Walking on Air (17 page)

In order to get the project going, Phoebe volunteered to be a guinea pig for a preliminary study by bureau medical examiner Dr. Roy E. Whitehead. She submitted to daily physicals for ninety days (three menstrual cycles). Her “chart showed almost straight lines during all of that time.” When the pilot and doctor showed the chart to Cone, he dismissed it. “This doesn't prove very much, you're just a healthy horse.” Despite the lack of funds, the Department of Commerce officially endorsed Phoebe's research plan.
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Examinations of women pilots commenced; some data from related studies was gathered. The research went on for over a year, but ultimately, no regulation was ever proposed and the whole matter was allowed to “die a natural death.”
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As Phoebe continued to travel for the bureau, she managed to get home to Memphis now and then and Vernon occasionally traveled to Washington to see his wife, but their times together were scattered and infrequent.
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Despite the distance between them, Phoebe characterized her marriage to the press as a loving partnership. “We have shared everything together, and it has made for complete understanding.”
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Nonetheless, Vernon and Phoebe's lives seemed to unspool in ways totally separate from each other. Her detailed flying itinerary coupled with her duties in Washington kept her very busy and away from home, while Vernon's business demanded his presence. Despite economic hard times, aviation in Memphis remained a popular avocation and his flying school was continuously booked. Vernon's most famous student was the author William Faulkner. He started taking lessons at Mid-South Airways in February 1933.
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Faulkner had long been enamored with flying, at least since the age of twenty-one, when he joined the Royal Air Force with visions of becoming a flying ace in the Great War. The war was over before he could make his first solo flight, but that didn't prevent him from spinning tales about being shot down in France.
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As barnstormers made their way across the South in the 1920s, Faulkner loved to don a white scarf and goggles for a “loop-the-loop in an open cockpit over the Mississippi River.”
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Vernon and Phoebe were the living embodiment of a way of life he found enchanting.

After several weeks and seventeen hours of dual instruction, Bill Faulkner soloed in Vernon's Waco biplane on 20 April 1933. Nearly every weekend, he would drive up to Memphis, stay at the Peabody Hotel, and spend all his spare time in the air with Vernon. Faulkner bought his own plane in the fall, and put up the money for his younger brother Dean's flight instruction as well. The three men, Dean and Bill Faulkner and Vernon Omlie became
fast friends. Dean moved into Vernon's apartment, and after both brothers got their licenses, the three of them put together their own flying circus: “William Faulkner's (Famous Author) Air Circus.” The group, with the addition of a black wing-walker named George “The Black Eagle” McEwen, followed the formula Vernon developed with Phoebe a decade before: a thrill show followed by passenger hops. The Faulkners flew the open-cockpit Wacos while Vernon and George did the stunts. The Faulkner Air Circus continued on weekends through two summers, 1934 and 1935, sometimes including William and sometimes not, doing shows in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Missouri. In 1935, they called themselves the Flying Faulkners, and McEwen was replaced by another black wing-walker and parachute jumper named Willie “Suicide” Jones.
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Dean continued to live with Vernon in his apartment on Lamar, and after Vernon was a witness at Dean's wedding to Louise Hale, she moved in with the two men.
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All the flying and all the additional hangar flying (sharing tales of daring-do among pilots) provided valuable material for Faulkner's fiction. He wrote a series of short stories, including “Honor,” “All the Dead Pilots,” and “This Kind of Courage,” based on his fascination with the skill and daring of barnstormers, and his eighth novel,
Pylon
, published in 1935, was loosely based on the adventures of the Omlies.
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In February 1933, Vernon and the Faulkner brothers flew to New Orleans for the dedication of Shushan Airport, which was celebrated with races and aerial events that featured numerous crashes and mishaps. Faulkner fictionalized that event as the setting for
Pylon
. In the novel, Faulkner rejects the romantic aspects of flying to focus on the tawdry lives of a clan of itinerant stunt fliers whose need for money ties them to a vocation that threatens their lives and whose mode of living has removed them from the moral strictures that bind everyone else. These barnstormers, Faulkner writes, “they ain't human like us; they couldn't turn those pylons like they do if they had human blood and senses and they wouldn't want to or dare to if they just had human brains … crash one and it ain't even blood when you haul him out: it's cylinder oil the same as in the crankcase.”
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Pylon's
main characters are Roger Shumann, a skillful but luckless racing pilot; a dull-witted alcoholic mechanic named Jiggs; Shumann's promiscuous wife, Laverne; her six-year-old son, Jack, a child of uncertain paternity; and parachute jumper, Jack Holmes, Laverne's lover. Laverne is strong and fearless, a mechanic, former wing-walker and parachute jumper, who dressed “in dungarees like the rest of them, with her hands full of wrenches
and machinery and a gob of cotter keys in her mouth … and a smear of grease where she had swiped it back with her wrist.”
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Laverne is sexually aggressive, claiming at least two men as lovers, and unapologetic about her desires. Faulkner's description of her first parachute jump with Shumann as her pilot has them agreeing that she should wear a skirt because “her exposed legs would not only be a drawing card but that in the skirt no one would doubt that she was a woman.” She removed her underwear as well. Standing on the wing, preparing to jump, Laverne suddenly crawls back into the cockpit to straddle Shumann in a sexual embrace as he struggles to control the plane. Then she climbs out, turns, and plunges into the open air, her body on full display as she descends to a “yelling mob of men and youths.”
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As told through the observances of an unnamed newspaper reporter, who also lusts after Laverne, Faulkner's characters lead exaggeratedly unconventional lives of illicit sex and reckless flying that lead toward inevitable tragedy. In the end, Shumann dies in a fiery crash and Laverne is left bereft and alone.

There was little doubt that Roger and Laverne were based on the exploits of Vernon and Phoebe. She had loaned the author her early scrapbooks and clippings to use while writing the manuscript. When the novel was published, Phoebe was shocked and embarrassed by what he had done with them. Faulkner had taken the raw material of her achievements and twisted them into a grotesque tale of a sexually voracious usurper in the masculine world of aviation. Publicly, she said nothing except when she was directly asked about the veracity of the characterizations. Then she simply noted that she and her husband “disapproved of Bill's
Pylon
.”
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When Vernon privately admonished Faulkner with the comment that “aviation people are not like the way you portray them, and I doubt that it will be accepted by the majority of the people,” the author allegedly replied that he was more interested in selling books than portraying historical accuracy.
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The Flying Faulkners continued throughout the summer of 1935, doing airshows around the mid-South. Dean earned his transport license and bought his brother's Waco. In one of the last events of the season, the troupe was scheduled for a show on Sunday afternoon, 10 November, at Pontotoc, Mississippi. Dean had been hauling passengers all day Saturday and continued to do so Sunday morning. He had three passengers with him who were viewing their farm from the air when the Waco suddenly plummeted to earth, killing all aboard. Witnesses said the plane was about 4,000 feet when the wing fell off and the plane dived into an open field, the wing landing in
a cemetery about a mile away. Vernon, who had thoroughly inspected and certified the plane when Dean bought it just a few weeks before, rushed to the scene. Vernon's examination of the wreckage revealed that the control wheel, which was moveable, had been moved to the right, indicating that Dean's passenger had been flying the plane at the time of the crash. Devastated by the loss of his friend, Vernon told a friend that the accident “will always be a mystery. No one will ever know for sure exactly what happened.” William Faulkner blamed himself for encouraging his brother to fly, for buying the plane, and ultimately for his death. Though they shared grief over the loss of Dean, how Vernon and Bill responded to each other after the accident is unknown.
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Phoebe's work in Washington took on new impetus after she conceived and developed a million-dollar program that she staffed with an all-women crew.
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Aviation, she frequently told the press, was “a field where women have the same opportunities as men, where men will cooperate with women and help them get ahead.”
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She aimed to prove it while simultaneously solving a very serious problem for civil aviation.

Navigation, the seemingly simple matter of avoiding getting lost, had long vexed pilots. While the needs of commercial aviation were increasingly being addressed with aids like radio beacons and lighting systems, the private pilot still flew the way she always had, balancing a road map on her knees, tracing her route with a thumb. Whether flying over the trackless desert or the farm-country grid of the Midwest, there was little information to help her figure out where precisely she was. This became particularly acute during flights over strange and unmarked territory as storms closed in. Perhaps there was enough gas to reach the nearest airport, but only if the pilot knew where that airport was. During Phoebe's thousands of hours in the air she had often been lost and had witnessed countless other pilots who had to set down in unfamiliar and often dangerous terrain to ascertain where they were.

Local attempts to put “road signs in the air” had been started by some municipalities and aero clubs in the 1920s. In 1928, the Bureau of Air Commerce held an airway-marking conference to work on formulating a set of standard guidelines. Their report called for the name of the location in chrome yellow letters ten to thirty feet high, a north arrow, and the distance and direction of the nearest airport. Efforts were sporadic and funding depended upon the will and determination of local activists.
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As she flew across the country in 1932, Amelia Earhart complained that she saw
few towns properly named. “In some, the airway sign boards had been so neglected that the lettering was dirty and almost illegible; in others the only words visible from above spelled the names of certain kinds of pills or liniment.”
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The program finally came together when a pilot with sensitivity to the situation was in a position of power to obtain federal funding. Shortly after Col. Walter Sumpter Smith, army pilot and former commander of the Alabama Air National Guard, was appointed head of the Airport Division of the Works Progress Administration, he dropped by Phoebe's office. As pilot's often do, they engaged in a bit of hangar flying, including tales of “railroad-track navigation” and “div[ing] down over depots” to figure out their location. Together they mapped out an air-marking plan to use the WPA to solve this problem and lobbied the WPA's new auditor, Corrington Gill, to approve the funds.
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Unemployed men would be put to work, and pilots would have a road map in the sky to help them find their way. The plan was for twelve-foot black-and-orange letters to be painted on the roofs of barns, factories, warehouses, and water tanks. Visible from 4,000 feet, they identified the locale, gave the north bearing, and indicated by circle, arrow, and numeral the distance and direction to the nearest airport.

Phoebe was in charge of the program, working under Jack Wynne, director of airports for the bureau; her new title was assistant to the chief of the airport section.
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Phoebe announced that the project would use women in multiple capacities to ensure its success. She requested approval to use women in local areas for liaison work. She wrote to Mr. Robert Lees of the Works Progress Administration that while “the actual painting would come under the labor of men … there is nothing in these approved projects that limits the liaison work necessary to obtain roof-top site releases to the male sex. This work could be done by women.” She suggested that special efforts be made to involve women's organizations as well as the traditional male civic clubs in the project.
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Phoebe was authorized to hire three fliers as field coordinators to work with state and local officials and WPA coordinators to set up the project. She immediately hired Louise Thaden to help her plan the project. Considerable research was required to determine the cost of materials, hours of labor involved, and general policy considerations.

Phoebe and Louise charted each state in fifteen-mile squares and designated the nearest towns to the intersecting lines as possible sites for markers. Phoebe then added “famed female flyers” Helen McCloskey and Nancy Harkness to aid Thaden as field representatives.
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Ironically, the women pilots had no airplanes. The comptroller general would not allow WPA funds
to be used for additional equipment for the project and the bureau did not have enough planes available for their own personnel. So the women traveled by bus, train, and airline when possible.
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The women worked with state and area WPA coordinators, local leaders and civic clubs like the American Legion, the Shriners, numerous women's clubs, Lions' Clubs, chambers of commerce, Rotary and Zonta Clubs, to obtain permission and workers to paint rooftops on municipal buildings, businesses, barns, and factories. Sometimes multiple rooftops on groups of small buildings were used; in rural areas where buildings were not available, they built “shelters” to support the markings. Markers were painted on open highways and painted rocks were arranged to mark the tops of mountains.
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Newsweek
observed that the women “must be expert salesmen as well as pilots. A stubborn official can usually be convinced by flying him 15 miles from the airport and letting him try to find the way back.”
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