Before Amelia (23 page)

Despite her hectic career, Blanche married and divorced twice; both were nice men, and wealthy. Her explanation: “They wanted domestic wives, and I couldn't stay in a birdcage.” By the end of 1916 she had given up flying, realizing that a real career in aviation wasn't possible and stunt flying had lost much of its appeal.

She sold her machine to the government when war began and turned her hand to the movie business with a studio bought for her by her second husband. This lasted a couple of years by her account; then she wrote scripts and performed in radio at station KFI, in Los Angeles, before returning to Rochester to work in radio (WVET and WARC) and at Hornell, New York (WLEA). During the 1950s she worked with the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, traveling around the country boosting the museum and collecting material and memorabilia from the pioneer days of flying for the museum's collection.

Blanche continued watching and commenting on aviation developments through the years; she enjoyed membership in the Early Birds, a society of aviators who soloed before World War I, and several other aviation organizations. On September 6, 1948, she had a unique experience. Flying with Charles E. Yeager in a TF-80C, she became the first American woman to ride in a jet. Her long life was a delineation of American flying history from the first lifting off the ground by a woman pilot to women in space. She flew without earning a pilot's license; she never saw the need for one.

Blanche died at Genesee Hospital in Rochester on January 13, 1970. She loved telling people about the early years of aviation; she was never short of opinions, and her stories got better with the years. She considered herself one of the lucky ones: “Most of us got killed.”

Bessica Faith Raiche shared the honor, with Blanche Scott, of first American woman to solo and received a gold medal presented by Hudson Maxim from the Aeronautical Society of New York on October 13, 1910, to prove it. Maxim was the inventor of deadly explosives.

Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1876, to James and Elizabeth Curtis Medlar and the oldest of three daughters, Bessica was an active girl with wide interests: languages, music, shooting, swimming, driving an auto, and painting—in many ways a Renaissance woman! Her father was a pioneer photographer who owned the Art Emporium Studio on West State Street, where Mrs. Medlar helped out regularly enough to learn the new art of photography and its commercial applications. The 1893 Rockford High School yearbook noted that Bessie, as they called her, was third vice president for her class, and a Literary Society officer. “Through nature and through art she strayed” was an appropriate comment beside her name.

American aviator Bessica Raiche, a portrait photo.
DEAN TODD COLLECON, COURTESY OF GIA IONNITIU

Following high school, Bessica attended the Rockford Academy, a private school run by Mary L. Carpenter, for one year. About this time, her mother and father separated, as they are listed in the city directory at different addresses. Mrs. Medlar was operating her own photography business at a new address on State Street. Sometime between 1894 and 1900, Bessica studied painting in France, but, in the years 1896-97, she was listed in the city directory as assistant to Dr. C. J. Sowle, dentist. Her work with Dr. Sowle may have led her to consider a career in medicine. Certainly she learned skills that enabled her to pay her way through medical school. She and her sister Ruth both worked as clerks in 1899, according to the directory, and lived with their mother. By 1901, mother and daughters had disappeared from the directory.

Bessica entered Tufts Medical School in 1900 and was graduated in 1903. Apparently the family disapproved of her choice of profession— none of them attended her graduation—but Bessica's determination blazed a trail for women in medicine. She worked her way through school as a dental assistant and by teaching painting, with little support from her family. During this period the young dental assistant met the man she would marry, François Raiche, when he came to the office with a dental problem. It was kismet.

François C. Raiche was the son of a French immigrant who had prospered sufficiently in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to send his son to university. The elder Raiche spoke no English when he came to America and answered every remark made to him with the word “right.” Consequently, his son went through school as Frank C. Wright, although his real name was Raiche. Young Raiche was Yale Law, 1892, Phi Sigma Kappa, and crew; a practicing attorney in New York, he and his family had become proper Yankees.

Bessica's first assignment was Staten Island Children's Hospital, where she interned and served a residency, receiving specialized training in obstetrics. In 1904 she started private practice as Faith C. Medlar, M.D., first in Beachmont, then Swampscott, Massachusetts, as a general practitioner. According to Catherine Stull, the couple's daughter, Bessica and Frank married sometime between 1904 and 1907, maintained a home in Beachmont, and were actively pursuing their interest in the new heavier-than-air technology. Frank was a member of the New York Aeronautical Society, and both Raiches attended exhibitions of new flying machines and studied the latest literature about aviation.

By 1907, the couple was settled in their summer home on Long Island to be near the aviation activity at Mineola. All of the early aviation enthusiasts were there: the Wrights, Glenn Curtiss, and a throng of amateur builders with whom the Raiches fit right in. Bessica was determined to learn to fly; Frank, as his American friends called him, dreamed of building his own aeroplane. In short order, the couple did just that in the living room of their summer home. The Raiche-Crout biplane, the work of Bessica and Frank, was the first machine to fly that was built by a member of the New York Aeronautical Society—earlier models never got off the ground. The engine was built by a Mr. Crout.

As the machine took shape, the grand piano became a carpenter's horse to support the back end. The aeroplane was a Curtiss-type pusher biplane of flimsy design: A set of wings, covered on the top with shellacked silk, had boxlike structures fore and aft, and bamboo struts held in place with wire, all of which sat on a triangular set of bicycle wheels powered by a two-cycle, forty-horsepower boat motor that turned a wooden propeller behind the pilot's seat. Like the first Wright motors, there was no throttle to control the motor's speed; it ran at full speed until the gas and ignition were cut off.

Weight was a major concern for the builders, who had the mistaken idea that the lighter the machine, the better it would fly. The builders didn't realize that the power of the motor was the key to successful flight. Bessica weighed ninety pounds, which made her an ideal candidate for pilot. Just to be sure, there was much drilling of crankshafts and other parts to reduce every possible ounce of weight. When the machine was ready, the front of the house was removed to move the aeroplane out for a trial. That was a unique learning experience; Bessica had no training other than helping to build the machine and cursory advice to pull the stick to go up, push it to come down.

The first starts were tentative, little more than grass-cutting up and down the field to get the feel of the motor. Before the aeroplane moved, the motor was started, and when it was going at full speed, the mechanics holding the wings let go and the fragile contraption moved forward, skimming the tops of the grass. The first attempt was judged a success; the machine left the ground briefly, then came down again—a bit hard, but machine and pilot were safe. It was a remarkable achievement for 1908, considering the stage of aviation, when the first test was often a disaster.

Bessica discovered that wearing a skirt was a mistake. The wind got under it, and interfered with the safe working of the controls. Thereafter, she wore riding breeches until she had leather pants, a jacket, and a helmet made. When a second aeroplane was finished, Bessica's very own, the determined flier was on board again. This one was a Curtiss-type pusher biplane with a rebuilt four-cylinder, forty-horsepower engine that could fly about thirty-five miles an hour. Ailerons for lateral balance in flight were still unknown, and because the Wrights controlled wingwarping devices, a harness worn by the pilot worked wing flaps on the upper and lower wings. If the aeroplane started to slip in flight, the pilot leaned in the opposite direction and the harness depressed one flap while raising the other to keep the machine level.

Finished on September 15, 1910, the frail machine was rolled out the next day, and Bessica settled herself in it to make the first accredited solo flight by a woman in the United States. She made several more short flights that day, but on the fifth trial, the aeroplane hit a rut in the ground at the far end of the field, and the nose jammed into the ground, smashing the front control. The aeroplane crumbled, and the pilot shot out onto the ground, followed by the seat, which hit her in the back. Dazed for a minute or two, Bessica got up, ran to the machine, whose motor was still running “at a terrific rate,” and cut the ignition. As she explained later, she needed that motor for the next aeroplane.

The press followed the aviation attempts at Mineola with quizzical interest. Accidents were sure to make the news. The
New York Globe
observed on September 25 that Bessica's appearance on the field after her mishap quieted fears “that the experience might unnerve her. But it was proved this morning that she was made of different stuff.” Interested spectators noted approvingly her increased skill with each flight: “The longest was about 500 yards, during which she rose from 15 to 20 feet above the ground.” There were more misadventures—wind was a problem for the delicate machine—but by October 15, Bessica was flying at thirty feet and making several circles of the field, a marked advance from the straight flights, when around the country scores of amateurs “have operated aeroplanes without leaving the ground.”

The Aeronautical Society of New York had recognized in 1909 that many of the aeroplanes built were ingenious but impractical. Its prize to a triplane that year was carefully worded: “winner of first prize money for design and workmanship, independent of performance.” Elsewhere, amateur builders had similar results.
Flight
published a lively account of one builder in Budapest who could not contain his excitement when after repeated tries “the tail lifted from the ground”—he was still not airborne. The Raiche machines, built with little technical knowledge by enthusiastic tinkerers, were amazing for their time.

The Aeronautical Society, impressed by Bessica's achievement, held a dinner in New York on October 13 to award her with a winged gold medal encrusted with diamonds. The wording of the presentation was very specific: in official recognition of her aeroplane flight a month earlier as “the nation's first intentional solo by a woman.” The society, Solomon-like, chose to recognize Raiche's intentional flight rather than Scott's accidental one.

The success of the first aeroplane led the husband-and-wife builders to construct two more, which were sold to eager buyers. Meanwhile, Bessica had designed and made patterns for the castings and supervised the building of the aeroplane that was hers. Flying this machine, Bessica continued to gain expertise. Gliding was an essential movement. She described how this was done: “In starting a glide down you shut off the motor in the air. There was no starting again. You came down, and if the glide was too steep, there was no climbing out of it.”

By 1911, another bird woman had joined the crowd at Mineola— Harriet Quimby, the first woman to earn a pilot's license in the United States, followed thirteen days later by Matilde Moisant. More would follow. Bessica, like Blanche, had no interest in getting a license. She proved to her own satisfaction that she could fly and was content with that.

Bessica continued improving her flying technique in addition to helping with the Française Américaine Aeroplane Cie., a husband-and-wife venture. The company advertised to teach students to fly in two weeks for two hundred dollars, with one hundred dollars down and the balance at the end of the first week. Students learned construction along with flight lessons; the school boasted that students made circles after four days of flying. Interested persons were to give their weight; the emphasis on lightness was still uppermost in the builders' minds.

The Raiche enterprise didn't have much success; the couple's original investment was too small to attract the numbers needed. In 1911, husband and wife moved to Chicago and linked up with the Standard School of Aviation. By 1912, Bessica had organized the nation's first pilot-instruction class exclusively for women. This endeavor was shortlived; later that year the Raiches moved to Balboa Island, California, in search of a warmer climate. Bessica gave up her aviation career and returned to medicine; presumably, Frank returned to the law. Together they had enjoyed a unique experience during the infancy of aviation, which earned Bessica a place in the history books.