by Alice Arlen
· 18 ·
IN APRIL 1928, in the same week as her husband was off in the north of England, training to compete in the famous Aintree (or Grand National) Steeplechase, Mrs. Simpson also traveled north, to Liverpool again, where she boarded a ship and sailed for home; or rather, where she hoped her next home might be: New York, her father’s new base and surely welcoming domain. Joe Patterson, however, despite his success with the Daily News, had more than enough domestic problems of his own, not only his highly visible though formally unacknowledged mistress, Mary King, living in an apartment down the street from his own, but also now an illegitimate son, James or Jimmy, and accordingly was less than eager for added complications. Thus, instead of being greeted by Poppa’s open arms, the new Liberty contributor was instead rather brusquely reminded that, despite a byline carrying her maiden name, she was still Mrs. James Simpson, Jr., still married to Mr. Simpson, and properly belonged back in Chicago at her husband’s side when he returned to resume the pleasures of domestic life.
Cross but more or less obedient to her father’s wishes and, besides, having few alternatives, Alicia made her way back to Chicago, then out to Lake Forest, where she started looking for a house to rent for herself and Simpson; nothing substantial or with too long a lease, since her plan was still that she would soon be single again, after her year of marriage was up in late August. This time uncomfortable reality intruded in the person of her mother, another marital expert in the family, who not only disapproved of her daughter’s breezy notion of dissolving a union that she, Alice Patterson, had done much to create but then, more usefully, took Alicia in to visit with an experienced lawyer: a Michigan Avenue veteran who briskly spelled out the relevant details of Illinois law, essentially that the quickest she could expect to be divorced, in any sort of binding fashion, would be after at least two years of marriage.
Stymied yet again, and now stuck in a Lake Forest rental with a husband who, on his return from England, appeared to show no greater interest in her than she in him (who in fact was currently in New England, looking into Eastern law schools), Alicia’s first thought was to use her newfound magazine-writing skills to gain some needed independence and in the process get back into her father’s protective orbit. Confidently she fired off a daughterly letter to New York, asking for another assignment from Liberty (which, by the way, was a new general-interest magazine, owned by the Tribune Company though financed from surging Daily News profits), but Patterson was still in no mood to be helpful. Instead of the easygoing, friendly banter of “I kid you not” encouragement, he sent back a note of blunt dismissal: “What makes you think you can write about anything except horses? Besides,” he scrawled, “the magazine needs no more articles on that subject….Next time you write for an assignment you should check the spelling in your letter.”
All the same she persisted, and soon came up with an idea for a series of articles on the different challenges faced by young working women in the notoriously male-dominated Chicago job market. As she explained in her spell-checked proposal, the pieces would be “nothing too serious or sociological” but rather something informal and more personal. Patterson didn’t answer for several weeks and then wrote back with a perfunctory, almost grudging sign of approval, adding that she would likely find the new assignment “harder to do than you expect, the work more difficult than you are accustomed to.”
Alicia clears a five-foot-seven-inch jump at the Onwentsia Club, Lake Forest, Illinois.
Each day she took the train into the city from Lake Forest, and with a borrowed identity (volunteered by a neighbor in Libertyville) she trudged around the Loop, responding to a variety of job-offer ads, in the process putting up with continual rejection, demeaning jokes, and outright hostility. A junior editor, doubtless instructed not to be too easy on the boss’s daughter, sent her first article back for four rewrites. Patterson himself then provided the final edit, scolding her that “Coca-Cola is among our big advertisers so don’t call it ‘poisonous stuff,’ at least not on a whim,” and giving further lectures on correct style. “It’s just lazy and unschooled,” he wrote with his red pencil, “for a writer to shirk punctuation. And never, never use dashes instead of commas, parentheses and so on.” The second article was even harder to complete: a supposedly humorous sequence of vignettes showing the writer making a mess of the simplest and least-demanding jobs, such as movie usher, department store greeter, and so on, but in the end she finished it and saw it published. Then in late summer, struggling to come up with something else, while at the same time trying to maintain the facade of her virtually nonexistent marriage in the dead zone of marriage-proud Lake Forest, a solution suddenly revealed itself to her, perhaps to several of her problems all at once.
· 19 ·
THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS went something like this: Given that Joe Patterson throughout his life (doubtless to some degree in response to his own conservative origins) had been an enthusiast for the new—new ideas, new things—it followed, more or less, that first he would have been an early proponent of aviation, and next that as a fiftieth-birthday present to himself, or so he said, in the course of that same summer of 1928 he signed up for flying lessons. The problem was that Patterson, in flying as in many other activities, inclined to impatience, clumsiness especially around machinery, and a marked degree of carelessness about his own person. Thus on a mid-August morning, at the far end of a grassy airfield on Long Island, instead of waiting as he should have for his instructor to check the wind and so on, clearing him for takeoff on his first solo flight, Patterson blithely took off on his own say-so, made one wobbly circle of the field and then crash-landed, mostly destroying his plane and in the process receiving many cuts and bruises.
As Editor & Publisher wryly reported the incident: “On takeoff, the soloing editor’s wing was observed to dip in a manner already dangerous for both machine and pilot. Then on the landing he came down early, very hard, the biplane’s nose right in the ground, narrowly escaping with his life.” Not surprisingly many voices were raised, among them those of his wife, his mistress, daughter Elinor, and a Greek chorus of newspaper executives, to persuade the battered though not entirely chastened pilot to act his age and remain on the ground. Only Alicia went against the consensus, dashing off a note to remind him, “You’ve always been right, telling us never to quit or give way to fear…and so you shouldn’t do so now.” Alicia’s tough-minded, chiding words, so much like his own to her on many occasions, apparently struck a responsive nerve in Patterson, and he wrote her back right away, much more warmly than before, thanking her for “my only vote of confidence,” seemingly once again in Poppa mode. When she followed up with a second letter, declaring her own interest in flying lessons, perhaps as potential material for a Liberty series, he replied cheerfully, “I think you have a good idea, it’s a grand experience,” and suggested she get herself out to an airfield and persuade someone to take her up.
On a dare, AP steers a glider in for a landing, Roosevelt Field, Long Island, 1929.
Almost certainly what Patterson had in mind was that his daughter should try her wings at some airfield near Lake Forest or in the Chicago area, at any rate in the Midwest, her part of the world. But Alicia, whose impulsiveness had badly misled her all too recently, now gambled once again, packed her bags, boarded the train for New York, and once more placed herself, quite literally, on her father’s doorstep at Forty-First Street and Madison Avenue. By doing so she thereby left behind the Old World of mother, husband, Chicago, Lake Forest with its Scott Fitzgeraldian ambience of country club, lawn tennis, polo—the whole pure, high-WASP culture of the Midwest—seemingly determined to reinvent herself overnight, under her father’s benevolent umbrella, in the New World of miscellaneously populated, urban New York, and as something she hadn’t thought about till just a moment before: one of the first women, as she would turn out to be, in a small, self-selected cohort of female pilots: aviatrixes, as they were called.
As luck would have it, P
oppa’s goodwill was still on tap when she arrived. He was as usual preoccupied with many matters, great and small, but with a mixture of bluster and bemusement he let her “bunk in” with him, in what was in fact a large, haphazardly furnished apartment, clearly not much lived in, and waited to see what she would do. At first it was much as he had expected. After advancing her a small amount of spending money, he watched as she spent most of it on a cab ride out to Curtiss Field near Malverne, Long Island, where in her own later recollection she “walked or rather strutted like a fledgling little Amelia Earhart into the flight shack in which a handful of wind-burned pilots were lounging about.” She asked if any of them would take her up for a flying lesson, but none would, or showed the least interest in the new arrival. At last one of them laconically pointed with his thumb to a sign on the wall, which spelled out the stuff you had to sign off on before getting off the ground: medical clearance, fleece-lined flying suit, helmets, goggles, and so on, plus three hundred dollars (no small sum at the time) for a minimum of four months of lessons. Over time she acquired the medical certificates and necessary gear; her skeptical father coughed up the three hundred dollars on condition she used public transportation. And with the patient tutoring of a Bulgarian flight instructor (who got her attention right away by telling her that only one out of the twenty-five women who had started the course had been able to finish it), after forty hours in the air, with many close calls and nervous moments, she became the second: a licensed pilot.
Flying solo: As an early aviatrix, Alicia went on to set several women’s speed and distance records.
Her father congratulated her, though not as much as she would have liked; and when she confided to him that sometimes she too had thought of quitting, he didn’t seem to know what she was talking about. “You’re my dirty dog, why would you quit?” she remembered him saying to her once, maybe more than once; she knew he was crazy about dogs, so took it as a compliment. Most days she found herself getting up later and later, lounging about the somewhat strange apartment in her dressing gown, smoking of course, planning something to write. Her mother sent her a postcard from San Francisco, where she’d gone to be with Aunt Florence while she waited for her husband, Mr. Richard Teller Crane, who was taking his yacht through the Panama Canal. “When are you coming home?” her mother asked, though not as if she expected a reply.
And then one morning a businesslike envelope arrived for her, by messenger from J. M. Patterson at the Daily News. Inside was a clipping from the magazine Aviation News, a brief item, or perhaps commentary, related to women and flying, noting that while it had become almost usual for women to earn a basic pilot’s license (there now being 105 of them in the country, according to the magazine), only nine women so far had received the far more challenging and demanding transport pilot’s license, which required two hundred hours of flying time as well as substantial expertise with navigation and engine mechanics. To this her father had added a handwritten note to the effect that, while he thought she might survive two hundred hours in the air, he strongly doubted she could ever hope to master the map reading and machinery part of the test, the “technical stuff that even men have trouble with.”
Was Patterson being intentionally provocative? Unintentionally? Just making trouble? In any event Alicia took up the challenge, as she saw it, and returned to Curtiss Field, where—with another infusion of her father’s money—she signed up for the extensive flight and ground training required for the more advanced license. A transport license in those days meant one could carry mail as well as passengers (providing the foundation of the nascent commercial aviation industry), and was no easy matter to achieve, especially for someone such as Alicia whose formal schooling had been so erratic, whose math skills were all too basic, and whose engineering knowledge was practically nonexistent. At first, instead of flying she had to sit for two months, day after day, in a little bare-bones room at Curtiss Flying School, trying to learn about maps, grids, coordinates, and flight paths, also about the mysteries of the internal-combustion engine, from a sequence of often skeptical and condescending instructors. As for the matter of logging the necessary two hundred hours in the air—solo time, all by herself—this was its own special kind of challenge; instead of taking off from Curtiss Field and making scenic runs up and down the Long Island seashore as she’d done before, she now had to plot a course for Cleveland or Detroit, hoping the weather would hold and her fuel remain sufficient, and get herself back by sundown. On one such flight on a gray day she’d reached Detroit on schedule and made a turn for home, but then the weather closed in around her, and realizing she was lost, she brought her plane down low, flew above some railroad tracks for guidance until she found a farmer’s field she could land in. When the weather lifted she got herself in the air again and made it back in time to Curtiss, where her instructor suggested she work a little harder on her navigation skills. This she did, in the process discovering that she was turning out to be quite good after all at “the technical stuff”; good enough at any rate to get her transport pilot’s license six months after she’d begun, becoming possibly the tenth woman in the country to have done so.
AP and Poppa in matching gear, flying together, 1930.
· 20 ·
FROM AN EARLY ISSUE of Time, December 9, 1929: “A score of private plane pilots in various parts of the country are watching today the progress of Editor Joseph M. Patterson’s ten-thousand mile ‘air-cruise’ to the Caribbean in his all-metal, five-ton, amphibian aeroplane, although for obvious reasons Mr. Patterson prefers the description ‘flying boat’ over ‘air yacht,’ which the manufacturer, Sikorsky Aviation, employs in its advertising. The air cruiser, christened ‘Liberty’ for the occasion, has two large Vought engines, enabling it to fly at 120 miles per hour, at an expected altitude of 3,000 feet….In addition to Mr. Patterson and a crew of three, comprising pilot, Lt. Fred Becker, assisted by a mechanic and a radio operator, all three borrowed from the U.S. Navy, there are two guests on board: Mr. Floyd Gibbons, veteran war reporter, and Miss Alicia Patterson, the air-cruise commander’s daughter.” Alicia was just twenty-three that winter, not really young but not exactly old, not really married though not exactly unmarried; a last-minute addition to the Caribbean expedition, filling in for some nameless guest who had just dropped out. When she got the call from her father, already down in Florida, she packed her suitcase, took the train to Miami, where the seaplane or flying boat or air yacht was boarding, a surely strange contraption tied up to a dock in the harbor, and dutifully fit her small self in beside the luggage in the back of the cabin.
Father and daughter, with Patterson’s amphibious flying boat Liberty, before their 1929 “air-cruise” to the Caribbean.
First they flew out low across the waters of Biscayne Bay, then a one-hour straight shot over to Cuba, splashing down into Havana Harbor, peering out the little porthole-type windows at the still-visible wreckage of the USS Maine, with Morro Castle across the bay, and a flotilla of government launches approaching to take them ashore. Everywhere they went, people were nice to them, important people, unimportant people. After some days in Havana they flew off to Santo Domingo, rode horses around a coffee plantation; then up in the air again, zigzagging back and forth across the Caribbean: Belize in British Honduras, a small harbor not really equipped for air cruisers, where a squall came in while they were landing, Lieutenant Becker skillfully lifting off again, just in time, before two fishing boats were nearly blown right into them. Then Haiti, flying across the mountains into Port-au-Prince, where the president of Haiti gave them a big dinner, and the next day a quartet of young U.S. Marine Corps aviators took Alicia and Floyd Gibbons for a joyride in their pursuit planes, skimming over the mountaintops, diving down into the green valleys with the little tile roofs. However, in Haiti they started to have trouble: not with the plane or flying but with the pilot, Lieutenant Becker, who got so sick he had to be taken to a U.S. Navy hospital on the other side of the island. Becker said they should f
ly in a substitute, continue on their trip, but Patterson said he’d stick with Becker. While they were waiting around for Lt. Fred to get better, Floyd Gibbons said there was a ship in the harbor bound for Panama, only two days’ steaming, Panama with its superb fishing. And so off they went, a little detour to Panama. Floyd Gibbons, Poppa’s old buddy, with a patch over one eye, who’d made his name by tracking Pancho Villa through the Sierra Madre mountains for his famous scoop; and of course Poppa, who liked to fish, although he liked to move about on the spur of the moment even more than he liked to fish; and Alicia, who when she was around Poppa made it a point to be game for anything. The Swedish ship to Panama was okay; Gibbons played poker through the night, also the day. In Panama, which was known as the Canal Zone, they made a quick tour of the big locks and then went off to the Chagres River to fish at the Chagres dam, one of the world’s great places for landing tarpon, where you could actually see the huge steel-blue fish darting about in the water near the lip of the dam. What happened then and there probably wasn’t intentional, although who’s to say in the end what’s intentional or not? Years later Alicia said she was certain her father had been told about her problems, abdominal problems, female problems; after all, she used his doctor back in New York, Dr. Harold Meeker, and she knew they spoke together. About six weeks earlier, Dr. Meeker had examined her at Doctors Hospital, indeed opened her up because she was in pain, found nothing (though noting significantly on her chart, “patient unlikely to bear children”), stitched her up again, told her she could do the trip but avoid strains.
