Before Amelia (39 page)

After twenty minutes' practice on the rudder (a lesson usually was four to five minutes), the student was given both the rudder and ailerons to handle, and flying became a little more intricate. When the student was sufficiently advanced, he was given full control, with the addition of the elevator. At this stage, Marjorie said, “I merely sat in the plane and folded my hands,” but on many occasions she unfolded them quickly to “get the plane out of a tight place.” The students learned to make turns, alternating left and right, wide and easy at first, then gradually tilting the aeroplane and tightening the turns until they could make a sixty-degree bank with confidence. That is when they began to develop flying instinct. Unlike most other training schools, at the Stinson School students flew alone for the first time when they took their tests, which lasted about an hour. That was the Wright method of training.

As important as air time were the discussions following a lesson. Everyone critiqued the performance; each student told what discovery he had made, what error, and how to correct it. Marjorie felt these sessions were very helpful to the students. When they were able to correct an error while flying, she added another skill—landing without power. It was required for the license test but, more important, said Marjorie, “Spot landings without power were an every-flight occurrence.” Once a student worked the controls instinctively, Marjorie could then teach him to actually fly in six days.

A stream of students followed in short order after the original four were licensed. Marjorie realized later that she was flying continuously for six hours a day. On one particularly cold day, oblivious of the weather, she sat on a lower wing of an aeroplane, concentrating on a succession of students' performances, until one student called a halt. Blue from the cold, her teeth chattering, Marjorie was taken to the nearest household, where she warmed herself near the oven and “drank all the coffee that had been prepared for the family breakfast.” When she had thawed out, she walked back to the field and resumed flying. Thereafter, she admitted, she had a teacher's pet; she did her best to get that young man licensed as quickly as possible—in three hours and forty-five minutes. He was not the fastest; Marcel Dubuc from Montreal passed his test after three hours and forty minutes.

Marjorie Stinson (right) congratulating her pupil, Marcel Dubuc, on finishing his fiying course in record time.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Occasionally the school heard from former students overseas. Their letters were full of shoptalk about aeroplanes and how they performed. Gorman was flying a bigger machine with “lots of horsepower.” English fliers, he wrote, “used the rudder a great deal and never land unless we are dead into the wind”—this where sea winds “often rise to 50 miles! hour.” Another former student wrote that the government plane was so stable “you can let go controls and she flies herself beautifully, climbing slightly.” Its drawback: “no great speed and can't climb fast.” The “flying schoolmarm” was proud of her graduates.

Of her many students, eighty-three by one statistic, John Frost, vice president of the Frost National Bank of San Antonio, was unique. He soloed in four hours and passed his tests in May 1916, winning license No. 498, which was usually the last Marjorie saw of her students, but on the following morning, Frost was back again in his Pierce-Arrow roadster. Marjorie landed to see what was wrong—she had been chasing coyotes around the field—and was stunned when Frost said he wanted to take some advanced flying lessons. That sounded interesting, and she agreed. Frost took twelve hours of training; bought a Curtiss JN, “the latest and raciest plane to be had in those days”; laid out a field on his estate; and built a hangar. When the United States entered the war, he was ready and served overseas, winning a Distinguished Service Cross.

During the years the school was operating, one student had his money returned to him with the explanation he would never learn to fly. He habitually froze in the air, holding the controls in a rigid grip that endangered himself and his instructor. Marjorie and Eddie tried talk sessions on the ground, but he froze the next time up. On the day his money was returned, the student inveigled John Frost into taking him up. Too late, Marjorie ran out to stop the flight. Shortly after takeoff, the aeroplane crashed into the mesquite. The student died on the way to the hospital; Frost was in shock but recovered quickly.

The school was running at full speed from daybreak often until night, when bonfires marked the landing place. Sixty-seven lessons were given in one day, a school record that saw Eddie in the air most of the day, with Marjorie doing her share. Canadians were still the greatest number, together with a few National Guard men and civilians. Flying schools around the country were enjoying similar popularity. The cost of lessons was usually a dollar a minute, but a deposit for breakage could raise the price, and some schools charged for the use of a school machine to take license tests.

The continued fighting in Mexico between contending factions brought the local National Guard to Fort Sam Houston before it moved to the border. Marjorie flew for the troops to show what an aeroplane could do and carried cameramen up to photograph the sight of hundreds of tents on the field. She demonstrated bombing techniques, using a floral bouquet instead of the usual flour bombs. Whoever caught the bouquet won a ride with her. Sergeant E.W. Edwards, the largest man in camp, well over six feet, outreached his competitors to win. The losers groused the machine would never get off the ground with his 240 pounds. But it did.

Marjorie, in a letter to her brother Jack years later, recalled another student, named Arbuckle from Ok lahoma (nicknamed “Snake”), who was very anxious to learn and couldn't wait to take his tests. When he was ready to go up alone, the weather seemed fine, and Arbuckle took off and began his first set of eights. As he lined up to begin his first turn around the pylon—the Wright was not a speedy machine—the sky darkened rapidly, and a norther (a high, rough wind) blew in. The gang on the ground got the white sheet used to signal a flier down and began to wave it frantically in the center of the field. Arbuck leflew on, oblivious of everything except trying to keep the machine steady and together as he made his turns. When he finished, the norther had subsided a little, and he landed all right, considering the gusty wind. The gang rushed out to meet him, and all he said was, “I had no idea it would be so much bouncier without the instructor aboard. I didn't think the lack of weight would be so noticeable.” Marjorie told Jack, “He learned to really fly in the norther.” She had a warm spot for him.

One of her most interesting students was Francisco Montes de Orca, from Mexico. He spoke no English; Marjorie spoke no Spanish. All instructions about flying were relayed to Orca through his interpreter, making the learning experience a little awkward in the beginning. Fortunately, he was an excellent student. “Had he not been an exceptionally apt pupil in the air,” Marjorie recalled, “the lessons might have proved to be hazardous for us both.”

Not all her students were so bright. One young man always flew with the wing low. He seemed sensible on the ground and “on an even keel,” but he never flew level. During one of his many sideslips in the air, Marjorie turned to see “whatever in the world he could be thinking about.” It turned out he wasn't thinking—he was just gazing at the day moon and chewing gum. On the next flight up, the gum was stuck under the wing, and “the plane flew level for his first time.”

During the early months of 1916, Walter Brock, a well-known English builder and pilot, was working at the Stinson School, building new machines for Katherine, Eddie, and Marjorie. On rainy days Marjorie worked with Brock during construction of the aeroplanes, drawing diagrams and copying detailed drawings, experience that taught her a great deal about design and helped her find a job with the government during the war. Two of the aeroplanes, when finished, were flown by Marjorie and Eddie during the summer at Ashburn, the new Aero Club field near Chicago; there, they continued to teach a few Canadian students. Eddie used his Brock regularly; Marjorie probably crashed hers in Ohio. Katherine never flew hers; it sat in a hangar at the school until Emil Laird took it up one day in early 1917 and crashed. Laird built and flew aeroplanes in the early aviation days. Marjorie didn't think much of his flying ability.

Brock called Eddie's machine the Caudron, the French design it resembled. It had a new wing curve, a square elevator, and was stronger to carry a sixty-horsepower Curtiss engine. Marjorie's model, like all the Brocks, was a speedy tractor, a one-seater, strictly for exhibition. Earlier, her favorite machine had been a pusher with a new wing curve, a more streamlined edge than the standard blunt Wright lead edge, covered with doped aeroplane linen. The September 18, 1916,
Aerial Age Weekly
reported that Marjorie flew “the tractor,” with its fifty-horsepower engine, “perfectly” the first time at Ashburn, that she was making daily practice flights “preparatory to the exhibition season.” A new machine took time to get used to; Marjorie was a careful flier.

She flew at Chicago Heights on the Fourth of July and was listed as a guest with Katherine at the Aviation Day Banquet given by the Chicago Advertising Association. Shortly after, Marjorie was scheduled to appear at Napoleon, Ohio, then Cleveland, where the Industry Exposition Fair was to take place on Labor Day weekend.

For the first time, Marjorie's luck in the air failed her. She crashed her machine at Napoleon and had to borrow an aeroplane for her appearance at Cleveland. described as “a model used in the United States Army, so constructed that the driver cannot see directly in front of him,” the machine was probably a Curtiss tractor or possibly Eddie's Caudron. Certainly Marjorie knew both models, but their different control systems, together with her lack of practice on the tractor, made flying a very different experience.

Takeoff was smooth, according to the
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
but no sooner was the machine barely ten feet off the ground than the young pilot stopped smiling and was seen pulling anxiously at a lever that apparently refused to work. Pointing the aeroplane toward the lake, she turned back abruptly as the machine shot upward. In the next instant, the machine seemed to stop, and a cry went up, softly at first, then shrill: “It's coming down—she's falling!”

The thousands watching below in horror were galvanized into action. Ignoring the police, they raced the ten blocks to where shattered wood and twisted steel marked the machine's fall. A streak of blood colored the length of the machine's floor, the wheels were pushed up through the floor, and the body of the machine was twisted completely around. The injured pilot was taken to German Hospital—miraculously, still alive.

Interviewed the next day, Marjorie admitted to being cut up and sore, but “accidents are bound to happen and until one gets my neck I guess I'm in the business.” Marjorie was a trouper. She had a telegram sent to her mother to keep her from worrying. Commenting on the accident in her first and only explanation, she wrote that she had realized the machine wasn't at the height it should have been and a series of scary prospects flashed through her mind: The machine might turn upside down (she wasn't strapped in); it might land on top of her. Unable to stop the engine, the aeroplane “hit the ground head-on going at 50 miles an hour.” Except for this brief explanation, Marjorie never mentioned the accident again, so we don't know what really went wrong. Like most fliers, she shut it out of her thoughts; there were more important things to occupy her mind, such as students and machines.

Over a year's time, the constant use of school machines took its toll. Magnetos needed reworking weekly, if not daily. Captain Townsend Dodd of the Army Squadron became a regular at the school, working on magnetos. Grover Loening, an early builder, worked on the collection of parts bought by Emma in 1916 for $350 and fashioned a modified Burgess H aeroplane, used for advanced training. A biplane with a tractor engine, it was designed so that the pilot and wheel control were set back from the engine and propeller. It was very different from the open-front Wright, with pilot and student seated on the lower wing, looking like “so much laundry hung out to dry”—according to Marjorie's description.

When the Aero Club of America had called attention during the summer of 1916 to the need to train men to make “America first in the air,” Marjorie responded. James S. Stephens, vice president of the Illinois Aero Club, speaking in Chicago, deplored the lamentable condition of American aviation in the military action in Mexico. Aeroplanes had demonstrated their usefulness in eliminating the element of surprise and were needed to save American lives, but as John T. McCutcheon of the
Tribune
wrote: “Uncle Sam, inventor of the aeroplane, has only one in service at the front.”

In early 1917, to correct that situation, Marjorie organized the Texas Escadrille, patterned after the famous Lafayette Escadrille. Its purpose: to train primarily Texas civilians to serve in the American flying corps. Robert Shank, a Stinson graduate, shared teaching duties with Marjorie, Eddie having left for the Curtiss School in Newport News, Virginia, to join up. A majority of the group of nineteen were from San Antonio, a few from other Texas cities, and four were from out of state. All were eager to win their license and serve in the Aviation Service.