Walking on Air (24 page)

Sometime in 1964, Phoebe left Memphis on what would become a seven-year journey during which she resided in at least a dozen different locations.
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The record is blank until the spring of 1967. On 10 July of that year, the women's-page columnist for the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, Mary E., declared the day “Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie day.” She recorded the story of forty-six years earlier when “a skinny little 18-year-old climbed out on the wing of a big red Curtiss and dropped 15,200 feet to make a new world's record for women.” The article recapped Phoebe's colorful career through World War II.
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In a follow-up column two weeks later, Mary E. wrote that Phoebe had long since dropped out of sight, and somebody suggested she may have died. But a reporter in the newspaper's Washington bureau had located her living in the Capitol, where she had apparently gone to lobby for her paramount cause: state control of education. “Mrs. Omlie has jumped, minus her parachute, into the states-versus-federal government wild blue yonder,” Mary wrote. Calling herself a crusader, Phoebe indicated that she had been working with “small groups in the Middle West and Southern states. These are solid citizens who … dislike federal controls. Now our
greatest fears have become reality. So last fall we concluded it was time for a Constitutional amendment, one that will simply clarify the Constitution.”
¹⁹

The amendment she proposed would codify state and local control of schools. Each state, it read, shall have “complete, absolute, direct and indirect control of all schools and training” within its borders. Secondly, “All federal educational and training appropriations funded by the Congress shall be allocated, as the states' agreed-upon formula—per student, direct to the states and local school districts without any kind of federal control, except for reports on the expenditures.” Section three mandated that “No more than one-half of one percent of all funds for education and training appropriated by the US Congress shall be used for administration and State-Federal Relations in any department of the federal government.”
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“I think this is going to save our country,” Phoebe declared. “The states are closer to the people; they understand their problems.”
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It should be noted that this whole debate was taking place within the context of the country's turmoil over civil rights, desegregation, and efforts to ensure racial balance within the schools. “States rights” and “local control” functioned as euphemisms for states' desires to maintain segregation. A constitutional amendment, in this context, was an attempted end run around legislative and judicial enforcement of civil rights.

While in Washington, Phoebe sought the assistance of Senator Everett Dirksen to press for “the enactment of a Constitutional Amendment that would clearly define the powers of the States and local School Districts. It is my opinion that drastic actions must be taken
now
to quell the unrest that exists in our country today. We are committed to shed the blood of our youth around the world to provide self-determination to everyone, yet, here at home our present leaders are gradually whittling away at all pretense of self-determination in our educational system.” Dirksen's reply reminded her that the passage of an amendment required a two-thirds vote by the Senate, which, he said, would be unlikely given the “rather close vote” on the education bill.
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The vote to which Dirksen referred was the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), passed in 1965, which funded primary and secondary education. Opposition to federal aid to the schools was based primarily on the contention that federal aid meant federal control. To mollify these critics, the act as passed explicitly stated that there was to be no federal control over the curriculum, selection of books, or personnel of any school aided by the ESEA. After another bitter partisan battle in 1966, Congress added language prohibiting
the federal government from requiring the transfer of students or teachers to overcome racial imbalance, but left intact the government's authority to withhold federal funds from schools that did not comply with the non-discrimination requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Again, during another contentious reauthorization process in 1967, though Congress did not directly address the racial issue, it did rewrite some provisions to expressly give most of the control for the dispersal of funds to state education agencies.
²³

Phoebe had been following these developments closely, even campaigning for the approval of the ESEA and the similar Vocational Education Act of 1963, which authorized a major expansion and redirection of vocational education.
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But, as she complained in numerous letters over the years, “The Acts were passed, but the ink on the Presidents' [
sic
] signature was hardly dry before ‘guidelines' were issued by HEW. First, to apply only in the South, using the double-school system as an excuse, but with the full intention of eventually covering the entire country.”
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Again, the primary issue here was school desegregation. The guidelines referenced included the mandate for “categorical aid” geared primarily to upgrade the education of low-income pupils and the provision, based upon Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that no federal funds would be expended in support of segregated schools. These limitations imposed upon the separate states' total control of the schools within their borders amounted to, in Phoebe's way of thinking, Soviet-style “thought-control.”
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Phoebe left Washington sometime after writing Dirksen in mid-1967. Aviation journalist H. Glenn Buffington gathered a stream of forwarded and returned letters to various friends and acquaintances of Phoebe's that help to account for her wanderings over the next few years. After he wrote to her in Washington seeking her permission to publish an article about her, Phoebe responded from Montgomery, Alabama, several months later, but when he tried again to reach her there, his letter was returned with a note by the occupant, Lillian Fields, saying that Phoebe had left Montgomery, and was heading for Florida. She supplied the Florida address but noted that she felt sure Phoebe was no longer there.
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Phoebe apparently caught a bus to Florida where she worked as a companion for an elderly woman for a time in Jacksonville before relocating to the home of an old friend, Marie Ryan in Silver Springs. “She arrived in Silver Springs all bedraggled and worn out from bus travel,” reported one friend to another. “Her stay there was brief. Miss Ryan was, herself, old and ill. While there, Phoebe received
money and clothes from her friend in Miami. She would not accept the money, but did take the clothes.”
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Phoebe spent some time during the summer in Atlanta, then headed north to visit an old acquaintance, Richard Cornell, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Meanwhile, Buffington exchanged letters with Percy McDonald in early 1969, asking if he had any information about her whereabouts. McDonald replied that he didn't know where Phoebe was, adding:

Phoebe had accumulated some money and left a very satisfactory job in Washington to come down here and against advice of her friends bought a plantation and lost every cent. She has been practically destitute every [
sic
] since that time. The last time I heard anything about her was from a lawyer in Jacksonville, Florida who wanted to hire her for a companson [
sic
] for his mother. When I knew Phoebe she was OK, and I told him I had not heard from her in quite a number of years. I do not know whether she secured the job or not.
²⁹

In fact, by that time Phoebe had already moved on. She placed an ad in the
Chicago Tribune:
“Situations Wanted-Women. Companion to elderly lady. I will live in, drive, light housework, travel. $50 a week.” She worked for three months as a companion in Chicago, then moved to Cleveland, living presumably in the home of a friend for a time and then for several months at the Quad Hall Hotel in the city.
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Buffington finally caught up with her there. She replied to him:

I am pretty much on-the-go, still fighting for a more practical approach in starting the youth of America toward a goal that can bring them contentment and happiness. It has been a long, hard, rough and rugged road, but I think the people are beginning to see the futility of listening to the professors and young “diploma-holders” and their philosophies. Their thinking that money will solve everything just is NOT true. If we used the funds already appropriated to train people, instead of for high-salaried personnel in the federal government, we would have an entirely different outlook from our youth. I have spent the 1960's talking with hundreds of people representing all sections of the country, and feel that I really know how they think. They are fed-up!!! … The great mistake that many of the so-called leaders make is that, people are “dumb.” They are years ahead of the leaders. Well, anyway, there is a beginning of a little light on the horizon. Thank you again for remembering me.
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After he heard from her, Buffington contacted Glenn Messer in Birmingham, telling him he had found Phoebe and urging her old friend to contact her. “We believe Phoebe has been having a rather rough time of it lately, so I imagine she would be happy to hear from some of her old-time friends.”
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At about the same time, Louise Thaden flew into Memphis asking about Phoebe. The
Press-Scimitar's
aviation writer, Orville Hancock, wrote that the latest word received from Phoebe was from Florida, but she had reportedly moved to California. “If anyone knows Phoebe Omlie's whereabouts, the aviation community would like to know how to reach her.”
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Phoebe later contacted Louise from Cleveland, saying she'd been busy working on political issues for free, and would stop now and then to take odd jobs until she had saved enough to start again. She was meeting lots of folks, she said, who were urging her to write about these issues. She had come to Ohio “because there has been so many ‘school bond' failures. The people are just fed up with the squandering and waste in education funds that have already been appropriated.”
³⁴

While she had been traveling about, Phoebe told Buffington, she had been working on a book, but had been unable to find a publisher who would contract to market it “the way I think it should be handled, a direct-mail distribution.”
³⁵
She initially called her book
S.O.S.: Save Our Schools from Federal Control
, but changed the title to
The Silent Majority Speaks Out
, after Nixon's characterization of patriotic Americans who did not join in public demonstrations. Based upon her “personal contacts with thousands of people throughout the entire country during the past ten years and from actual experiences of the author,” the book represented the culmination of her quest.

“When I resigned from a federal government job in Washington,” she wrote in her foreword, “I willingly gave up my future security to help alert the American people to the threat of the federal government to brain-wash the youth of the country through the public schools. Hundreds of letters poured in from every State in the country thanking me for trying to alert the people to what was taking place.”
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Her “introductory” set the tone for the work. “This book will concentrate on why it is necessary that the people take a good look at the bureaucrats in Washington, how they want to control the schools in our country, to ‘brain-wash' the youth to accept federally-controlled ideologies and philosophies in every phase of government.”
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In addition to taking on the “ultra-liberals” and “intellectual morons” who misled people about the need for a college education at the cost of vocational training, she also raised alarms about “foreign ideologies” infiltrating
education at all levels and posited that “much of the trouble in the schools today is caused by the gradual breakdown of the homes, which has been engineered psychologically by those who are out to capture the country from within.”
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In the ten chapters of her manifesto, she also critiqued Social Security, the Alliance for Progress, government funding of the transportation system, as well as the “one-worlders” and the United Nations. All of these were part of a conspiracy to crush independence and individualism, leading to “the conquering of the minds of the masses.”
³⁹

Throughout the manuscript, she defined the development of aviation as the epitome of rugged individualism and entrepreneurship, and its takeover by the federal bureaucracy as the forerunner of the decline and fall of America. Her concern about excessive regulation of civil aviation, combined with her distaste for forced racial integration in the schools, had evolved, in the overheated anticommunism climate of the period, into an obsession with looming federal control over every aspect of American life.

Her manuscript concluded with a proposal for a Constitutional Convention to create a new Bill of Rights that included provisions to ensure unfettered state control of schools, welfare programs, and voter requirements; a balanced federal budget; limits on all taxes to 25 percent of the Gross National Product and the return of 10 percent of all income taxes to the states. Congress members would be forbidden to hold outside employment or take expense-paid junkets; all Supreme Court decisions would be limited to “Constitutional issues (no legislative actions).” Federal civil service retirement was to be placed under the rules and regulations of Social Security and “the United States shall remain on the existing system of measurements” (a reference to her continued hostility to the adoption of the nautical mile).
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