Walking on Air (12 page)

The competition had been tough, and the women had certainly proven themselves capable. Newspapers across the nation carried the Cleveland story extolling “the rise of women pilots to the status of men …. Official results of the national air races here reveal the feminine fliers have established themselves firmly in the field of aviation. The skill they displayed generally during the races earned them the right to compete with men in future air meets.”
¹⁴⁴

As the games continued with men-only competitions, a group of women fliers met under the grandstand to talk about the future. Now that women had arrived as aviators, they felt a need to form an organization that would formalize their comradely bond with one another and promote women in aviation. Where the idea originated is unclear—some say it was Amelia's idea, others assert it was Phoebe's.
¹⁴⁵
The group decided to include all women licensed pilots, not just those who had participated in the race. Amelia offered her secretary in New York to “get the ball rolling.”
¹⁴⁶
Ultimately, it was a group of women pilots who worked for the Curtiss Flying Service at Valley Stream, Long Island, who sent out the invitations to the 117 licensed women pilots in the United States asking them to join the as-yet unnamed organization.
¹⁴⁷
Recipients were assured that the group would not be “a tremendously official sort of organization, just a way to get acquainted, to discuss the prospects for women pilots from both a sports and bread-winning point of view, and to tip each other off on what's going on in the industry.”
¹⁴⁸

Twenty-six women pilots attended the formative meeting in Long Island on 2 November. Choosing a name proved one of the most difficult decisions. It was easier to reject inappropriate ones than to settle on a favorite. Among the rejected were The Climbing Vines, Homing Pigeons, Gad Flies, Angel's Club, Cloud Chasers, and Bird Women.
¹⁴⁹
Ultimately the decision was made to base the name on the number of charter members. After eighty-six replies arrived in short order, the group was dubbed the Eighty-Sixes.
¹⁵⁰
Within a few weeks, a few more responses arrived and the name was revised to the Ninety-Nines. The organization maintained a loose organizational structure, with Louise Thaden acting as general secretary, until
the Ninety-Nines elected Amelia Earhart as their first president in 1931.
¹⁵¹
The Ninety-Nines eventually went international, and while their membership currently numbers into the thousands, the name remains as a testament to the original pioneers in women's aviation.

Phoebe loved the challenge and adventure of competitive flying
. It was also a business for her, one she was good at and one that offered large purses to skillful pilots. “My aviation career started early in 1921 when I entered the game to make money,” she told the press. “There was no commercial aviation in those days to speak of and we got what we could doing exhibition work.”
¹
During the spring of 1930, she continued her work as a liaison between the Monocoupe factory and its distributors around the country. She flew
Miss Moline
in several state aviation tours, where she easily captured first place in the races they allowed her to enter. She spoke on behalf of the company and encouraged airport development before civic clubs throughout the United States and Canada.
²

In August, she took delivery of a new, more powerful Monocoupe, which she immediately christened
Miss Memphis
, and headed for Chicago, the site of the 1930 National Air Races.
³
From there, she and Blanche Noyes “piloted their boudoir-like little aerial coupes” to Hoover Field in Washington, D.C., to meet the president. Given the “comfort of speedy, modern, enclosed planes,” the press noted, “the need for heavy breeches and leather leggings for women” had vanished. “Only a whiff of their powder puffs was necessary to prepare” the pilots for their reception by the president. The article featured a fetching photo of Phoebe, wearing her helmet and goggles despite
her plane's closed cabin, powdering her nose.
⁴
Phoebe showed off her new scarlet and black Monocoupe to the press. “Proudly she called attention to the red leather cushions, the colored enamel control knobs and the little blue skylight curtain which keeps the sun from burning a pilot's neck. She took off her helmet, passed a powder puff over her nose and smilingly said she was ready to meet the president as soon as she changed her stockings, which were a bit grease spattered. She wore a green and white silk suit.”
⁵

Reporters were certain that readers would want to know the pilots' fashion choices, so they also reported that Mrs. Noyes wore a leather coat over a light blue knitted suit. Nancy Hopkins flew in from New York to meet them wearing “a smart blue and white linen costume under her coat.” The group of women pilots presented President Hoover with a giant floral invitation to the races, covered with “Herbert Hoover Roses.” Afterward, they dined with the president and first lady at the White House.
⁶

For the 1930 National Air Races, rather than competing head-to-head, the women's derbies were divided between the lighter and heavier horse-powered planes. The Pacific Derby for heavier planes departed from Long Beach; lighter planes flew in the Dixie Derby starting in Washington, D.C. Both races were set to converge at the Chicago Curtiss-Wright-Reynolds Airport for the opening of the air races in August.
⁷
Phoebe signed up for the Dixie Derby, a 1,575-mile course from Washington's Hoover Field through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and back to Chicago.
⁸

As the most accomplished pilot in the race, Phoebe was expected to lead the pack, and she did. The other competitors were Vera Dawn Walker, Martie Bowman, Nancy Hopkins, Laura Ingalls, and Charity Langdon. The group took off into low-hanging clouds and a steady rain. Accompanied only by a silver rabbit's foot, Phoebe beat her five competitors into Richmond in thirty-eight minutes flat at an average speed of 163 mph.
⁹
The weather the next day was no better: thunderstorms, lots of rain, the ceiling at about a hundred feet. The weather was so bad that airmail pilots stayed grounded.
¹⁰
Nonetheless, the women took off. The weather began to break at Raleigh, but bad luck dogged Phoebe's competitors as they flew over the Carolinas. Vera Dawn Walker, who had been at Phoebe's heels the previous day, was forced down near Darlington, South Carolina, approximately seventy-five miles off her course, by a faulty fuel line. She was not injured, but a service plane had to be sent from Columbia to repair her ship. She headed for Atlanta an hour and a half late, only to be forced down once again at Athens, Georgia. Walker abandoned the race.
¹¹

Guided only by highway maps covered with a confusing blizzard of railroad lines, roads, and county boundaries, Martie Bowman and Laura Ingalls both wandered over the two Carolinas in confusion. Martie landed far from her course in Charlotte, North Carolina, to get her bearings; Laura Ingalls landed at Spartanburg, South Carolina, for the same reason.
¹²
Phoebe moved far out in front, landing at Atlanta with a commanding two-hour lead over Bowman and nearly three hours over Ingalls.
¹³

Despite her lead, Phoebe was in trouble. Dust blown into her eyes at the Washington airport soon developed into a serious eye infection. By the time she landed in Atlanta, her right eye was swollen completely closed. Martie insisted on taking her to the doctor. Initially the doctor suggested Phoebe abandon the race. Under intense pressure to come up with an alternative, he offered to prescribe drops that would need to be administered every hour all night long if she was to continue in the race. Martie left a call at the hotel desk to be awakened each hour so that she could administer the drops to Phoebe. The next day her eye was much better, thanks to the selfless assistance of her friend. When the women arrived at Memphis, with Phoebe in the lead, she refused to take the lap money, insisting that the $300 go to Martie Bowman.
¹⁴

As the other women pilots jockeyed for position behind her, Phoebe arrived first at East St. Louis, thirty minutes ahead of the pack and setting a record on her leg from Memphis to St. Louis for flying 245 miles in one hour forty-eight minutes.
¹⁵
When she landed in Chicago she had averaged 127.5 mph for the race, finishing well ahead of Martie Bowman, who came in second fully three hours behind her. Laura Ingalls was third. Phoebe won the first-place prize of $2,000, an undetermined amount of lap money, and the Washington City Club Trophy.
¹⁶

Spectators crowded onto the field, overflowing grandstands built for one hundred thousand, to see the arrivals of the seven air derbies, part of a program of forty-four scheduled events and over one thousand airplanes on display.
¹⁷
The U.S. Navy's High Hat and Red Ripper Squadrons staged sham battles and stunts, including the spectacular “formation barrel roll,” where a trio of pursuit planes, wing to wing, flipped over as one plane. Balloon bursting contests, dead-stick landing contests, demonstration flights by auto-gyros and gliders, pylon races, and the spectacular free-for-all Thompson Trophy Race, all competed for the crowd's attention.
¹⁸

Phoebe's wheels had hardly stopped rolling before she was lifted out of her plane and carried to a battery of microphones. She was dressed to match her plane “in a yellow crepe sport dress and crimson beret, a silver wishbone
from a fine chain about her neck and wearing neat white and brown oxfords and white silk hose.” Her cabin plane, the newspaper reported, made her choice of fashion possible. “I'm glad I won,” Phoebe shouted to the crowd. “Right now Chicago looks almost as good to me as Memphis.” When a reporter asked what message she wanted to send to the folks back home, she replied, “Just tell 'em
Miss Memphis
came in first.”
¹⁹
Vernon had driven all night to be there for the finish. He greeted his exhausted wife, who collapsed in his arms. The strain of the race had stripped fifteen pounds off her tiny frame and her right eye was again swollen nearly shut. Phoebe vowed later that night that she was through with cross-country racing. “I'm quitting,” she told reporters. “I've had enough.”
²⁰

She wasn't quite finished, though. Despite her swollen eye and its impact on her depth perception, Phoebe competed in two closed-course races (five times around a five-mile circuit) the following day. Phoebe took first place in both of them, with a top speed of 135.20 mph and 139.97 mph respectively, winning another $1,250. In all, Phoebe collected $3,250 plus an estimated $300 per lap for four of five laps, or approximately $4,450.
²¹
She headed home to Memphis to buy back her husband's business.

Business at Memphis Municipal Airport was struggling as the Depression deepened. When the airport opened in the spring of 1929, Curtiss-Wright and Universal Aviation had optimistically set up flying schools, invested heavily in large aircraft sales, and supported expensive airport improvements. When the new lighting system was installed in March 1930, an estimated crowd of 15,000 turned out to watch demonstrations of night take-offs and landings. For a finale, Vernon and Phoebe released fireworks from their planes high in the air and lit flares attached to their aircraft to trace a series of graceful silver arcs as they looped and twirled across the sky.
²²

Universal Aviation and Transcontinental Air Transport offered crosscountry passenger service from Memphis through an innovative but shortlived program of air-rail service.
²³
Passengers traveled by airplane during the daylight hours, then transferred to railroad sleeper cars for the overnight portion. By the end of 1929, several airline-railroad agreements had been established. Transcontinental Air Transport (T.A.T.) was the best known of these ventures, largely because of the direct involvement of Charles Lindbergh, who surveyed the route and flew the inaugural flight, and Amelia Earhart, who invested in the airline, christened the first plane, and made the inaugural trip. Universal indicated that their linking system made it possible to cross the continent in only sixty-seven hours. T.A.T.
countered with an advertising blitz claiming a coast-to-coast time of an astonishing forty-eight hours.

Patrons of the T.A.T. can now board the “American,” a de luxe
[sic]
limited train of the Pennsylvania railroad, in New York in the early evening, spending the night in a sleeping car. In the morning they are transferred to a waiting airplane in Columbus, Ohio, and a daylight flight is made to Dodge City, Kansas. Stops are planned en route at Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City and Wichita. After dinner at Dodge City an Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe trail [
sic
] takes the passengers on another night journey in a sleeper. At Las Vegas, N. M., the final lap by air either to Los Angeles or San Francisco, arriving late that afternoon.
²⁴

Memphians wishing to visit the west coast, for example, could rendezvous with either system at St. Louis. The trip was comfortable and safe, but also expensive and cut only a day off the regular train trip. Moreover, planes were frequently grounded by bad weather. The worsening economy and the increasing potential for night flying soon doomed these ventures.
²⁵

By early 1930, Universal had suspended operations at Memphis, and Vernon was able to reacquire Mid-South Airways from Curtiss-Wright the following year. The formal reopening of “the South's oldest flying service” was celebrated on 19 October 1930 with a special program of stunt and glider flying and a parachute jump (though not by Phoebe). Vernon's operation, “capitalized at $75,000,” took over the abandoned Universal hangar. The company would be distributors for four popular makes of airplanes: Stinson, Waco, Monocoupe, and Aeronca, and offer flying lessons, crosscountry trips in open and closed airplanes, and local passenger hops.
²⁶
The next few years would be lean ones for aviation nationwide, but Vernon's smaller-scale operation continued to hang on, sustained at least in part by his wife's earnings.