Before Amelia (33 page)

Of the many women who flew in the years before 1916, Katherine Stinson was one of the very few who could have picked up after the war where she left off, if her health had permitted. She had the ability, the intelligence, the spirit. As she had learned years before: “If you are going to let other people decide what you are able to do, I don't think you will ever do much of anything.” She knew that flying was not a matter of gender. “There is nothing about flying that makes it unsuited to a woman. It doesn't demand size or strength.” And she loved showing the world what a woman could do.

RUTH LAW, A NEW Englander with just a hint of reserve, obtained her pilot's license, No. 188, four months after Katherine Stinson, to become the sixth American woman pilot. (Bernetta Adams Miller was the fifth.) Like Stinson, whom she resembled in nerve and daring, she was instantly taken with flying, pursued it confidently, and made a good living during a long career. Of the many recognized women in early aviation, Ruth Law was the only one who had a successful career after World War I.

In August 1912 the
Boston Herald
described her as a “slip of a girl who likes to fly 75 mph at Saugus racetrack... a slim young woman who has yellow hair, blue eyes and a low voice. She looks like some high school girl whose principle business might be wrestling with Ovid's translations.” In short order, the girlish appearance would give way to competency. She checked the machine before each flight—being a mechanic is part of an aviator's responsibility, or should be: “When your engine suddenly stops when you're 2,000 feet in the air, it's some comfort to know that if anything can be done, you can do it,” Ruth said. Not yet a licensed pilot, Ruth practiced her trade through the summer of 1912, totally absorbed in the enjoyment that came from flying. It was what led men and women to take up wings, not fame, not money. Ruth commented succinctly: “There's too little money for the risk.”

Born into a proper Daughters of the American Revolution family in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1887, Ruth Bancroft Law and her brother, Rodman, were the adventuresome children of staid parents. Ruth's mother once remarked that she felt like a hen who had hatched two ducks. Both children had a daredevil streak that all the education and refinement in the world could not dislodge. Rodman, who was a year and a half older than Ruth (“We were almost like twins,” she said), led his sister in a parade of games and outdoor sports that made a tomboy of her. Rodman, known as “the human fly” for his feats scaling buildings, performed leaps from high points with a parachute (he made the first public parachute jump from an aeroplane and leaped from the hand of the Statue of Liberty); he was one of the original stuntmen in the movies, with Pathé, before he pursued experiments with rockets and plans to cross the Atlantic. His interest in the aeroplane as a vehicle led Ruth to follow suit; she was a keen observer when the Burgess Aviation School opened at Marblehead. The years at Miss Livermore's School in New Haven, Connecticut, had not subdued her.

Tired of watching the activity on the field, she begged one of the boys to take her up in his machine. From that moment, she was determined to enter the school but met a wall of refusal. Finally, she convinced Phil Page to take her on; July 1, 1912, was scheduled for her first lesson. Waiting on the field, she watched Harriet Quimby and her passenger fall to their deaths at Squantum during the Harvard-Boston meet. Amid the mass hysterics, her practical mind looked for a reason for the crash, and she decided, to her own satisfaction, that the Blériot monoplane was to blame, not the pilot. Convinced that the Wright biplane was a safer machine, she sent her husband to Dayton.

Charles Oliver was an understanding husband. Also a native of Lynn, he had married Ruth in 1910 and realized soon after that domesticity was not Ruth's main interest. He encouraged her interest in aviation, and became her manager and chief supporter when she began her professional career.

Oliver tried to enroll Ruth in the Wright School, but without success. Orville Wright refused “absolutely” to teach her, convinced that women were “entirely unfitted for the nervous strain and that women . . . have no mechanical ability”—he would not be responsible. However, Orville willingly sold her an aeroplane for seventy-five hundred dollars—twenty-five hundred dollars down, the balance in installments. Oliver made all the arrangements, and the machine, a Wright Model B, was shipped to Marblehead, where Ruth continued lessons with Page on the old Saugus racetrack. In later years she said she also exchanged the use of her machine for lessons with another young flier at the field.

As important as the air lessons were shop lessons with an elderly German mechanic at the school, who taught Ruth to grind valves, take a motor apart, and put it together again. As a result, Ruth firmly believed that aviators, in a pinch, must be mechanics. With experience, she could “anticipate what would happen to the motor by the sound of it, and be able to get down.” Of course, as she was quick to acknowledge, “there was a lot of luck entered into it, too.”

Early on the morning of August 1, Ruth soloed; impatient with waiting, she took the aeroplane up without her instructor's knowledge. Getting off the ground was easy, but it was “quite another matter to stay right side up after you get off.” At five hundred feet, she realized she didn't know how to get down. Wobbling around in the air, she pulled herself together, aware that “until I had confidence I could not make a landing.” The Wright aeroplane did not fail her; it was “very simple to learn to fly, because it was a natural flier.” After fifteen minutes spent calming her fears—anxious friends waited below, knowing she had no business in the air alone—she felt fairly composed and “more by good luck than ability made a very fair landing. After I landed, I thought I was quite some aviator.” But good sense prevailed; she continued to practice daily, weather permitting. Reportedly, on one practice flight with Arch Freeman, her teacher, she climbed to seventy-eight hundred feet.

On Labor Day, Ruth made her first exhibition appearance, flying at Narragansett Park in Providence with Lincoln Beachey. Before a crowd of ten thousand, she showed aerial mastery, doing figure eights and banking well on the turns. She had accepted the date because she felt the need to earn some money. Flying made money disappear at a fast rate—the cost of oil, gasoline, and rental of a hangar were constant—and there was five thousand dollars owed to the Wright Company. She received five hundred dollars for her first exhibition flight, mainly in one-dollar bills. “It looked like a fortune when I threw it on my bed in the hotel. It was the first money I had ever earned in my life.” As a beginner, she was paid half of what Beachey received, but that didn't bother her a bit. As her reputation grew, she was very well paid, because there were so few women doing exhibition flying.

Appearing on a program with Beachey ensured being seen by a good-size crowd. The weather was not ideal—a drizzling rain lasted throughout the afternoon—but the two aviators and Samuel A. Libby, a parachute artist, were not deterred. Beachey performed a series of spirals, dives with his hands outstretched, and the glide for which he was famous. From a height of several thousand feet, he made a vertical dive with the motor cut off, and landed on the racetrack in front of the grandstand—an area of about seventy-five feet in width with a straightaway of possibly five hundred feet. The crowd, seemingly oblivious of the weather, was on its feet throughout much of Beachey's performance.

Ruth went up without incident and was warmly received by the crowd, who admired her graceful maneuvers. Her landing gave the crowd a thrill, as she descended rapidly near the first quarter post on the mile track, with so much speed that her machine bounced over the gully outside the track. One strut snapped, but machine and pilot were uninjured. Replacing the strut was minor; Ruth had learned to whittle as well as take a magneto apart. Yet she still had a lot to learn. Exhibition flying demanded good judgment in sizing up locations, in adapting the machine to new dimensions. At the end of her flight, the crowd surged onto the field, despite warnings from the police, to inspect the young woman pilot—dressed in black satin bloomers, a red sweater, a black head covering, boots, and goggles—and her machine. It took the sound of Beachey's motor starting up to make the excited fans give way for another flight.

Beachey, at that time America's most famous aviator, was friendly and helpful to the novice pilot, offering advice on clearing the trees near the field. “Now, Ruth, you see those trees at the end of the racetrack? You only have to just miss 'em by a little. Don't try to go up too high, you might stall and fall.” With all his success, Ruth found Beachey a modest person, contrary to the opinion others had of him. After his exhibition, nobody could find him. According to Ruth, he left the area quickly, and “when the newspapermen wanted him for an interview or pictures, he was gone.”

As the only woman flying in the East, Ruth was a prime subject for newspaper articles whenever she appeared. Following her debut at Narragansett Park, she spoke up frequently for women in aviation. Ingrained in her personality from years of copying her brother's actions was the knowledge that anything he could do, she could do, too. In the press she expressed herself this way: “I believe a woman can do anything a man can do and do it just as well, with the exception of anything which requires great strength.” Aviation, generally, did not require that kind of strength. She believed, however, that men were more apt to be successful at flying than women, because “it's an adventurous business and most women prefer other things than adventure.” She herself, a tomboy, loved adventure. She touted flying as a “fine and dignified sport for women, healthful and stimulating to the mind.” She might have added that nothing could compare with flying for sheer, “dizzying” fun. When she became a regular on the exhibition circuit, receiving fifteen hundred dollars for an appearance, she marveled that she was paid so well for “just having a good time.”

Along with the fun, there were moments of anxiety. Flying at the same Providence fairgrounds, Ruth narrowly missed serious injury. The weather was miserable; high winds spelled trouble for a fragile aeroplane. Before a large crowd, Ruth agreed to go up simply out of ignorance. Later, she knew better. About two hundred feet in the air, a gust of wind caught the machine and pitched it around like a feather, threatening to turn her upside down. The machine dropped rapidly downward, blown by gusts of wind, hit an automobile that had taken refuge near a shed, sheared off the top of the auto (there were seven people inside), and demolished one wing, then spun around and crumpled the other against the shed. Miraculously, none of the five children and two adults in the auto were injured, nor was Ruth.

In November, she attended a Staten Island meet where she was billed as trying for an altitude record. On the appointed day, she reached fifty-five-hundred feet according to her barograph, a record for American women, but the Aeronautical Society of New York did not announce the record until it had studied the instrument. The
Staten Islander
advertised “Free Aeroplane Ride with Miss Ruth Law” to the man or woman presenting the most coupons from the newspaper at the paper's office “before six o'clock on Thursday, November 14, 1912.” The free ride would take place at the Oakwood Aerorace on Sunday, November 17. The aviatrix was flying every day and taking up passengers for a fee; each received a certificate indicating the holder “has had an aerial experience.” The accumulation of hours in the air grew, and on November 18, having performed the required tests at Oakwood, Ruth Law received her license from the Aero Club of America. She was a bona-fide aviation pilot, entitled to enter any meet sanctioned by the club.

That winter, Ruth and her husband went to Sea Breeze, near Daytona Beach, Florida, where, in agreement with the Clarendon Hotel, starting on January 1, 1913, the newly licensed pilot took hotel guests and other interested people for aeroplane rides. It was a perfect arrangement: The hotel could boast an unusual attraction, Ruth earned money during the slow aviation season, and the couple enjoyed the balmy southern weather. The Olivers kept this arrangement for three years.

On one occasion a young man came running to the hangar around closing time, asking to be taken up—he was leaving the next day. Ruth agreed and the two took off. As she recalled years later, it was late afternoon, absolutely calm, no wind. She went up the beach, “the usual flight,” then back again, toward the hangar, and prepared for landing. Suddenly, at about three hundred feet, the machine started down without any motion of the elevators on her part. Immediately, she knew something was wrong and turned off the motor. She eased the aeroplane down and, because there was no wind, made a perfectly good landing. The young man hopped out, paid his fee, and left. Ruth went to the back of the machine, her original Wright, for a look. Said Ruth, “We used to joke about them [the early Wrights] being put together with stove bolts—well, it was no joke, they were put together with stove bolts. And the bolt that held the elevator arrangement on the end of the tail of the plane had broken loose and was swinging free....I had no elevator or directional guidance for the plane.” Fortunately, the perfect calm and the ability of the Wright biplane to float down like a bird had saved pilot and passenger.

The Florida season had its comic moments. One year the Brooklyn Dodgers, in Florida for spring training, wanted something unusual for their opening game. Ruth was hired to throw the first ball from her aeroplane. Wilbert Robinson, the Dodgers's manager and known for catching high pop flies, would be the catcher. Just before takeoff, she realized she had no baseball to throw. “Here,” said her mechanic, “you can use this. It's about the size of a baseball,” and he handed her a grapefruit. It looked about right, and Ruth thought nothing more about it. Up in the air, ready for the throw, she zeroed in on Robinson, let the grapefruit fly, and hit Robinson on the chest, knocking him flat on his back.