these aerial circuses often grew violent when aviators declined to fly in bad weather. As a consequence, pilots would take off when they shouldn’t and many were killed. They knew that the crowds came to see them flirt with death. The Moisant International Aviators emphasized this point by featuring portraits on advertising posters of their pilots who had been killed performing.18
Johnny Moisant opened the show in the Bleroit with which he had won the Statue of Liberty race, taking off “flying straight into the teeth of a gale that at times held his 60 mph Bleriot at an absolute standstill, 1,500 feet above the earth, and in a temperature below the freezing point.” He made twelve circuits of the one-mile track at the fairgrounds while the “spectators went wild with enthusiasm.”19
Three days of
rain, sleet, and snow followed the opening, but once the skies cleared, the show resumed. On 7 December, Rene Barrier broke the world’s speed record at Memphis. Barrier and Moisant flew head-to-head around a 16-mile course from the Tri-State Fairgrounds to and around a mark on Hen and Chickens Island, twice around a mark on Presidents Island, and back. “Business in Memphis was practically at a standstill,” as tens of thousands of Memphians watched from roofs of houses and downtown buildings and along the riverbank. Moisant’s choice to climb to 7,000 feet apparently cost him the race, as Barrier chose to stay at 3,000 feet despite fog that obscured the tops of some of Memphis’s taller buildings. Barrier completed the circuit in ten minutes fifty-five seconds with an average speed of 87.93 mph. Moisant took forty-three seconds longer. The flamboyant Moisant, though, had the big finish: he held his altitude until he was directly over the fairgrounds, then put his plane in a steep dive to the landing.20
Day after day, the newspaper carried the circus’s exploits on the front page with giant headlines, proclaiming “INTERNATIONAL AVIATORS FULFILL EVERY PROMISE MADE TO MEMPHIS.”21 The large crowds and enthusiasm encouraged local businessmen to raise $10,000 to prolong their stay.22 Held over by popular demand, the show remained in Memphis for sixteen days, “the longest continuing flight exhibition ever held in the United States.”23
After the great success of these popular exhibitions, the infield of the former harness-racing track north of town, the North Memphis Driving Park, became the focus of a variety of aviation activities as local entrepreneurs and visiting fliers used the long flat surface of the former infield golf course as a makeshift landing field.24 Built before the turn of the century, the North Memphis Driving Park had hosted huge crowds as part of the Grand Circuit of harness racing, but such activities came to an abrupt halt in 1906 when the Tennessee General Assembly made it unlawful to bet on “any trial or contest of speed or power of endurance of man or beast.”25 Without the gambling incentive, harness racing quickly lost its popularity and cache.26
When America sent troops to France in 1917, the Army Signal Corps began teaching men to fly at the landing strip at the Memphis Driving Park until the facilities at Millington’s Park Field were completed.27 The winter of 1917 was among the worst in Memphis history. The Mississippi River froze over as temperatures dropped below zero for several days. Some area residents believed that somehow the airplanes had stirred up the terrible winter weather.28 With the spring thaw, the sod fields at the airbase turned to deep mud, forcing the Air Service to once again use the Driving Park for pilot training.29 In 1919, the Memphis Aerial Company flew from the Driving Park.30
In the fall of 1922, when the Omlies arrived in Memphis, their airplane was parked in the middle of the track at the old Memphis Driving Park, from which they did their flying for the fair. Given its history and long association with aviation, the park seemed like the perfect venue for them to build a business. The landing field was in good shape, the steel grandstands could accommodate 3,500 people, and it was a ten-minute streetcar ride from downtown Court Square. Vernon and Phoebe struck a deal with the Memphis Business Men’s Club, which managed the park, and began to host exhibitions and offer rides and flight training. Vernon taught his wife to fly and to master the rudiments of airplane mechanics, making her a full partner in his enterprise.31 Gradually the Omlies gathered together a clique of air-minded Memphians, many of them World War I veteran fliers like Vernon, to talk about the future of aviation in Memphis.
By 1924, the activities at the Driving Park had clearly outgrown the facilities. After that year’s Armistice Day parade, the group of fliers gathered in front of the Hotel Chisca at the end of the march and discussed the need for a real airport. The following year, Armistice Day 1925, the group met in a luncheon to finalize the organization of the Memphis Aero Club and elect Everett Cook as their first president. Their first effort was petitioning the government for the abandoned Park Field at Millington. Cook enlisted the aid of Senator Kenneth D. McKellar, but to no avail; the government refused to relinquish the land.32 When efforts to interest city fathers in funding a municipal airport also failed, the Aero Club pooled their resources and leased seventy acres of cow pasture at Woodstock, on the old Millington Pike north of Memphis, not far from the Driving Park.33 With the help of the Shelby County Commissioners, they graded the field. The street car company furnished cinders for the runway, and the Illinois Central Railroad hauled them to a siding next to the field for free.34 The first plane to land there, 26 June 1926, was piloted by Vernon Omlie, described in the press as “for five years the torch-bearer for aviation in Memphis.”35
This first official Memphis airport was dedicated the following Armistice Day, 11 November 1926, and named for Lt. Guion Armstrong, a Memphis pilot killed in France during the war. More than “three score of airships” flew in for the ceremony from as far away as Chicago. A special train departing from the Poplar Street Station was available for a sixty-cent fare. Nonetheless, “the roads out of Memphis were jammed with traffic from one end to the other” as some 12,000 spectators attended this grand “coming out party” for the Memphis Aero Club. The paper reported “thrills galore and hair-raising emotions” as over one hundred aviators competed in two closed-course races, and the U.S. Army pilots and National Guard Squadron demonstrated formation and combat flying. Phoebe was the star of the show:
Taking the olive branch for the most daring and thrilling stunt was Phoebe Fairgrave, in private life Mrs. Vernon C. Omlie, wife of the manager of the port. Phoebe did some stunts which to hire certain newspaper men [to] do would make the war debt look like a postage stamp. She walked the planes [wings] of her husband’s ship, hung from them by her toes, at one time hung from one end of the ship by her teeth and wound up her day by leaping from the plane in a parachute.36
Only two days later, the great Fokker Trimotor airplane, Josephine Ford, landed at Armstrong Field, just six months after making the first successful journey over the North Pole, thus, as a reporter gushed, “establishing contact between this city and the Artic regions.”37 After Richard E. Byrd and his pilot Floyd Bennett flew over the North Pole on 9 May 1926, the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics sent the plane around the United States to demonstrate the possibilities of commercial flying.38 Bennett and his passengers, representatives from the U.S. Commerce Department and the Guggenheim Fund, were greeted by the Omlies and feted by the Memphis Aero Club with a lunch at the Peabody Hotel, a tour of the city, and dinner at the Lions Club.39 With the opening of her first airport, and the hosting of this celebrity of the air, Memphis became an important hub for aviation routes across the nation.40
The Omlies established Mid-South Airways at Armstrong Field, offering flying lessons, aerial photography, air-taxi charters, cargo transport, crop-dusting (pioneering the practice of combating the boll weevil from the air), and aerial mapping of the river, power lines, and various commercial developments.41 Phoebe eagerly took on the duties of secretary, office manager, flight instructor, transport pilot, and mechanic for their new business.42 Vernon began active lobbying for a municipal airport, taking local dignitaries, including former mayor E. H. Crump, for free rides to see Memphis from the air.43 After Mid-South Airways secured the Waco agency, to sell and maintain Waco airplanes, Phoebe added sales manager to her duties.44
In 1927, the Mississippi River Valley was inundated by one of the nation’s most destructive natural disasters. Abnormally high amounts of rain had fallen throughout the Midwest during the fall of 1926. This was followed by record-setting snowstorms in the north and heavy rains in Tennessee and Kentucky that winter. The rain and snow melt saturated the earth and overflowed creeks and tributaries along the Ohio and Mississippi, setting the stage for a massive flood in the spring of 1927. Floodwaters began to break through the levees built to contain the river, eventually breaching them in 145 places, flooding farmers’ fields and numerous towns and villages from Missouri to Louisiana, some to depths of thirty feet. The city of Memp
his became an emergency depot, struggling to care for thousands of refugees pouring in from all directions.45
Responding to the disaster, President Coolidge appointed his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, to coordinate rescue and relief efforts from a headquarters in Memphis. Hoover put the Red Cross in charge of responding to the emergency. They faced immense problems with communication and distribution of supplies and services throughout the flooded region. There was a complete paralysis of ordinary communication: no mail, telegraph, or telephone service. As the scope of the disaster became clearer, the agency rapidly outgrew its offices downtown and relocated into the enormous Ford Motor Company assembly plant with its huge warehouse space served by a railroad spur.46 On the twentieth of April, “a great concentration camp for refugees” was set up at the Tri-State Fairgrounds. More than five hundred people arrived the first day. “Many were half-clad, caked with mud and in a dazed condition from the sudden loss of all their worldly possessions.”47
During the emergency, the airplane became an indispensable means of fast communication and distribution of vital commodities to the stricken area. Aviators of the U.S. Navy and the National Guard assisted the Red Cross with information on levee breaks and flood depths. The Omlies, as well as other members of the Memphis Aero Club and anyone else with available aircraft, took to the air to do what they could. “The Omlies were everywhere, flying above the ugly, yellow torrents, carrying photographers and newsmen, doctors, nurses, medicines, antitoxins and food.”48 When the bridge washed out at Memphis, the Omlies hauled the mail from Memphis to Little Rock. They dropped food to people marooned on rooftops, in trees, along levees. They transported messages from rescue headquarters to inundated areas and back again. They patrolled the levees to spot “sand boils,” indications of ruptures. They flew news reporters and photographers to document the disaster, Phoebe’s aerial photographs supplementing those of the professionals.49 Every day for nearly eight weeks the front pages of the Memphis newspapers, the Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar, carried accounts and photographs of the flooded areas, along with wrenching stories of tragedy and heroism. The flying itself was heroic, without the option of a safe landing in case of a flight emergency. Phoebe later recalled, “At three thousand feet altitude you couldn’t see dry land half the time, and we were flying tiny land planes.” Several people were killed in airplane accidents during the emergency, including the general reconstruction officer of Mississippi Valley Flood Relief for the Red Cross Earl Kilpatrick, who died when his plane plunged into the water while flying between Vicksburg and New Orleans.50
Walking on Air Page 4