Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  Following the transatlantic attempt, the New York ticker tape parade, and 1929 Women’s Air Derby success, Elder turned her fame and adulation into a screen career. Her brave adventure in an airplane named The American Girl led naturally to Flo Ziegfield’s movie Glorifying the American Girl, based on her aborted Atlantic crossing. She starred in two silent movies with Richard Dix and Hoot Gibson. Ironically, the popular beauty launched a $100,000 speaking tour about the same time her flying career was coming to an end and the Depression deepened.

  The flamboyant aviatrix had lunched with President Calvin Coolidge and hobnobbed with European royalty. But even a good thing could be too much. At one point, Ruth Elder, determined to withdraw from the spotlight, went so far as to take the name Susan to diminish fame’s glare. “A quarter of a million dollars slipped through my fingers, and soon there was nothing,” she said.

  Elder was married six times, twice to Hollywood cameraman Ralph King. He said she called him one day to ask, “‘Daddy, are you married again?’ I says no, and she says, ‘Can I come home?’ I says yeah, and there it was. We got married again. A real love story.”

  Ruth Elder

  Ruth Elder died at age seventy-three on October 10, 1977, one day short of the fiftieth anniversary of her famous attempt to conquer the Atlantic. In tribute to her passion, her ashes were scattered over the Golden Gate Bridge from an airplane.

  Claire Fahy, too, dreamed of setting records and making a name in aviation, but she was killed the year following the derby. When the engine failed on Fahy’s taperwing Waco while taking off from Tonopah, Nevada, the terrain and altitude gave her few choices or chances to recover from calamity at the most critical point of flight. Her test-pilot husband Herb, who had taught Claire to fly, was killed the same year while demonstrating the first low-wing Lockheed Sirius. It had been designed for Charles Lindbergh, who lowered the west to east nonstop transcontinental record in it.

  Edith Magalis Foltz (Stearns) was another pilot who could lay some claim to that slippery word “first.” She barnstormed her own airplane before and after the 1929 Women’s Air Derby and, at the same time, sporadically maintained what could have been the first female airline copilot “job.” Smitten by a longing to fly, women would take any opportunity they could get. Foltz became an unpaid copilot in a trimotor Bach on the West Coast Air Transport line between Seattle and San Francisco. Apparently, it was one of those go-along-when-invited situations, usually on charter trips. Nevertheless, Foltz logged nearly one hundred hours right seat in the Bachs, Fokkers, and Fords with West Coast Air. Western Air Express bought the line, and eventually sold out to United Airlines.

  The accomplished early transport pilot continued racing, flying a Kinner Bird, placing third in the Women’s Air Derby of 1931, and, in the 1932 Transcontinental Derby for both men and women, placing fifteenth overall. She was the second-place woman behind Gladys O’Donnell.

  Prior to World War II, Foltz became operations manager for a new feeder airline in Portland, Oregon, Oregon Airways, where her husband Joe served as president. She taught primary civilian pilot training (CPT), and she remained active in the Ninety-Nines as the first Northwest Section Governor.

  When war broke out, anyone who could fly was in demand—so long as he was male. The United Kingdom’s need was so great that even female pilots were considered indispensable. Foltz was soon one of the twenty-five elite women pilots selected by Jacqueline Cochran to serve in Great Britain with the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), ferrying RAF heavies—Halifaxes, Wellingtons, and Lancasters. The ATA women flew anything, anywhere, anytime, in any weather. Their astonishing story is told in the Ninety-Nines Museum of Women Pilots. Edith Foltz’s son Richard followed his mother’s example and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps.

  Edith Foltz

  After the war, Foltz taught instrument flying to naval cadets in Corpus Christi, Texas, but she never lost her fascination with air racing. She flew the modern Powder Puff Derby twice in the fifties before she died at age fifty-one in 1956.

  Mary Hays Haizlip caught the racing fever in 1929. She said her favorite races were the closed-circuit pylon races. In Chicago’s National Air Races of 1930, she won a first, second, and third rounding the pylons. In Cleveland in 1931, she entered seven races, winning first or second in each. In 1932, she climbed into her husband’s Wedell-Williams Racer in which he’d just won the Bendix and set a speed record of 300 miles per hour, which stood for seven years, eventually broken by Jacqueline Cochran. The year 1932 in Cleveland saw her winning the women’s free-for-all in a Howard, then, the next year, pylon events in Los Angeles and Chicago. It was no surprise that Mary became the second-highest money-winner in air races, male or female. She later established an astonishing thirty-five-thousand-foot altitude record in a Buhl Pup airplane.

  An interesting and tragic aside to the 1933 Chicago pylon races concerned Florence Klingensmith, who finished second to Mary Haizlip. Klingensmith was an experienced pilot. She had set a 1931 record of 1,078 consecutive inside loops. She finished second to Mary Haizlip in the 1933 Chicago pylon races, flying a Gee Bee built by the Granville Brothers. The airplane was a strange-looking ship, quite fast, seemingly all engine. Jimmy Doolittle had won the 1931 Thompson in a Gee Bee and would never fly one again. Every Gee Bee ever built eventually crashed, probably due to the airplane’s instability; it was no longer built after 1934. Crashes were not uncommon at the air races, and the pilots, who loved the challenge of competition, glumly wondered if the public came out specifically to cheer a particular pilot or airplane design, or if they attended simply for the excitement of seeing someone die.

  Mary Haizlip

  The day after Florence Klingensmith’s good showing around the pylons, she flew the Gee Bee in the mixed-feature race. The fabric peeled off one of the wings, the wing failed, and she was killed. However, the interpretation of her accident by race officials was that her problems were caused by her “time of the month.” Not until women flew thousands of hours during World War II was the old precept that women were not safe to fly during menstruation dampened. Even then, it did not end entirely.

  To make money, Mary Haizlip flew as a test pilot for three aircraft companies, Spartan Aircraft, American Eagle, and Buhl Aircraft. This dangerous type of flying took its toll when the entire tail assembly disintegrated on an experimental Monocoupe that she was testing. The intrepid aviator survived the crash with a broken back, crediting her husband Jimmy with saving her life. He had strapped her into the airplane so securely, she said, it was like “falling three stories strapped to a chair.” Haizlip described a funny encounter with the inscrutable Howard Hughes, a story that is still repeated in aviation circles. She had a special Ritchie aperiodic compass for which she’d paid $125 that Hughes wanted to use for a flight. She offered to simply lend it to him, but he insisted on a five-dollar rental fee. For years, Haizlip said Hughes still owed her the five dollars. “Even then, Howard proved he was a clever man with a dollar. He returned my compass air freight collect.”

  Haizlip related another encounter with a famous aviator. When the famous General H. A. P. Arnold was a guest in their home, he and Jimmy Haizlip reflected on the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots of World War II. “Hap” Arnold had worked with the mercurial Jacqueline Cochran, implementing her plan to train female ferry pilots to release male pilots for combat during the war. As the war’s end was in sight, Cochran challenged the general, he said, telling him to either make her a general officer or she’d shut down the WASP. Mary Haizlip heard Arnold tell her husband, “I told her to go ahead. And she did.”

  Haizlip and her husband, Jim, later took a vacation trip to Europe, not on an ocean ship but rather an airship. They enjoyed passage on the airship Hindenberg’s second commercial crossing of the North Atlantic, with their Beech Staggerwing airplane stowed as baggage. With war approaching, the Haizlips returned and settled in the Los Angeles area where Mary became a realtor, Jimmy joining her later, in one of the most successful real es
tate companies in Malibu. Mary said that when all the fine young men came back from war, “they wouldn’t need any little old lady test pilots.” Both of the talented pioneer pilots ended the flying phase of their lives, living a full, contributing life in their community. Sadly, their house on a cliff above the beach burned in a Malibu fire, and all their flying memorabilia was lost. Characteristically positive, Mary’s comment about the lost treasure was that “when they are in your memory, you don’t have to dust them.”

  Both Haizlips were inducted in the Oklahoma Aviation Hall of Fame and were honored at “the gathering of Eagles.” Mary was the only woman in both cases. Mary Haizlip died at eighty-seven in 1997, the second to the last survivor of the 1929 Women’s Air Derby.

  Jessie Maude Beveridge Keith-Miller (Pugh), nicknamed “Chubbie,” had been a bit bored in marriage. Just like Pancho Barnes, Chubbie stumbled into the adventure of flight. What could be more fun and frightening than a first-ever flight in a ninety-horsepower, eighty-mile-per-hour cruise speed, unproven airplane from London to her home in Australia—with the bonus of fame and romance!

  While vacationing in London, Keith-Miller responded to the intriguing plan of a Captain Bill Lancaster of the Royal Air Force who was looking for a copilot and a fund-raiser for his proposed record flight to Australia. Though not a pilot, Keith-Miller filled the fund-raising role and became Lancaster’s business partner and passenger. The pair left England in October 1927 in an Avro Avian two-seat biplane. The trip required forty intermediate stops, including one crash and a broken nose for Keith-Miller along the way. A long delay for repair allowed another pilot to pass them by, though their March 19, 1928, arrival in Darwin gained them great publicity and instant fame. The scandal of Keith-Miller and Lancaster spending three months together on the flight, while each was married to another, diminished her regard at home in Australia. Nevertheless, Keith-Miller’s fame and life’s course were sealed.

  Cashing in on the American public’s interest in the colorful Aussie with the musical accent, the Bell Company entered Keith-Miller in the fifty-mile closed-circuit pylon race for women immediately following the 1929 Women’s Air Derby. She was still flying her derby Fleet biplane. (Like Keith-Miller, airplane designer and manufacturer Reuben Fleet’s young daughter Phyllis Fleet was also a charter Ninety-Nine, though she did not compete in 1929. In fact, the upstate New Yorker didn’t attend the Ninety-Nine’s charter meeting on Long Island, because her mother wouldn’t allow her to wander the big city without a chaperone. Phyllis Fleet didn’t meet the other women until some years later.)

  Excited spectators of the pylon competition concentrated on well-known Phoebe Omlie, Amelia Earhart, and Ireland’s Lady Mary Heath, who would undoubtedly place first, second, and third. The unknown Keith-Miller moved up because Earhart passed her on the inside of a turn and was disqualified. The crowd was astonished when Mrs. Keith-Miller, as the American press invariably called her, won the race and the headlines. Her fame in the United States was always greater than in her native country, possibly because the scandal of her association with Bill Lancaster was forgiven more easily in America.

  Keith-Miller’s first-place win encouraged her to compete further, and aircraft companies queued up to sponsor her. She flew the Ford Reliability tour for the Fairchild Aircraft Company, one of only three women among the thirty-eight starters. Unstoppable, she was the only woman to finish, and came in eighth overall. Her all-white jodhpurs, silk shirt, jacket, and flying helmet, along with her black boots, tie, and aircraft, added glamour to flying skill. Fairchild happily increased her prize money, and Keith-Miller moved into the big time.

  When the stock market crashed just two months after the derby, it took aviation into its drowning embrace. The industry had been experiencing a stupendous period of growth, with commercial production increasing 193 percent over the previous year and flight hours tripling from 1928 to 1929. However, as some aircraft companies immediately struggled to stay afloat and their grandiose publicity events faded, others were able to continue in the business-as-usual mode for at least a short while.

  The Wright Engine Company already had agreed to lend Keith-Miller an engine to attempt a transcontinental record, and she searched for an appropriate airframe for it from her narrowing sources. She settled on an Alexander Bullet with a 165-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engine. The airplane had a terrible reputation for haplessly spinning, but the optimistic pilot figured it was a straight-and-level race and she would “be careful.” The daring Keith-Miller established a record both ways, between New York and Los Angeles, mastering the untrustworthy Bullet.

  Keith-Miller was on a roll. When offered a Pittsburg-Havana round-trip record flight, again to be flown in the Alexander Bullet, she followed the S on her compass. Cuban crowds welcomed her at the end of the first leg, then she contracted a near-fatal case of “get-home-itis,” a well-known aviation disease especially common to inexperienced pilots. It’s a feeling of a great need to get home, with the good judgment and patience to wait out bad weather diminishing in direct proportion to mounting pressure to take off. An old saying in aviation points out that “the pilot took off in terrible weather and his funeral was held in bright sunshine.” As Keith-Miller remained grounded in Havana by bad weather, her sponsor pushed her to complete her flight. She succumbed to the pressure and took off for Florida despite ominous weather, with plenty of fuel, but aided neither with instruments for flying in the clouds nor radio.

  When she didn’t arrive in Miami and her fuel was known to be exhausted, a search was initiated, then abandoned after two days. Actually, Keith-Miller had fought it out with a storm encompassing frightening winds, both horizontal and vertical, a lifeless compass, and a growing terror that she might spin the Bullet. When she eventually flew out of the storm, land was not in sight, and the fuel level was becoming critical. She finally saw land, even though it was jungle, and set down in a short clearing. The strong west wind had taken her to the Bahamas instead of to Florida. Only dumb luck kept her out of the ocean.

  The Cuba fiasco was virtually the end of Chubbie Keith-Miller’s aviation glory days, but a bizarre turn kept her in the news. As she worked with a ghost writer, Haydn Clarke, on her biography, she developed feelings for him, and her romantic entanglement with Bill Lancaster was jeopardized. Keith-Miller professed love for both men. Clarke was murdered, and Lancaster was arrested and charged with killing his rival in a fit of jealousy. Lancaster claimed that Clarke had committed suicide. There was a sensational trial. The Miami Herald said the “swashbuckler” Lancaster was lucky to have an outstanding defense attorney. Keith-Miller’s pilot was acquitted, and the notorious couple left for England.

  Not long after, Bill Lancaster attempted a record flight from England to Cape Town in an Avro Avian. His route took him across the great Sahara Desert with its endless uninhabited stretches of desolate sand dunes, and the adventurer never arrived at his destination. Twenty-nine years later, Lancaster’s body was found by a camel corps, preserved by the dry desert heat. He had lived for a week after his crash, and his diary was said to have a message for Keith-Miller: “Chubbie, my darling, give up flying and settle down!”

  Chubbie Keith-Miller did indeed marry again, this time to John Pugh, an airline pilot. They were in Singapore when the Japanese arrived in World War II. Chubbie Keith-Miller died at seventy-one in London in 1972.

  Opal Logan Van Zandt Giberson Kunz, although only married once, came by her string of names as a result of the demise of her parents when she was twelve. Her mother gave Kunz her own name, Logan. Her father was William A. Van Zandt. When Kunz’s aunt and uncle, Ed and Margaret Giberson, adopted her when her parents died, they added their family name. Kunz’s marriage to world-renowned gem expert and Tiffany’s vice president, Dr. G. F. Kunz, had been a major social event of 1923. The subsequent annulment drew much commentary. News reports never failed to mention the couple’s forty-three-year age difference and Opal’s prestigious address on Riverside Drive. She held her head
high, saying that the annulment had been achieved in complete amity, that they would continue living together, and that Opal would run Dr. Kunz’s household. Dr. Kunz died in 1932, leaving Opal half his estate, estimated at $1 million.

  Opal Kunz

  Kunz bought a 300-horsepower Travel Air for the 1929 Women’s Air Derby, but she was not allowed to compete in it, since race officials said it was “too fast for a woman to fly.” So, she rented a 200-horsepower Travel Air. Following the race, Kunz became prominent in the organization of the Ninety-Nines. The Tiffany’s connection came into play with the prestigious jewelers designing the interlocking square nines, which became the badge worn by all members, even today.

  Tiffany & Co. designed the Ninety-Nines official badge.

  Kunz stunned a crowd of thirty thousand at the American Legion air meet in Philadelphia in September 1930, winning a spectacular and dangerous pylon race in open competition with men.

  Opal Kunz’s unequivocal patriotism led her to found the Betsy Ross Corps for women supporting national defense. (Like Pancho Barnes’s Women’s Air Reserve, this was another offshoot, though only the Ninety-Nines survived long term.) The Corps’s purpose was to serve on noncombatant duty in time of national emergency. Opal Kunz’s greatest pride was in teaching four hundred students to fly in the civilian pilot training program during World War II.

  Her patriotism never waned. When Yuri Gagarin hurtled into space in 1961, sixty-five-year-old Opal Kunz wrote President Kennedy volunteering to go for the United States. She died at age seventy-one in 1967.