The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller

by Carol Baxter

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Another grand luncheon. More fried chicken.

  Chubbie and the other women silently fumed at the delay, aware that the sun would continue heating the earth and would spawn more thermals—or worse—while they made small talk with the Midland locals.

  The next stretch, to the refuelling stop at Abilene, was well marked by roads and railway tracks, which usually allowed pilots to fly at a comfortably low altitude. However, the derbyists had to maintain a higher altitude on this stretch because of cross-winds and thermal-induced turbulence. In fact, the flying was so hard through much of the stretch from Douglas to Fort Worth that some of the women ended up with blisters on their hands.

  Chubbie was flying at 1500 feet, concentrating on fighting the thermals, when it happened. A roar engulfed her as if a train was running over her. Her plane started rotating like a spinning top. Her senses swam. She had no idea what was happening.

  Then her plane stopped spinning as unexpectedly as it had started. She was upright, although still enveloped by the mind-shattering roar. Her head cleared enough to identify the problem. She had been swept up in a twister, one of those mini-tornadoes of rotating heated air that danced along the hot ground, making its presence known only when the dust sucked into its vortex outlined its shape like a ghostly apparition. It was a freak of nature that pilots feared even more than an airborne fire because there was little they could do to counter nature at its most ferocious and deadly.

  She looked around her. The rotating winds were pushing her plane towards the ground. She had to get out of its clutches. She considered bailing out, but had no idea what effect the twister would have on her flimsy parachute. It might shred the canopy as if it were tissue paper. It might twist the lines around each other and prevent the canopy from opening.

  She looked at the altimeter. It was gyrating wildly. She couldn’t work out if she was high enough to survive a jump. With a fatalistic shrug, she decided to remain with her plane and ride it out.

  The twister shot her from its grasp as quickly as it had seized her. Looking down, she was thankful she hadn’t tried to parachute to safety. She had dropped more than 1200 feet and was only a few hundred feet from the ground.

  She climbed so she could see a broader expanse of the terrain. She had no idea where she was and needed to regain her bearings. When she looked at her map and compared the navigational features, she discovered that the twister had thrown her backwards by a half-hour’s flying time.

  ‘Hangar tales’ were what aviators called them, the stories that pilots told their companions at the end of a day’s flying. By now, most of the derbyists had a good one to tell. Some were dramas like Blanche’s and Chubbie’s, which left their listeners shaking their heads in wonder that they had lived to tell the tale. Others were humorous, like the tale Ruth Elder would tell the following night after they flew from Fort Worth to Wichita.

  The fertile plains of Oklahoma and Kansas were a welcome sight after the desert country of Arizona and Texas. Navigation was easier because the farmer’s fields were one-mile squares creating a landscape that looked like a chequerboard. However, the wind was gusty and Ruth, like Chubbie, was flying an open-cockpit plane. As she pinched one end of her map between her thumb and forefinger so she could get a good look at its markings, a gust of wind buffeted the aircraft. The map was torn from her hand, leaving only a piece the size of a postage stamp clutched between her fingers.

  After travelling a bit further, she was worried she might have gone off course. She landed on a flat area of pasture near a homestead, intending to ask directions. Cattle lounged in the distance, but she wasn’t concerned because she had more than enough room to take off again without trouble. However, the noise of the plane landing had disturbed them. They looked up and started lumbering towards her.

  That’s when she remembered that her plane had a bright red fuselage. She prayed, ‘Please God, let them all be cows.’

  Fortunately, they were.

  Wichita called itself the aviation capital of the world, despite sitting in tornado alley. The reception it offered the racers was the most exciting of them all. An army plane equipped with a short-wave transmitter joined the planes before they reached Wichita and followed them in, transmitting an account of the final leg of their journey that was re-broadcast from a local radio station. As each pilot stepped from the cockpit, she was handed a microphone and asked to comment on the race. Afterwards a personal hostess chauffeured her to the evening’s events in a car with the pilot’s name on the side.

  At the evening’s banquet, each of the aviators was asked to speak. The reporter for The Wichita Eagle praised Chubbie’s as one of the best tributes the city had ever received. ‘I think Wichita is the very nicest city we have landed in since the derby started in Santa Monica,’ she told the 300 attendees, ‘and you have truly given us a reception that we always will remember.’

  The Wichita press noticed that there was little talk about sabotage, although it was clear from Thea Rasche’s answers that she wasn’t convinced by the investigators’ reports. ‘I never saw gasoline that dirty,’ she said in reference to the muck in her fuel system. ‘All that dirt couldn’t have been in the tank unless someone had put it there.’

  Chubbie too was still wondering why she had run out of fuel. She told the reporter, ‘They said it was a mistake that I had not enough gasoline for the hop, but it seems like a rather peculiar mistake. It has cost me a good deal.’ She added that she had had stinking luck and that, to top it all off, she was losing her voice from all the talking. But, otherwise, she was having a wonderful time.

  As exhaustion sapped their energy, and as the parachutes beneath them felt increasingly like concrete, they flew onwards to Kansas City and East St Louis on Saturday then to Terre Haute and Cincinnati and Columbus on Sunday. Engine trouble forced Chubbie down in a meadow near Xenia, Ohio, halfway between Cincinnati and Columbus. When she alighted from her plane, she was shocked to discover she had stopped a mere six inches from a pit that hadn’t been visible from the air.

  Forced to wait for a new cylinder to be flown from Cleveland, she decided to spend the night at a nearby farmhouse and complete her journey to Columbus in the morning. She missed the last of the race dinners that had been organised in their honour, as well as her fellow derbyists’ delight that fried chicken was at last off the menu. They’d had to resort to drastic measures, though, sending word to the Columbus race authorities that they would eat anything at the banquet dinner—anything but fried chicken!

  Monday, 26 August, dawned clear and dry. The starting flag wouldn’t drop until 1 pm so the women were able to sleep in for the first time. Most chose not to do so—for long at least. They wanted their planes in prime condition for the race to the finishing line. Dressed in their once-white coveralls, they slid under the bellies of their planes and scrubbed off dirt and oil and bugs before giving them a final polish. Like Chubbie, most had no interest in domestic chores, but they would do anything to maintain their precious machines. They knew that a slick ship was a fast ship and also a good-looking one.

  The ‘Flying Debutante’, Ruth Nichols, had been having a beneficially uneventful race and was sitting in third place in the heavy division when she took her Rearwin up for a post-maintenance test flight. Columbus airport was being upgraded and a concrete runway laid. As it wasn’t yet completed, Ruth and the other pilots had to fly over the new section and land on the old runway.

  The sound of a plane coming in to land inevitably drew the derbyists’ attention. Looking skywards, they recognised it as Ruth’s red-and-white Rearwin. They saw it drift slightly in a cross-wind as it passed over the new section. They glanced down to see where it would touch down if it continued on the same course. A steamroller smoothed the concrete at the junction of the new and old runways.

  They looked back at Ruth’s plane. It hadn’t changed course. She mustn’t have seen the steamroller.

  Onwards the steamroller ran. Onwards t
he plane flew. With a horrifying inevitability, the two converged. Ruth’s plane struck the steamroller and somersaulted across the soft dirt of the old runway. Over and over the plane tumbled until it came to rest on its back.

  The siren’s warning wail chilled the blood of every pilot at the aerodrome. Before the plane had even stopped moving, people were running towards it. Astonishingly, they saw a body wriggle out of the wreckage. Ruth was alive, but the Rearwin was a wreck. With only 120 miles to go, she was out of the race.

  For the first time, the pilots were to take off in the order of their derby positions. This meant that the first to cross the finish line would be the winner.

  One by one the fourteen surviving planes raced down the runway and soared into the haze. As bright as a flock of toucans, they flew across Ohio in a final bid for derby honours. Louise Thaden was the first to rocket across the finish line in Cleveland, to an ear-blasting roar from the crowds. And for the first time, the spectators besieged her rather than Amelia, who took Ruth Nichols’ third-place position.

  When Louise took the microphone to address the crowds, she began, ‘Hello folks. The sunburn derby is now over.’ She walked away with over $4000 in winnings from the air race organisers and another $6000 in stage prizes and other payments.

  Over the next hour, most of the other derbyists crossed the finishing line then parked in front of the main grandstand. As they stepped from their planes and looked around them, the gaps were obvious. Marvel was gone and her ship, with its bold number 1, was probably now in a garbage dump somewhere. Margaret Perry had been diagnosed with typhoid a few days earlier and, crying with frustration, had been admitted to hospital where she would remain for some weeks. Claire Fahy was at her home in California. The other three downed pilots, though, were making their way to Cleveland, where they would all be reunited. There they would celebrate their achievements and retell the funniest and scariest and most outrageous of their hangar tales: Phoebe’s drug-smuggling charge, Louise’s carbon monoxide poisoning, Chubbie’s twister, Blanche’s fire, Ruth Elder’s cows, Ruth Nichols’ steamroller, Pancho’s invisible Chevy. Each tale of triumph or ruefully acknowledged failure was a badge of belonging that no one could ever take from them. The race had ended, but the spirit of friendship would live on.

  When the race organisers stepped up to the microphones to announce the winners, Chubbie was astonished to receive third place in the light-plane division and a prize of $325. Phoebe had maintained first place, Edith Foltz had come second, and the Flying Fraulein fourth.

  Many years later, when Louise Thaden wrote her memoir, she could still remember the sight of Chubbie’s face as she received her derby prize, a grin stretched from ear to ear.

  The Cleveland air races had commenced two days prior in front of 100,000 spectators. Before the end of the races on 2 September, many more were expected to walk through the gate, eager to see the feats of the nation’s best aviators. Charles Lindbergh was among the attendees.

  A reporter managed to corner him for an interview and questioned him about the aviation industry. He talked at length about the development of large passenger and transport planes for transcontinental trips and the need to speed up these journeys by developing night-flying instruments. When asked about parachutes in passenger planes, he said that he thought them unnecessary. He expressed his opinions about lighter-than-air dirigibles like the Graf Zeppelin, about gliders as training tools, about autogyros and other experimental planes, and about the industry in general.

  The journalist asked him about the women’s derby. He said that he had followed it with interest.

  So, what effect did he think it would have on aviation? Did women have a real place in aviation?

  After offering his lengthy opinions on so many other topics, Lindbergh’s response was that he didn’t care to say.

  The 2800-mile National Women’s Air Race had been a long, gruelling marathon across difficult—indeed dangerous—territory. It had required outstanding navigational and piloting skills. Above all, it had required pluck, courage and an emotional resilience that women were constantly told they didn’t have. Yet despite the extraordinary achievements of these female aviators—these ‘Powder Puff’ derbyists, ‘ladybirds’, ‘petticoat pilots’, ‘flying flappers’, ‘sweethearts of the air’ (‘Can’t we just be called “pilots”?’ Amelia Earhart begged)—even the King of Aviation wasn’t willing to accept these magnificent young women as men’s aerial equals.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Clifford Henderson’s dream had come to fruition. Some 450,000 spectators paid to see the greatest assemblage of planes and pilots in the history of aviation. So much food was sold that the hot dogs, if laid end to end, would have stretched from Cleveland to Boston. And the energy from the opened soda pop bottles could have dispatched the derbyists’ nemesis, Floyd J. Logan, all the way from Cleveland to Atlanta, whether he wanted to go there or not.

  The spectators were not only interested in watching the parachute-jumping, high-speed racing, war manoeuvring, aerobatics and other hair-raising stunts by male aviators. For the first time ever, women were participating.

  Those with a keen interest in human nature asked the experts why so many people were so eager to watch others—male or female—risk their lives. Mehran K. Thomson PhD, author of the recently published The Springs of Human Action, provided the answer. Thrills! ‘We live for the thrilling moments in life,’ he told the press, ‘and endure the rest.’

  For some spectators, the idea of watching women risking their lives was even more thrilling than watching men. And, according to the program, they would have the opportunity to do so for the first time. Three of the closed-circuit events—the air races flown around a course visible to spectators—were open only to women.

  Chubbie hadn’t known what a closed-circuit event was until the Fleet company told her she was entered in a few of them. The first was a pylon race scheduled for the day after they reached Cleveland. She hadn’t known what a pylon race was either.

  The company sent a test pilot to instruct her. He explained that the race was flown over a five-mile course marked by three tower-like, red-and-white-checked pylons that created a racetrack in the sky. The judges and pressmen stood atop the pylons so they had a bird’s eye view of the planes’ movements. Chubbie would have to fly ten laps of the five-mile course to complete the fifty-mile race. She must count the laps to make sure she had completed the course because if she landed too soon she would be disqualified. She must also fly outside and not inside the pylons or she would be disqualified. The winner was the pilot who completed the course in the shortest possible time. It was tricky and dangerous flying, definitely not for the fainthearted.

  Indeed, in past pylon races, planes had sometimes collided or slammed into the ground, killing their male pilots. So what would happen when these less experienced female pilots competed in such a deadly event?

  When Chubbie arrived at the starting line, she discovered that the test pilot had nosed her plane into a rut and broken the propeller. It seemed that she was out of the race before she had even climbed into her cockpit. Furious to the point of tears at the lost opportunity, she stood there for a moment looking strangely elegant in her dirty white coveralls and high-heeled black lizard shoes. Then she snapped at the test pilot, ‘Well, you’ll have to let me have your machine!’

  ‘No!’ he retorted. He needed it for his own race. As they glared at each other, the company president came along and told him to lend Chubbie his plane.

  The race was about to start. The test pilot taxied his plane to the starting line. Chubbie climbed into the cockpit and sat at the controls—and realised she had a problem. She couldn’t reach the rudder. Her own cockpit had been modified to fit her diminutive frame whereas the test pilot’s cockpit was the usual design, built for a man.

  She refused to pull out. The challenge of the race had an appeal of its own. Someone stuffed cushions behind her back so she could sit further forward in the seat.
Then they left her alone to fly.

  She looked across at the flagman, waiting for his signal. She was to be first to take off, followed by Phoebe Omlie, then Amelia. Fourth was the famous British flyer, Lady Mary Heath, the only registrant who had previously flown a pylon race. Blanche Noyes would set off last. Two other derbyists, Edith Foltz and Thea Rasche, had also registered for the race but had been forced to pull out because of problems with their planes.

  All of the contestants had been derbyists, except Lady Heath who had registered but withdrawn before the derby. A rumour had spread that she had withdrawn because she thought her presence would not be fair to the other pilots. The comment from a member of England’s peerage, whether true or not, was a reminder of Britain’s historic snootiness towards the colonies and generated resentment among the American pilots. An atmosphere of international rivalry developed as the women declared they were ‘out to get’ their famous British rival in this pylon race. America versus the Home Country. Chubbie, on paper the weakest pilot in the race, was largely forgotten.

  The flag dropped and she opened her throttle. Her plane shot across the field. Gently she pulled back on the stick and lifted into the air. She was off and racing.

  Down the straight stretch towards the first pylon. The circuit was five miles long so each straight was around 3000 yards. Chubbie leaned forward to try to reach the rudder, bracing herself with one hand. The cushions, no longer wedged between her back and the seat, popped out from behind her and were gone. She would now have to fly this unfamiliar plane across an unfamiliar course in an unfamiliar race while teetering on the edge of her seat.