Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  A gathering mob, convinced that they had captured a Yankee spy, was persuaded by cooler heads to relinquish him to the authorities, and he was jailed in Columbia, South Carolina. He was eventually allowed to retrieve his balloon and go on his way, but his experience revealed further the seriousness of the South. Any ocean-crossing balloon flight at that time was off.

  Early in June 1861, Thaddeus Lowe arrived in Washington, DC, to find state militias on hand, having been called up by President Lincoln for a three-month enlistment. Should there be any confrontation, it wasn’t expected to last longer than that. There were some troops in Union uniforms, but many served in their own colorful state livery, carrying their personal weapons—some embarrassingly obsolete. Thaddeus met with President Lincoln, who authorized him to set up his balloon on the Smithsonian grounds tethered to twenty-five hundred feet in order to take a practice look at the Federal fortifications. Pancho Barnes’s grandfather telegraphed his observation from aloft. His was the first message from air to earth.

  On July 21, Barnes’s grandfather flew free over the Battle of Bull Run and inadvertently landed behind Confederate lines. Presumably, the Rebels were so startled by their first view of a manned balloon overhead that they didn’t think to take a shot at him. Thaddeus’s landing site wasn’t seen, and he was safe behind protective terrain. However, he had no way to get out. He knew the Union Army, should they search, would never find him. But his wife Leontine knew his balloon, the air currents, and how he thought and planned. She came after her husband. Disguised as an old country woman, Leontine passed freely through the lines with her mule and cart to rescue her husband. Lowe was stunned when she appeared. Leontine hid her husband and his balloon basket and envelope on the cart and carried him to safety.

  President Lincoln considered a proposed Aeronautics Corps invaluable, and finally his skeptical generals agreed. Fifty civilians were assigned to the balloonist to transport, launch, and retrieve. Thaddeus and his support troops were promised an army commission, though none ever materialized. Thaddeus had envisioned himself as a spotter of enemy troop movements. However, the aeronaut metamorphosed into a much more proactive role. Using a white handkerchief to signal Union gunnery troops, he could direct the fire.

  Needless to say, the Confederate troops could see what he was doing and, when in range, tried to shoot him down. Thaddeus lined his basket with sheet metal to deflect the gunfire and was recognized as the most targeted man in the war. Bullets never hit him, though malaria did.

  Naturally, the South soon wanted their own spotting balloon, but they discovered on their first attempt that an envelope constructed with cotton was too heavy to lift. To Thaddeus’s amazement, one day he saw a balloon of various bright, gay colors amid the enemy troops. The Confederate ladies had donated their vivid silk dresses to the cause.

  The battle at Chancellorsville, Virginia, was Thaddeus’s last effort for the army, but his creative mind didn’t rest. After the war, the inventor developed an artificial ice machine, the beginning of commercial cold storage. In 1888, he moved his family to Pasadena, California, where he erected an astrological observatory and installed a cogwheel railroad to get to it. In 1890, the State of California named it Peak Lowe. Such was Pancho Barnes’s genetic heritage.

  Thaddeus and Leontine Lowe’s seventh child, Thad Jr., married neighbor Florence Mae Dobbins, of old Philadelphia money. Thaddeus the elder had built a twenty-four-thousand square-foot, twenty-five room mansion on Pasadena’s millionaire’s row, but it was easily dwarfed by the Dobbins’s palace. The widow of a successful architect, Caroline Dobbins soon built the young couple a thirty-five-room English manor-style home constructed with the bricks shipped west from the Dobbins’s former Philadelphia mansion. Thad Jr. and Florence’s firstborn was a sickly and fragile boy, worried over and protected by his mother. When daughter Florence Leontine arrived, she was raised as the son her father and grandfather had longed for. She was her grandfather’s shadow until his death when she was twelve. His brilliant mind and individuality passed unaltered to Florence.

  Pampered, Florence grew up with huge wealth, servants, horses, and an adolescence without limits. By the time her parents realized that she was incorrigible, it was too late. They unsuccessfully tried one private school after another to tame the wild child. The tomboy was already formed by her smart and adventuresome genes, cemented by her parents’ lack of will or ability to control her. Grandmother Dobbins came to the rescue, arranging a marriage for young Florence with Rankin Barnes, the rector of fashionable St. James Episcopal Church in South Pasadena. No detail was overlooked during the extravagant wedding plans, with the exception of anyone bothering to supply the bride with any information about sex, wifely duties, and cooking. As related later by the bride, the wedding night was disaster. In fact, it was the only time the couple made any attempt to consummate their marriage. As it turned out, once was enough.

  Florence made it known that as far as she was concerned, William Emmert Barnes, who came into the world exactly nine months after his parents’ wedding day, was the product of a virgin birth. She named the baby after her brother who had by then died of leukemia. With nannies, housekeepers, and cooks, baby Billy really didn’t interest his mother. She spent her time supplying horses from her stables to western movie makers.

  Bored with her genteel lifestyle, Florence Barnes cut her black hair short, slipped into greasy, baggy clothes, and signed onto a banana boat to Mexico as a seaman, using the name Jacob Crane. On board, she smoked, drank, and cussed with such flourish that even the other sailors were awed at Jacob Crane’s extensive and colorful vocabulary. Upon departure, the Panama flag was hoisted, and the crew, at least the unknowing ones, discovered that they were smuggling guns to revolutionaries, a dangerous business. At San Blas, Mexico, the ship was seized by port authorities and held for six weeks. Roger Chute, another crew member, was planning to jump ship, so Florence (as Jacob Crane) insisted on joining him. Along an old jungle trail, Chute rode a skinny white horse and Florence was astride a burro. She said he looked like Don Quixote, and his response was that she looked like Pancho. “No, no, you mean Sancho Panza.” He didn’t care. From that moment, for the rest of her life, Florence Leontine Lowe Barnes was known as “Pancho” Barnes.

  When Pancho Barnes returned home in November 1927 to her life of privilege and domesticity, she found it suffocating. Her husband Rankin was busy with church business and was perfectly happy to have Barnes make her own life. Though their marriage went on for many years in separate directions, and the pair retained a certain fondness for each other from afar, she never lived with her husband again.

  Movie folks hung out at Barnes’s Laguna Beach house (bought for her by Grandmother Dobbins). Her parties, generosity, and outlandish exhibitionism became legendary. Shocking behavior put Barnes on center stage. Barnes loved the Hollywood crowd, and her equine passion expanded to include airplanes. She learned to fly, buying a used Travel Air and then the new Speedwing, in which she would fly the air race.

  Pancho Barnes’s Travel Air

  When twenty-eight-year-old Barnes entered the 1929 air derby, she pre-flew the entire route to get a leg up on her competition, as did others competing. The first race publicity had announced that each woman pilot would be accompanied by a mechanic, since there was no question that mechanical problems would develop along the way. However, devious promoters pounced on that loophole immediately. Ravishing Hollywood starlets who had never been closer to an airplane than to watch one overhead suddenly were revealed to have become “pilots.” They would pose prettily for the camera, while the male mechanics accompanying them would really do the flying. (Nobody gave a thought as to how long the starlets would last under the hardships of racing.) The women pilots were outraged and demanded that they be allowed to fly solo. So they did.

  The media’s growing ability to ignite national and even international enthusiasm was helping turn aviators into celebrities and celebrities into aviators. Public spirit was buo
yed by those who dared to soar above earthly constraints. Aviators were heroic, and none more so than the brave women who overcame not only the considerable mechanical, financial, and technical obstacles, but also gender biases. Beautiful Ruth Elder made a grand entrance into the National Exchange Club banquet hall. She was a successful movie ingénue turned aviatrix, and the public was still spellbound by Elder’s daring adventures two years earlier.

  The frenzy to be first to fly the Atlantic solo had shifted from male to female after Charles Lindbergh captured the title. And as the pilots themselves vied, so too did the world that watched and waited. No other man could be first, but a woman could. Though the fall of 1927 hardly offered favorable weather for an Atlantic crossing, Ruth Elder had been afraid that another woman might beat her to the record. She pulled out all the stops to make the flight even though it was not to be solo. In fact, another female aviator, Frances Grayson, was just as determined to be the first woman pilot to cross the Atlantic, and she was hot on Ruth’s heels.

  Ruth Elder and her instructor, George Haldeman, had gathered sponsors and a Stinson Detroiter, which they christened American Girl. The disastrous Dole race to Hawaii, which had left ten dead at sea just two months prior, including female pilot Mildred Doran, dissuaded neither Elder nor Haldeman from attempting the Atlantic in the gathering winter weather. On October 11, 1927, American Girl took off for any land east of the Atlantic Ocean. They carried enough fuel for forty-eight hours of flying. October 13 brought no word of the flyers and the aircraft was obviously down.

  On October 14, radio bulletins proclaimed that Elder and Haldeman were alive. An oil pressure drop had persuaded them to make a precautionary landing at sea alongside a Dutch freighter rather than go on with the excellent chance of engine failure. The aircraft was lost and Elder and Haldeman proceeded to Europe by freighter. The flyers were lauded for their survival, though the first female crossing title had eluded them.

  Ruth Elder

  Knowing that Ruth had not completed the crossing, Frances Grayson stepped up her efforts. She recruited pilot Wilmer Stultz, taking off October 17 in a Sikorsky Amphibian called The Dawn, only to return with fuel problems. They tried it again on October 23, to return once again with engine trouble. Stultz refused to give it a third try so late in the year. Furious, Grayson hired another pilot and navigator, and The Dawn took off from Roosevelt Field, New York, December 23, 1927. It was never seen again.

  Wilmer Stultz lived to fly another day, and he was contacted by Mrs. Amy Phipps Guest of Pittsburgh to fly her across the Atlantic as a passenger. After her family persuaded her to abandon such a foolhardy scheme, Mrs. Guest asked her friend, publisher G. P. Putnam, to find a “suitable, aviation-minded young woman” to make the crossing under the Guests’ sponsorship. Putnam located a social worker in Boston, a five-hundred-hour pilot named Amelia Earhart.

  Earhart crossed the Atlantic as a passenger with pilots Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon in a Fokker Trimotor named Friendship. The trio departed Newfoundland June 17, 1928, and the rest, as they say, is history. Earhart was first. She was embarrassed at the adulation that came her way after the flight, giving credit to Stultz and Gordon at every opportunity, and pointing out that, “I was just a sack of potatoes in the back end.” The public would have none of it. To Earhart’s chagrin, “Lady Lindy” became her nickname. But she was infused with the passion to fly the Atlantic by herself one day.

  Amelia Earhart

  Barnstorming, record flights, stunting in Hollywood, and any kind of far-out publicity scheme seemed to be the primary avenue to flying jobs in 1929. Ruth Elder and Amelia Earhart had captured the public’s hearts—Elder by her beauty and enthusiasm and Earhart by her modest demeanor in the face of acclaim. “I was only a passenger, you know,” Amelia repeated again and again.

  Most of the famous women pilots of the day were present in the room in Santa Monica. Their personalities, appearance, and flying experience ran the gamut. Even-tempered record holder Louise Thaden and Marvel Crosson with her striking black hair and lively eyes were other Walter Beech protégés flying the Travel Air.

  Conversely, Blanche Noyes, a petite, budding actress whose large, innocent eyes rather demanded any nearby man’s helping hand, had learned to fly only weeks before the race. As a result, Noyes was admitted on the basis of a rather exaggerated pilot history.

  Reporters commented favorably on Bobbi Trout’s boyish figure and buoyant demeanor. In January 1929, Bobbi Trout had flown an endurance record in a Golden Eagle and then surmounted her own milestone that same month. She was hired to demonstrate the Golden Eagle and was racing under her employer’s sponsorship. Ruth Nichols was the first woman to fly in all forty-eight states. She was a saleswoman for the Fairchild Airplane and Engine Company, and they provided her a Rearwin, Ken-Royce model three-place open-cockpit biplane powered with a Curtiss Challenger engine. She was one of the so-called old-timers, having learned to fly in 1922, with a quiet, modest personality similar to Louise Thaden’s. Nichols’s startlingly bright blue eyes marked her unforgettably.

  Flustered National Exchange Club officials shepherded the racers, club members, and guests to their banquet seats. Some of the hosts were clearly cowed by this gregarious group of astonishing ladies. Not one of them took orders. Each wanted to change the rules. And, adding to their insubordination, they possessed an unsettling, outdoorsy look. This was an extraordinary experience. Aside from the pilots, many present had never even ridden in an airplane, let alone helped direct an air race.

  The women aviators dealt with the rising tension in various ways according to their personality types—from the demurring Earhart to the abrasive Barnes. The race committee grappled with their considerable challenge—control. Outside were the airplanes themselves, of uncertain reliability, though the manufacturers saw to it that the women had well-maintained ships. The National Exchange Club board had called the Santa Monica Club to duty, and the group desperately wanted to get the takeoff done tomorrow in an orderly manner. From the looks of things, they suspected they were alone in that wish.

  The official sign-in sheet for the derby.

  One official quietly told his wife that he didn’t really want to know what Mrs. Omlie was doing at the sheriff’s office. He had been eager to meet Phoebe Omlie, a senior pilot of the group in terms of flying hours. She and her husband had done rescue work during the Mississippi River floods, and they were highly regarded flyers. That Pancho Barnes, well, she was almost too much to bear. He didn’t know many men with such a zesty vocabulary.

  A partial lineup at the start of the derby. From left: Louise Thaden, Bobbi Trout, Patty Willis (who did not compete), Marvel Crosson, Blanche Noyes, Vera Dawn Walker, Amelia Earhart, Marjorie Crawford (did not compete), Ruth Elder, and Pancho Barnes.

  The pilots were gathering papers, including their racing numbers, at a table in the back of the room. Pretty Marvel Crosson was number one, Pancho Barnes was number two, Blanche Noyes was number three, Louise Thaden was number four, and then there were some odd ball numbers such as Bobbi Trout’s number one hundred and Thea Rasche’s number sixty-four for the twenty airplanes entered. There was no number thirteen.

  Even at this eleventh hour, the route still was being changed. It seemed that any town with a National Exchange Club wanted the racers to come through it, and stops were being added. Though the sponsors had sought professional advice for the suitability of the stops in terms of normal fuel range and adequate landing fields, the racers found fault with some of the choices.

  Will Rogers insightfully commented, “It was too bad Mexico City couldn’t raise fifty dollars, or it too could have seen our women fliers.” Folksy Will Rogers was known nationally as a favorite political commentator in both print and radio. Rogers’s California home near the Santa Monica airport included a polo field where the horsy set gravitated. Rogers spent considerable hours riding with friends and perfecting his astounding rope tricks. The humorist’s selection as the takeoff banquet speaker had met
with unanimous favor.

  Louise Thaden joined Thea Rasche to enjoy Will Rogers’s speech, take a look at the just-circulated latest changes, and dine. Rasche, a stalwart, no-nonsense German pilot, had made a name for herself in the United States via her German aerobatic license. The Moth Aircraft Corporation asked Rasche to fly a de Havilland Gypsy-Moth for them, to which she agreed with pleasure. The promised airplane was not ready in time, but a substitute was available, and Thea had been scrambling around Los Angeles trying to locate it. She would take off tomorrow without even having test-flown her aircraft. It was no wonder she looked worried.

  Thea Rasche handed a telegram to Louise Thaden asking in her thick German accent, “What do you think about this?” Her face became somber. Thaden, without comment, passed the yellow paper along to the other racers. It said, “Beware of sabotage.” It was unsigned.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 1929

  Race Day 1

  SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA

  Just read the Smithsonian Institution’s explanation about the Wright flying machine. They say the trustees decided Langley’s machine could have flown first but didn’t. I could have flown first but didn’t. I could have flown to France ahead of Lindbergh, but I just neglected to do it. I had a lot of other things on my mind at the time.

  Yours, Will Rogers

  Syndicated newspaper column

  Although takeoff wasn’t scheduled until 2:00 p.m., nineteen pilots and their entourage arrived at the airport near dawn after a full night’s revelry and prerace organizing. The twentieth racer, Mary Haizlip, still wasn’t on hand. As the morning fog gradually burned off, the darkened outlines of nineteen wood and fabric birds at rest gradually revealed themselves as racing planes. Clover Field came alive.