Before Amelia (22 page)

Dorothy Levitt, a student of Hubert Latham, was at Châlons at the same time as Raymonde de Laroche and Marie Marvingt, but she did not win a license. Spencer Kavanagh, a balloonist and parachutist of Irish birth, took lessons first at the Blériot School, at Pau, then with Grahame-White when his school opened there. She almost certainly soloed in early 1910 to win the title: England's first woman to fly. One writer has commented that Kavanagh changed her name as often as others did their dresses.

Her real name was Edith Maud Cook, but at different times she used Elsa Spencer, Viola Fleet, Viola Spencer-Kavanagh, and Viola Spencer or Viola Kavanagh, depending on which company she was working for as an aerial performer. The two most famous firms she worked for were Spencer Bros. Ltd., and A. E. Gaudron. Her exhibition career was shortlived; she died in hospital on July 14, 1910, five days after a failed parachute leap from a balloon at Coventry, England. Spencer, who lacked the money to buy her own aeroplane, had stayed at Grahame-White's school, where she could use a machine until she felt she had mastered flying. She never earned a pilot's license in her brief career, but not because she lacked courage.

AVIATION TOOK OFF in America in 1910. The Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss had company aviators who appeared at fairs and enlivened holiday celebrations around the country. Air meets were fashionable in cities wanting to prove themselves up-and-coming, and international air meets were held at Los Angeles in January, Boston in September, and Belmont Park on Long Island, New York, in October. It was a time when aeroplane enthusiasts designed and built their own machines, and two women could claim the distinction that year of “first to solo in an aeroplane.”

Blanche Stuart Scott probably flew first on September 6, but without official observers at the Curtiss center at Hammondsport, New York; Bessica Raiche went up on the 26th at Mineola, Long Island, a busy aviation center with numerous official witnesses. Both ladies deserve the spotlight for their achievement, and their courage.

Blanche, known as Betty in those days, was a harum-scarum young woman, “a fresh brat” in her words, with red hair and a temperament to match. Born in Rochester, New York, on April 8, 1891, she was the only child of doting parents who soon realized they had a spirited bundle on their hands. Her father, John C. S. Scott, was a veterinarian who amassed considerable wealth with the invention of a medicine for ringworm. Her mother, Belle J. Herendeen, was a descendant of
Mayflower
ancestors whose family migrated to Rochester in the early part of the nineteenth centur y. Blanche inherited plenty of pioneer spunk and the energy to put it to use.

Her daredevil antics led her mother to enroll her in a series of girls' schools—Miss Nichol's School for Girls in Rochester, the Howard Seminary in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and Fort Edward Seminary in New York State—hoping her high spirits would be tamed. Betty matured, decided she would like to be an automobile saleswoman—she could already drive a car—and went to work for the Mitchell automobile company. With an urge to do the unusual, she approached the Willys Overland Company and suggested that she drive one of its models across the country, visiting Willys Overland dealers along the way, with a newspaperwoman as passenger to describe the trip. It would be an eye-opening first, generate publicity for the company and Betty, and was not the first nor the last of her good ideas.

The trip was a publicity success. Gertrude Phillips, the presswoman passenger, and the advertising agent for Willys Overland contacted newspapers along the way so the two women were met by state governors, representatives of the auto clubs then in existence, and the Overland distributors as the two zigzagged six thousand miles across the country. The newspaper coverage was phenomenal. Like the coverage on Cal Rodgers, the first person to fly coast to coast, arrival in a town became a three-day story: the approach the day before, the arrival, and the latest word the day after. Gertrude didn't drive, which made Blanche the important figure behind the wheel. In later years, she admitted that so much attention went to her nineteen-year-old head.

As Blanche and Gertrude approached Dayton, Ohio, on their way to an appearance at the Indianapolis auto races, they saw two aeroplanes in the air above the Wright aviation field, an exciting first for the women. The travelers joined a crowd of several thousand to watch the aerial show. At the time Blanche thought the fliers “plumb crazy.” It was the first of two encounters with aviation. In California, at the end of the trip, the two women met Glenn Martin in Santa Ana. He had one arm in a cast from a crash testing his aeroplane and “looked and acted like a divinity student.” He was surely daft, the women thought, and teased him mercilessly. In time, when she flew his aeroplanes, Blanche would recognize his ability as a pilot and designer.

Blanche and Gertrude were entertained in Tijuana by Governor Carranza of Sonora, who was later the president of Mexico. On their return to San Diego to pack for the trip back to New York, a reporter for the eastern newspapers called with a story idea: How about being the first woman, or one of the first, to ride in an aeroplane? Betty agreed; “I was crazy enough to do anything,” she admitted.

Back across the border again on a Saturday afternoon—the story was scheduled for the Sunday-morning papers—the women discovered that the pilot had wrecked the Farman that day taking a spin. Even worse, the reporter had filed the story early because of the time difference, which left the three participants in a bind. It was too late for a denial, so Gertrude, Blanche, the reporter, and the pilot, Roehrig, were sworn to secrecy. The next day, the two travelers left for New York.

Blanche found New York City very quiet after the cross-country adventure. By chance, she met Frank Tipton, Glenn Curtiss's press agent, who was aware of the publicity generated by the cross-country drive. Would she like to learn to fly? After all, she had been up in an aeroplane near San Diego. Scott swallowed, hesitated, and finally agreed. Jerome Fanciulli, general manager for the Curtiss Exhibition Company, with booking offices in New York City, and always on the lookout for possible fliers, thought Blanche a likely candidate and sent her up to Hammondsport, aware that a woman pilot would be a good publicity gimmick.

The factory staff was less enthusiastic. Curtiss didn't think it was a good idea, but he yielded to Fanciulli's judgment. Reluctantly, Curtiss trained Blanche. After receiving a brief explanation of the machine's parts (a pusher biplane), she was set to running the machine back and forth— “grass cutting”—with a governor on the motor to keep the machine on the ground. A sudden gust of wind eddied around the surrounding hills, and Blanche found herself about ten feet in the air. From then on, she begged to have the block removed; she wanted to fly. A few days later she got her wish; she could do “hops,” but she must promise not to go into the air. She hopped, gradually extending her distance, landing on the straightaway, until one day she was up unexpectedly and “circled once or twice,” by her account, before landing. She had done it! Proud, scared, she claimed September 2 as the magical day, sometimes September 6.

With the years, the dates changed, but never her insistence that she was America's first woman pilot in the air. She probably was, but recognition was denied her because her solo was “accidental.”

Blanche tells one anecdote from her days with Curtiss that contradicts his reputation as a serious man without humor. According to Blanche, a prominent society woman approached him one day and said she knew a lot about aviation, but she had one question:“If one has trouble up there in the air, how does one come down?” “Well, we're still in the experimental stages of aviation,” Curtiss explained seriously. “Now, we've had a man up there for three days and there is some concern of his starving to death if we don't get him down.”

Curtiss may not have been happy about teaching Blanche, but he recognized her ability. In October, she made her public debut at Driving Park, Fort Wayne, Indiana, as a member of the Curtiss Exhibition Team. Using a machine of Eugene Ely's, she rose twelve feet and sailed across the field. Afterward she insisted she could have “turned and circled the track, but Mr. Curtiss has absolutely forbidden me attempting the turn.”

Shortly after, she married the man who had done publicity for her automobile trip and gave up flying for a while, but she couldn't stay away for long. By June 1911 she was flying with Thomas S. Baldwin at Mineola, unlearning what she had learned on a Curtiss pusher. Baldwin's machine was built for speed; his method of instruction, direct. As soon as a pupil learned the controls—the touch was more delicate than the Curtiss machine—he or she was permitted to make a straightaway, then turns. Blanche did all of these, and by August 1911 the
New York Sun
was reporting that three women fliers were in the air at Mineola: Blanche, Harriet Quimby, and Matilde Moisant. (Bessica Raiche was flying in the spring at the same time as Quimby, both women wearing trousers, which caused news comment, but there is no mention of her after that time.) The
New York Tribune
spotted the trio and hailed them as “First Americans of Their Sex to Wing the Deep Blue.”

During this period, Blanche, mad about something, took off in her machine one day and ignored the rule not to leave the area of the field. She was up and free. By the time she reached Riverhead, Long Island, her temper had cooled, and she turned back toward Mineola, where she landed safely. The next day she was surprised to read that the flight was hailed as a woman's cross-country distance record of sixty miles. It was typical Blanche behavior.

American Blanche Stuart Scott seated at the controls of a Curtiss pusher.
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S AIR & SPACE MUSEUM, INC.

Blanche flew everything, and everywhere, as “The Tomboy of the Air,” dressed in her voluminous bloomers padded with three petticoats. She earned as much as five thousand dollars a week, out of which she paid for maintenance and transportation of her machine, a fee to her manager, and her mechanic. She was at the meet at Squantum Field in 1912 when Harriet Quimby was killed in a crash. Blanche was in the air at the time of the accident and had a difficult time finding a clear space to land; unruly crowds were everywhere, and her nerves were not steady. With much anguish, Blanche got her machine down and, reportedly, fainted. Exhibiting was a strenuous life, and Blanche was a daredevil stunt flier performing ever more daring feats. She flew upside down twenty feet off the ground, under bridges and, as a special stunt, her “Death Dive,” during which she dropped down from a great height with the throttle retarded, then pulled up one hundred feet from the ground.

A typical advertisement for Blanche Stuart Scott, 1912
.
NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

In California she flew with the Great Western Aerial Circus, her reputation as a daring pilot calling for more and more dangerous stunts to live up to her billing: “A Thrill Every Second, Rain, Shine, or Cyclone”; “Watch this daring woman duplicate all the flying tricks of Paulhan”; “‘The Tomboy of the Air'—The Most Famous Aviatrix in the World.” Luck was often on her side. One day, in the midst of her daring dive, the carburetor flooded and the machine kept going down. Pulling the stick back quickly, the machine hit tail first. The pilot walked away, because, she believed, she was wearing a lucky red sweater. The proof was, another time, without the sweater, she landed nose down in a swamp and broke several ribs, her collarbone, and left arm. Blanche was fond of saying she had forty-one mended bones in her body, the result of numerous crack-ups and two that were serious. She must have forgotten the sweater more than once.

The circus performances were more entertainment than serious aviation. During one act at the Emeryville Air Meet, a mysterious pilot, announced as Mme. Cozette de Trouse, arrived on the field in the company of Mrs. Florence Ferris, the wife of the meet's manager. Dressed in an ordinary costume, the striking blonde posed for pictures with flowers for Mrs. Ferris, then seated herself in Lincoln Beachey's aeroplane and made a quick ascent, circling the field with a few dips and curves before landing. Blanche met the mysterious aviator, then reached up and tore off a golden wig and veil to reveal Lincoln Beachey. The crowd roared and applauded the stunt. The
San Francisco Chronicle
reported that Beachey made the mistake “of trying to walk while in skirts,” a certain giveaway. The act was a crowd pleaser but did little to advance aviation. Although Blanche was grounded by weather conditions one day, some thirty thousand spectators were thrilled by her performances during the eight-day meet. She showed that a woman could pilot a biplane as well as any man.