Each of the racers felt a sense of relief on their last leg of the day into Columbus. It was an easy leg, despite low visibility. A prominent road led directly from Cincinnati to Columbus with a string of towns all along the way. One farmer with a sense of humor, and apparently with some flying experience, had plowed out a huge arrow in the middle of his harvested corn crop, pointing toward Columbus. Thaden rocked her wings in salute as she went by. Thaden’s husband, Herb, had been in Wichita and now was waiting for her in Columbus. Chubbie Keith-Miller was down within twenty-five miles of Columbus, at Xenia, Ohio, with engine trouble.
The Columbus Airport was in the process of building concrete runways, but the edges were unfinished and there was a ten-inch drop-off to a soft shoulder. The racers had been cautioned to stay in the middle of the runway on landing and not to turn off until they saw a flagger indicating a safe off-ramp. They were on the alert. More used to landing on sod, those with metal tail skids were surprised at the trailing shower of sparks.
The racers greeted each other in Columbus almost deliriously, they were each so happy to be so close to the finish line and still in the running. It was almost over.
Herb Thaden, with Louise at the Columbus banquet that evening, had chuckled at the sight of the flyers in their formal evening gowns. Their brown arms turned stark white around the elbows, then the tan color appeared again for a V-neck and face that was trimmed white around the eyes where the goggles had been. Louise confided to Herb her sadness that the race was nearing the end, “We have helped each other, worried together, laughed over mistakes, silently wept and endured in community, recognized our strengths, and combated weaknesses. We never mentioned the afraid times—anticipatory on the ground, actual in flight.”
MONDAY, AUGUST 26, 1929
Race Day 9
COLUMBUS TO CLEVELAND
120 MILES
This thing of talking about “somebody’s life being too valuable to risk in an airplane” is not only the bunk, but it’s an insult to the men we ask to do our flying. Where does anybody’s life come in to be any more valuable than anybody else’s? Ain’t life just as precious to one as to another? If flying is dangerous pass a law and stop it. But don’t divide our nation between a class that should fly and one that shouldn’t. Aviation is not a fad, it’s a necessity and will be our mode of travel long after all the people who are too valuable to fly have met their desired deaths by the roadsides on Sunday afternoons.
Yours, Will Rogers
Syndicated newspaper column
Since takeoff for the last lap into Cleveland would take place late, the racers enjoyed the best night’s sleep in a week. Nevertheless, all were at the airport midmorning to find the souvenir and autograph hunters about in full force. They commenced to check over their airplanes for flight. Takeoff was scheduled for 1:00 p.m.
As they did so, they heard an airplane overhead and looked up, as flyers always do. Ruth Nichols, whose whole race had gone relatively smoothly, had had some maintenance done on her Rearwin. She made an early test flight, and the other racers watched her landing—their natural reflex. The first portion of Columbus’s new concrete runway was still closed, forcing the pilots to land “long” over the closed part as they had the previous afternoon, touching down only at the beginning of the usable portion. That morning, a large steamroller worked back and forth at the edge of the runway, just about where the usable portion began.
As Ruth Nichols descended over the closed runway, she seemed to drift a little in the crosswind as she came to the usable part. It was like a slow-motion picture of the inevitable—as if the two machines were drawn together by magnets. Nichols hit the steamroller and somersaulted, coming to rest upside down on the soft dirt. Observers could see her crawl out from the wreckage as they raced to her. Miraculously, she was unhurt, but her third-place standing had dissolved in those ill-fated seconds.
For such a senseless tragedy to befall one of the most experienced pilots of the race simply proved that bad luck could reach out to anyone. Ruth Nichols, of the striking blue eyes and calm demeanor, was the holder of the second transport license issued to a woman in the United States. She had discovered airplanes on a family trip to Miami when her father bought her a seaplane ride, which had long-term consequences. When she returned to Wellesley College, the wealthy debutante discarded her track toward medicine, determined to make a career in aviation. Her mother had been nonplussed with Nichols’s decision to study medicine, but the aviation alternative horrified her. Upon Nichols’s graduation from college in 1924, the fledgling aviatrix promptly soloed and became the first female seaplane pilot in the United States. In 1928, Nichols flew along with her mentor on a nonstop record flight from New York to Miami. Just because the press had dubbed Amelia Earhart “Lady Lindy” did not prevent them from attaching that title to Ruth Nichols too.
Amelia Earhart and Ruth Nichols
Nichols helped establish aviation country clubs across the United States. Promoting the concept with a “Sportsman Air Tour,” she wore all-white or all-lavender flying suits with matching helmet and goggles, and the shy Quaker girl learned the value of publicity to sales quickly. She toured ninety cities in forty-six states without a single forced landing. This achievement occurred in the day when flight plans usually carried the cryptic note “Arriving G.W.W.P.” (God willing and weather permitting). Nichols had quietly flown the entire air derby well, without fanfare or drama. But now she was a victim of random fate, probably helped along by a moment of inattention.
The Columbus takeoff was the first time in the whole race that the competitors departed in one minute intervals in the order of their standing, rather than the reverse. Conceivably, this would allow them to arrive in Cleveland in about the same order. Louise Thaden and Gladys O’Donnell lined up side-by-side first on the runway. With Ruth Nichols out, Amelia Earhart moved into third place, and Blanche Noyes followed. Though the aviators did not much like the side-by-side takeoff arrangement with that severe drop-off along the edge, no one objected. All the racers were flying conventional-geared airplanes with the third wheel at the tail as opposed to the modern design where the third wheel is usually placed in the front like a child’s tricycle. As a result, the pilots sat low in the boxy airplanes behind a huge round engine with the cylinders lined up in a circle. It was impossible to see out until the tail came up. The pilot was forced to lean out the side to be able to go straight down the runway on takeoff. Wedged between an airplane on one side and a drop-off on the other, there was little room for a miscalculation or drift. Sobered by Ruth Nichols’s fate, they all rose to the occasion. All Louise Thaden could think about was how easy it would be to lose the “guaranteed” first place she so desired.
Cleveland was only 120 miles away, plus or minus an hour in the various airplanes. Nonetheless, Ruth Elder did manage to get lost once again, landing in Akron. But the flashy pilot persevered and finally arrived in Cleveland as officials were considering a search. Edith Foltz had engine trouble not far outside Columbus, landed, then with characteristic grit, resumed the race. Bobbi Trout, officially out and not being timed, was determined to fly herself into Cleveland and did so. Considering the repairs along the way, she was flying a totally different and new airplane from the one with which she’d started. Proper clothing was the farthest thing from her mind, and she arrived sans luggage, borrowing a clean white blouse to go to the banquet in the same dirty pants she had worn for a week. For Louise Thaden, the last leg felt a little anticlimactic. Yet, as she listened contentedly to the hum of the engine and gazed at the heavens above, she knew no greater pleasure.
Finish at Cleveland.
As she approached Cleveland, Thaden thought the green earth seemed stationary beneath her wings. Her sweating right hand tried to choke the stick, her eyes moving constantly watching for traffic and for checkpoints. She told Herb later that her concentration was so intense that “there were seconds when I forgot to breathe.” She wanted to be in Cleveland and win, but at the sam
e time, she didn’t want the exhilaration of her great adventure to be over.
Excitement was simultaneously heating up in Cleveland for the Graf Zeppelin. The airship had completed its spectacularly fast seventy-hour crossing from Japan to the Golden Gate, then cruised slowly down the coast, circling Los Angeles for four hours awaiting dawn for landing. More than one hundred airplanes flew convoy for the dramatic colossus. The Zeppelin was to draw the world together in 224 hours and 24 minutes. The only female passenger, Lady Drummond-Hay, described her voyage as “trackless adventure through pathless space—a new trail blazed by the meteor-like Zeppelin”—almost indescribable, certainly unforgettable.
A chemical company, rather than an oil company, refueled the leviathan of the air. A bevy of chemists measured out six hundred thousand cubes of natural and chemical gas mixed. Navigators plotting the Zeppelin’s course appeared to be following the women’s’ derby trail through Yuma, El Paso, Oklahoma, and Kansas—the lower, southern route to their destination in Lakehurst, New Jersey via Cleveland.
All told, each of the derby pilots was flying the last leg with singular concentration, yet they were also reflecting on the past week. There had been trials and challenges, grief and exhilaration, but the camaraderie of the women generated sustenance that would extend well into the future among all women pilots.
Louise Thaden spotted the airfield and grandstands through the light haze fifty-four minutes out of Columbus, picked out the timers at the edge of the field, and dove for the line. Thaden arrived over the finish line first from Santa Monica, just over 2,700 official miles (not including some route changes), over 9 days, logging 20 hours, 19 minutes, and 4 seconds of flying time. She crossed the white chalk line in a 170-mile-per-hour powered descent, thunderstruck at the thousands of people cheering and pulling for her. She could feel their exuberance physically. Gladys O’Donnell and Amelia Earhart thundered in right behind her. The frenzied crowd rose to their feet and swarmed Louise Thaden’s blue and gold Travel Air, forcing her to shut the engine down in the middle of the field to avoid endangering anyone with her propeller. Her eyes swept the crowd for Herb, and the sudden emotion of her accomplishment surprised her. Throngs of reporters and photographers engulfed the airplane. A horseshoe of roses was thrust upon the pilot’s neck—with thorns intact. Thaden suggested diplomatically that the flowers really should adorn the winning airplane, and they were transferred to the nose of her loyal ship.
Louise Thaden waves at the finish.
A radio microphone was shoved in front of Thaden, and she graciously performed as she had all along. The Cleveland Plain Dealer described her:
As she faced the microphone, her teeth were very white against her brown cheeks. Her eyes are gray. The lids looked heavy. Wind had been hitting them. She wore a white shirtwaist which had black stripes in it; perhaps it was one of her husband’s, for it looked like a man’s shirt and was open at the neck. Mrs. Thaden’s neck is long and tanned. Her brownish hair is bobbed. When the wind strikes it, it falls over her high forehead. She brushes it back with her hands. Her face is thin. As she talked to the crowd through the microphone, she held a 20-for-15 cigarette in her right hand.
“Hello, folks,” she said. “The sunburn derby is over, and I happened to come in first place. I’m sorry we all couldn’t come in first, because they all deserve it as much as I. They’re all great flyers.”
Thaden with her decorated plane.
The Plain Dealer’s Roelif Loveland waxed ecstatic about what he was seeing:
These women started a week ago Sunday from Santa Monica, on the Pacific Coast. When this reporter used to study geography, the Pacific Coast seemed an awfully long distance away. It was, in fact, entirely too far away to be taken very seriously. They grew oranges out in California, and that was about all it was necessary to know, for nobody had much chance of ever getting that far away.
Well—the National Exchange Clubs having offered prizes for the first women’s cross-nation race in history—twenty women started. In a former generation they would have been darning socks and getting dinner and breakfast and supper and putting the kids to bed and reading, perhaps, of the wonders of South America in the National Geographic Magazine. Instead of that, they pulled on their tricky aviator’s suits and flew to Phoenix, Arizona, thence to El Paso, Texas, thence to Fort Worth, Texas; to East St. Louis, Illinois; to Columbus, then to Cleveland.
Their triumph did not convert all the world to esteem pilots of the “weaker” sex, despite their finishing the perilous route in fragile craft. As the arriving derby pilots descended upon the welcoming Cleveland crowd, a reporter asked Colonel Lindbergh, “Is aviation a woman’s game?”
He answered sourly, “I haven’t anything to say about that. I’m sorry.”
Certainly, Lindbergh was not alone in his skepticism. The bias can be found in isolated venues even today.
Still, at that moment, all the world was caught up in the exhilaration of the airborne gender revolution. The Plain Dealer wrote enthusiastically:
Young, small for the most part, and pretty, these women of our century wear goggles instead of knitted shawls. They burn up distance in a way which is ridiculous. Just imagine your dear old grandmother hopping in a plane, tossing away a cigarette butt, pulling goggles over her eyes, giving the ship the gun and heading from California to Ohio.
Writing in the Wichita Eagle newspaper, Thaden said, “There is one big pleasure I will get out of winning. I’ll now be able to make good my promise. I have won the cup for Marvel Crosson, and it will be inscribed with her name and turned over to her people.”
A reporter noted, “There has not been a race like the Women’s Air Derby before.” There was never one like it again. It was a first. And it was a sisterhood.
Air derby contestants stand arm-in-arm at Parks Airport, East St. Louis, Illinois. Left to right: Mary Von Mach, Chubbie Keith-Miller, Gladys O’Donnell, Thea Rasche, Phoebe Omlie, Louise Thaden, Amelia Earhart, Blanche Noyes, Ruth Elder, and Vera Dawn Walker.
Sixty-two years later, female astronaut pilot Eileen Collins flew the space shuttle into outer space around the planet Earth. Astronaut Linda Godwin, saluting the women whom she believed paved the way for her, had already carried Louise Thaden’s cloth flying helmet into space and returned it to the Ninety-Nines Museum of Women Pilots, the organization Louise Thaden and the other racers founded at the end of the 1929 derby. On another magical day at Cape Canaveral, derby racer Bobbi Trout was there, and watched as her Orville Wright–signed pilot certificate, entrusted to Eileen Collins, blasted upward until invisible in the black of space.
Bobbi still can’t understand why she couldn’t go too.
Final standings
HEAVIER AIRCRAFT LIGHTER AIRCRAFT
Louise Thaden Phoebe Omlie
Gladys O’Donnell Edith Foltz
Amelia Earhart Chubbie Keith-Miller
Blanche Noyes Thea Rasche
Ruth Elder
Neva Paris
Mary Haizlip
Opal Kunz
Mary Von Mach
Vera Dawn Walker
OTHERS
Pancho Barnes—out, wrecked
Marvel Crosson—died
Claire Fahy—out, separated wires
Ruth Nichols—out, wrecked
Margaret Perry—out, illness
Bobbi Trout—finished untimed
Pylon Race Results
Women’s Race (510–800 cu. in.)
Event #28 (of 35) at Cleveland
August 29, 1929 | 5 miles, 12 laps
PLACE PILOT PLANE ENGINE SPEED
1 Gladys O’Donnell Waco Taper Wing Wright J6 137.60
2 Louise Thaden Travel Air Wright J5 131.43
3 Blanche Noyes Travel Air Wright J5 127.77
Pancho Barnes and Ruth Nichols also competed but didn’t place.
Women’s Australian Pursuit Race
Event #30
August 31, 1929 | 5 miles, 12 laps
PLACE PILOT PLANE
ENGINE SPEED
1 Gladys O’Donnell Waco 10 Wright J6 138.21
RACE GEAR
A saddle on a motor
Burnin’ dynamite for gas,
As a little liftin’ surface
As will hike it off the grass,
A thousand roweled horses
With a feather for a girth
Three hundred miles an hour
Fifty feet above the earth!
The breed o’ man who rides ’em
Is an optimistic guy
With magic in his fingers
And a telescopic eye,
A throttle bendin’ genius
With ’is neck upon ’is nose,
His nervous system sweetened
With intestinal repose.
An autumn day of shadows
With the wind across the lake,
A bonus for a record
And a fortune for a stake;
But hell is in the makin’
And the devil sets the pace
When they tangle out at Cleveland
In the Thompson Trophy Race!
—GILL ROBB WILSON, 1938
EPILOGUE
Pancho Barnes grabbed a ride to the finish of the derby at the Cleveland Air Races after her accident in Pecos, arriving just in time for the start of the pylon races. It was a dangerous sport wherein the planes roared around pylons practically on the deck, in close proximity to one another. She loved the excitement of being there—all the new airplane models and the deep-throated roar of mighty engines. No one would have believed it had they not seen “Speed” Holman loop the loop in a Ford TriMotor and then fly the airliner inverted.
Pancho Barnes and the Mystery Ship.
She found that the rumor of Walter Beech’s Mystery Ship had become fact. The Travel Air Model R designed by Herb Rawdon and Walter Burnham was as beautiful as it was fast. Actually, the airplane didn’t incorporate startling new technology, but its low-wing monoplane design, high-powered engine, and the secrecy during its gestation explained the sensation surrounding its birth. The ship was nearly one hundred miles per hour faster than her J-5 Travel Air, and Barnes had to have one. So, she did. Only four of the magnificent racers had been built to date, and, as Barnes had plenty of money then, she immediately bought one. She soon challenged Earhart’s speed record at 196.19 miles per hour; then, in 1931, Barnes installed a 300-horsepower Wright J-6 nine-cylinder engine in her racer. She eventually owned one of the last two Mystery Ships, through attrition, as the glamorous Model R’s siblings perished in accidents through the years.
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