Flying Jenny

by Theasa Tuohy

  As she made her final circle, Jenny wryly noted that Miss Liberty was wearing a dress. She could hear her mother’s refrain, her mouth tight, her pince-nez set firmly in place for the stern admonition: “A lady is always properly attired.” Jenny laughed into the wind. Demerits, though, for the Big Gal’s stone sandals.

  She glanced down at the map to refresh her memory of the return route to Roosevelt Field and wondered at the strangeness of the day. Had she accepted this dare because of her takeoff point, named for the fallen son of a president? Quentin, son of Teddy. He’d been in the same regiment as Charles. Was that it? Of course not! But Bubba would have been proud of his baby sister, not aghast like their parents. The Roosevelt heir had an airfield named for him. This would be her monument to Charles.

  She touched a little finger to tight lips, smiled a child’s smile, and the deal was sealed. Now her sense of accomplishment was thrilling. But with it came added determination to not let the joy of flying turn into work. She wanted to have fun, go to dances at the country club, play tennis. Not toil all the time at perfecting aerial stunts. Phooey!

  “Oh lordy,” Jenny said out loud, as she saw from the map that the spot to her right was Governors Island. She knew her aviation history. She had pored over all of Charles’s books after he was shot down. This was the very place Wilbur Wright took off from way back in 1909 to fly around the Statue of Liberty in his old crate—that thing with all sorts of struts and him just sitting up there out in the open.

  Jenny swooped down to check out the terrain. Sure enough, it was a spit of land with a grass runway and a row of buildings that might be hangars. She buzzed the field, but no one appeared. A ripple of excitement, of reverence, ran through her—feelings tinged with a vague sense of disappointment that there was no one around who might have noticed her bridge feat. But it didn’t cross her mind that she herself was now part of aviation history. Instead she thought of the business at hand, finding her way back to Roosevelt Field.

  CHAPTER THREE

  RACING AGAINST DEADLINE

  Several reporters were right on Laura’s heels, charging for telephones. She had staked out a public booth in a drugstore just off the bridge on Delancey Street by paying a tough-looking street kid two bits to hold it for her. With a salary of only twelve dollars a week, a quarter was a big investment, but she wasn’t about to risk losing precious minutes and be beat out filing this story. A half hour spent searching for an available phone was a lifetime in the tabloid news business—she had to prove that she was skilled at these breaking stories. And maybe, just maybe, if her story was good enough, she could get the money reimbursed on her expense account. Sure enough, the kid was standing guard in the booth’s doorway, a grin on his face, his corduroy cap pushed back on his head, eating a Tootsie Roll that had obviously been purchased with his spoils.

  When she got a rewrite man on the telephone, he told her the wires were already reporting that the pilot had tipped up and flown sideways under the Brooklyn Bridge to thread the plane between a tanker and a US Navy destroyer.

  “Can you confirm he did that?” he barked.

  “I don’t have eyes in the back of my head,” Laura snapped back. “I saw the plane go under two bridges, and that’s it. But I swear to God that he was a she!”

  “Whoa, what’s that? Okay, kid, give me what you got.”

  When Laura had finished dictating, he said, “Barnes wants you and Cheese to lam it to Long Island and get a beat on whoever that pilot was.”

  “Will do,” Laura said, and hung up.

  Cheesy was waiting outside the booth at their prearranged spot. He had heard talk too that the pilot had flown sideways under the last bridge.

  As they started to leave, the phone in the booth rang. Laura snatched it up, and heard Barnes, the city editor, bellow: “It definitely was a girl, kid. Get on it. Mac supposedly has Roosevelt Field covered, but you better get out there too, so we can have a sob sister number.”

  * * *

  Roosevelt Field, some twenty miles from Manhattan on Long Island, was a flat, treeless plain where cattle had grazed in colonial times. Charles Lindbergh had taxied down its muddy ruts two years earlier on his way to Paris, wheels greased to help his lift, beginning the world’s first successful transatlantic flight. Visionaries, daredevils, and drifters all came together there in the aircraft-company hangars that dotted the several thousand acres and housed the flying machines that would soar into the future, or crash and burn at the ragged edges of the unkempt acreage.

  Presumably, it was also the spot from which the latest daredevil had taken off.

  When Laura arrived with Cheesy in his battered DeSoto, the immense flying arena was swarming with people cheering and waving, hot dog vendors, cars, trucks, newsreel vans. Even a dirigible hovered overhead.

  “How do we plow through this mess?” Laura asked after she and the photographer had parked some distance away and climbed a pasture fence to get nearer to the action.

  “Nutin’ to it,” he replied. “The victim’s gotta be at the center of the pile. Hang on,” he offered her an elbow, “I’ll bull my way in.” He thrust his camera forward like a ramrod.

  As they pushed their way through the circus atmosphere, a small plane would occasionally take off down one of the rutted roads that served as runways, the pilot hanging over the side of the plane waving to the crowd scattering out of his path. Some of the stunters would then buzz the excited onlookers, dipping their wings or even barrel-rolling over them.

  “Holy smoke,” Laura said to Cheesy when they’d gotten close enough to spot the star of the day, who was perched on the open rumble seat of a 1927 Chevy. “You’ve got to get a picture of that outlandish outfit.” The tiny fair-haired young woman at the eye of the storm of reporters and photographers was wearing boys’ knickers and argyle socks topped off by a beat-up leather flight jacket. She was merrily swinging a cloth helmet back and forth in her right hand.

  “Those clothes should please Barnes since he wants all this gal reporter fluff,” Laura said with a malicious grin. “He says my serious pieces read like Stella Dallas.”

  “Go get ’em, tiger. You got spunk,” Chessy said. “You certainly throw yourself into things all right.”

  “Ah, Cheese, you know I think these kinds of stories are silly. I’d rather be working on more worthwhile stuff.”

  “Dis here’s da business. You gotta realize that, kid.”

  She found this kind of assignment annoying. Barnes usually let her work on things that took time and some thought. She knew it was because he didn’t trust her to work fast and handle breaking news. That suited her just fine. She could develop her own stories about issues or people in need—not just pander to the lowest common denominator. On the other hand, this was her job and she didn’t want it thought around the newsroom that she couldn’t handle whatever the desk threw at her.

  As she and Cheesy pushed their way into the crowd, a reporter at the center of a howling pack yelled up at the woman in the rumble seat: “Say, you got a license to fly that crate?”

  The sparkly young woman, who had answered endless questions for the last twenty minutes and had long before identified herself as Jenny Flynn from Oklahoma City, frowned and squirmed. “Of course I do.”

  “So then,” asked a guy in the front row, “aren’t you worried you might lose that license? The Department of Commerce frowns on stunts like flying under bridges. You did four of ’em.”

  The tall, good-looking, middle-aged man who stood next to the pilot patted her shoulder reassuringly, and made motions that she should sit down so the car could move on.

  Jenny shrugged away his hand and squared her shoulders. “We’ll see,” she said in a much louder voice. “I trust that won’t happen. It’s interesting to discover, don’t you think, just what magic can be done with an airplane?”

  Laura, still missing her hat, but with her marcel wave back to its original stylish perfection thanks to some intense work with a comb and her compact whi
le Cheesy was driving, finally got a chance to shout from the crowd: “Why are you dressed in those clothes?”

  Jenny looked stunned. She leaned forward, scanning the sea of faces, and did a double take when her pale gray eyes landed on the sole woman among the pack of reporters. “They were handy,” she yelled, frowning and using her hands like a megaphone. “One can hardly fly in a skirt.” She turned to her companion and, in a voice that carried over the crowd, said, “These New Yorkers really are rude, just like everyone at home says. What business is it of hers what I fly in?”

  “But those look like boys’ clothes,” Laura persisted.

  “They are. I borrowed them from the child of a friend,” Jenny replied curtly. “Do you want his name and address so you can check?”

  “Naw,” Laura shouted over the din, “I doubt he’s important to the story. But what about this license business? Do you have one or not? And why did that question make you so nervous?”

  “I said I had one. Are you doubting my word?” Jenny turned and plopped down next to the tall man. He banged on the back window of the coupe, and it slowly pulled away, the driver tooting the Chevy’s horn to clear a path through the reporters and well-wishers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE LESSON

  There was hell to pay when Laura got back to the office with no more than what the pack had gleaned through the impromptu answers from the back of a rumble seat.

  Laura finished her entire story in one shot instead of giving it in takes for a copy kid to run over to Barnes at the city desk. She knew Mac had already filed his, and she had a feeling that somehow hers might not compare too favorably. She hadn’t quite understood what was wanted here. A mob of people, everyone shouting questions. No real answers, it seemed, to anything.

  She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and wound her way through the cluttered desks to hand her story to Barnes.

  He glanced it over, then threw the copy on the floor. “What’s this nonsense? Didn’t I ever teach you nothing? This is in Mac’s story. It’s on the wires.” He was revving up to such an extent she thought he was going to swallow his cigar. “For damn’s sake, it’s even in the cutlines next to Cheesy’s pictures.”

  Laura could see that Barnes was wanting to say something a lot heavier than damn. She knew she frustrated Barnes on a lot of levels. But why did he keep sending her out on silly stories like this hysteria over flying aces? “You didn’t say anything about an interview when you sent me out there.” She tried to keep the defiance out of her voice. She had a feeling this was a dumb thing to say, but it was true.

  “You knew Mac was already there!” Barnes yelled, his face turning purple. “Do you think it takes two of you to lift a pencil?”

  “Whoa!” She thought she was only thinking it, but she’d said it!

  Barnes gave her a startled, enraged look. “Whoa? Kid, you’re the one who’d better whoa.”

  “Sorry boss,” Laura mumbled, “I was just thinking out loud.”

  Thinking was right. It hadn’t crossed her mind before now that they’d sent her to Roosevelt Field because she was a woman—assuming that would somehow set her up for special treatment to get an interview with Jenny Flynn. Whoa. She said it to herself this time. She needed to think about this, and keep her mouth shut. This was a confusing world she found herself in, but like everything else in her life she needed to just grit her teeth and find her own way through the maze. Never let them see that you don’t have a clue how to do it. And this sob sister stuff, what exactly did it mean? She had thought it was synonymous with tearjerker. Could it possibly mean any old thing written by a woman?

  How to recoup? Barnes was really in a rage. And he was her lifeline in this place. He’d been stuck with teaching her the ropes ever since she’d had the good luck to land the job a few months earlier, after her English professor at Barnard, a friend of the publisher, went to bat for her.

  Not only had the job of trying to teach Laura how to chase a breaking story fallen to the longsuffering city editor, but he’d had to instruct her on the simplest tasks that one normally learned as a copyboy. Barnes had empowered Laura with the knowledge of such things as slug, lead, graf, cutlines, takes, kicker, wood block, type size, how to signal the end of your story with -30-, and, most of all, how to tread lightly around men in the back shop, also known as printers. And he had not been shy about grumbling that Laura was yet another example of why publishers should keep their noses out of a newsroom.

  “Say, boss . . .” Laura began tentatively, but knew she had to plow ahead into his rage. Otherwise she’d be worse than a wallflower in this joint. “I wanted to ask you about how to handle this license business. I did check for clips in the morgue . . .”

  Barnes had already turned his back on Laura, and was screaming at a copyboy across the room: “Get those pages to me, NOW! What license, what about the morgue?” Barnes whirled back to Laura.

  She quickly explained that Jenny Flynn had acted nervous when asked about the Department of Commerce and her license.

  “I asked if she really had one, and she got huffy as a hornet. Took off right after. But when I checked the morgue, I found a story that she got her license when she was only seventeen. She doesn’t look like she could be more than eighteen now.”

  Barnes’s face lost its purple tone and seemed to be flirting with a grin. “So you did all that, did ya? Okay. So that’s what she’s afraid of, losing her license because of this bridge stunt.” Barnes screwed up his mouth in thought, shook his head. “Hmm. Do you know what to do next?”

  “Umm, uh, I checked, but of course the Department of Commerce isn’t open on the weekend.”

  “It will be tomorrow. Keep after them to find out if they yank her ticket. Good girl. Mac didn’t mention this.” Barnes rolled his eyes in mock disgust, then gave Laura a stern, furrowed-brow command: “Now go back and write a story speculating how the winged lass’s young hopes and dreams hang on the whim of the Commerce bureaucracy.”

  Laura frowned. “She’s awfully irresponsible, I have to say. But isn’t that hounding the girl?” She was being kind to say that. She had found a lot more about Jenny in the morgue clips than she was imparting to Barnes. The pilot appeared to be spoiled and rich like all those uppity girls in college with whom Laura had never been able to make friends. Several wire stories had taken note of Jenny’s singularity in Oklahoma as a girl flier, but emphasis seemed to be more on her debutante status than anything else, and on the fact that her much older brother had been shot down over France during the war. The girl intrigued Laura. Why would she do such a silly, frivolous thing? She obviously didn’t understand life was tough. Was she trying to copy her brother? And running around in men’s clothes? Maybe in Greenwich Village, where anything goes, but—

  “Hounding?” Barnes voice rose to a near screech. “Don’t talk nonsense. We gotta keep pestering the feds or our readers will never get the answer.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OXYGEN

  Jenny Flynn and her friend Mark Snyder were at Roosevelt Field the following afternoon. Wearing a cloche hat and a light summer frock of peach organza with an uneven ruffled hem, she was hard to recognize as the curly headed waif outfitted in boys’ clothes who had accepted a dare from Mark the day before.

  But the tension between them would have been readily apparent to anyone bothering to take notice in the boisterous, milling crowd of thousands who tramped around the field anticipating that another transcontinental speed record was about to be broken. All eyes were scanning the horizon for Frank Hawks, who was due in from Los Angeles. He had set a record getting there—nineteen hours, ten minutes—and was now on the return trip.

  “I just can’t believe you did that to me.” Jenny had been fuming all morning. “You set me up, Mark. Alerted the press, just to get publicity for your darned company. And you know perfectly well that kind of notice could cause me to lose my license.”

  “Jenny, what you did was extraordinary. The world needs to
know about it. You don’t have to worry about your license. You’ll be a household name.”

  “That’s exactly what I don’t want—notoriety. Easy for you to say not to worry, but they could ground me.”

  “Not with the Curtiss clout,” Mark said, a grin losing its fight against an Eastern prep-school smugness that had always grated on Jenny’s Western sensibilities. His pasty, too-pretty face needed more sun. He never was much of a flier, as far as Jenny was concerned, and logging most of his hours in closed cabins gave him an armchair pallor that was hardly her idea of handsome. “We’re already working on it.”

  She blinked in disbelief. Mark was a Curtiss Aviation executive. “Working on what? My license? You’re sure? I’ve been really scared.”

  “The government wants to promote aviation, not suppress it.” Mark couldn’t lose his smugness. “Why do you persist in hiding your talent? Doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’m not interested in flying for hire.” My lord, Jenny thought, how many times am I going to have to say this? “I won’t work for you. That’s it. I certainly appreciate it, if you can save my license, but I came to the field today only because Frank Hawks is a friend. I want to cheer him on. Then I’m going back to Oklahoma.” She pursed her lips, jutted out her chin, and clenched a fist as though she were going to hit someone.

  The crowd pressing around them was in a festive mood, watching and waiting. A two-seater Movietone biplane circled overhead with Fox News painted in huge letters on its side. In smaller script, Mightiest of All could only be read when the plane buzzed close to the ground, its photographers hanging out of the cockpits taking pictures of the spectators. In these heady flying days of the summer of 1929, records were made to be broken, and the press was agog with every lurch. The New York Daily News even had its own plane, its ace aerial photographer always scouting around the field for stories.