Walking on Air (27 page)

After numerous attempts over several years to reach the appropriate authorities in the FAA to address the problem, the question of the name is about to become moot. A new control tower is under construction at Memphis International Airport, scheduled to be dedicated in 2011. The Omlie Tower will be destroyed. According to the FAA, since the Omlie name had been affixed by law to the old tower, it could not legally be transferred to the new tower. At the same time, the FAA's Southern Regional administrator Doug Murphy emphasized his agency's desire to officially recognize Phoebe's “extraordinary career and contributions to aviation in Memphis and the nation.” When the new tower opened, Murphy proposed to unveil a “prominent, permanent display” in the main lobby of the airport.
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This matter is still pending.

In the interim, in November 2008, Phoebe was officially inducted into the Tennessee Aviation Hall of Fame.
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Her commemorative plaque immortalizes the words of James Kacarides in deftly summarizing her career: “Her place in the pages of aviation history is unchallenged. A woman of daring, courage, intelligence and devotion to the ‘air age,' she ranks as one of the greatest participants in American progress.”
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Phoebe Omlie came into my life in 1994
. I had no sooner begun my new job as assistant professor of history at the University of Memphis when a colleague, who had noted from my resume that I had a private pilot's license as well as an abiding interest in the history of women, told me that the control tower at Memphis International Airport had been named for a woman.

I was just finishing up a very large project, a biography of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, to which I had devoted nearly ten years of graduate and postgraduate work. Looking for a smaller project with which to take a breather from the heavy lifting of academic study, I found this one intriguing: a nice local story to produce a small, engaging book.

As I began to look for information on Phoebe, I found newspaper clippings in the Memphis Public Library covering, for the most part, her early barnstorming days, a bit of information about some work in government during the New Deal, and her death in Indianapolis in 1975. The Memphis Airport had a few items in a tiny museum under the stairs in the main terminal: some yellowed newspaper clippings, a couple of trophies, the leather bit she held in her teeth as she twirled in the slipstream of a plane. There
was no indication that the control tower was named for her, and no one seemed to know anything about it. The Pink Palace Museum had a small display as well: more yellowed clippings, a couple of trophies, a small model airplane, her pilot's license and that of her husband, Vernon. Intriguing tidbits to be sure, but hardly the stuff of biography.

I posted a query on an internet listserv for historians interested in women in the military and other nontraditional occupations. I received a few responses from scholars suggesting I check archives in several areas of the country. A few listed publications that might be helpful. Several months after the posting, I got a telephone call from a screenwriter, Patrick Pidgeon, who hoped to make a movie about her life. After being assured that my project would not compete with his, he generously offered to share his research with me. His gift of a large spiral-bound folder filled with photocopies provided me with a very useful chronology and overview of Phoebe's accomplishments. The documents were a revelation. This was not a small, local story. This was the story of a woman of spirit, courage, and national importance.

I traveled to Minnesota where Phoebe began her aviation career. The Minneapolis Public Library had some clippings and a handful of photographs. The Minnesota Historical Society supplied some pages from her high school yearbook. Phoebe had been inducted into the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame in 1988. I visited the facility and photographed the plaque, but my research was not much enhanced. From there I headed for the Quad Cities (Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa; Moline and Rock Island, Illinois) in search of records from the Mono Aircraft Company. From what I had learned, Phoebe was a sales representative for the company when she took up air racing in their signature Monocoupe in the late 1920s. I figured if I could find the company records, I would learn a bit more about Phoebe and her connection with them. At the Quad Cities airport, decorated with a restored Monocoupe suspended from the ceiling, I was granted access to some “old papers” in the basement, where I found some company files, specifications, advertising copy, and the like. Between those records and a trip to the library to peruse the microfilm of the
Moline Dispatch
for the years Phoebe was active locally, I got a pretty good handle on Phoebe's activities with the Mono-Aircraft Corporation. Things were looking up.

With the information I'd gathered, I was able to piece together a brief overview of her life. While it lacked scholarly authority, it was liberally embellished with descriptions of airborne stunts, serious crack-ups, and pithy quotes. In an effort to find people who had once known her or known of
her, I offered free talks to any local group that would have me. At one such talk, a woman came forward with a battered pewter loving cup. On the side was etched: “Presented to PHOEBE FAIRGRAVE for Women's Record Parachute Jump by Grafton Aero Club.” She also had a small tattered photograph album containing snapshots, some of which included Phoebe. She told me the story of acquiring these items: her husband had once owned a small airstrip in Mississippi, and one day a man stopped by, asking $75 for the items. Her husband, she said, wasn't interested but she was, because it had to do with a woman. She paid the money and put the items on her mantle where they had been ever since. She had not known who the woman was, she said, until she saw the notice about my talk on Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie. Now she wanted me to have them.

Of course I loved having these items, and I had found some very interesting materials during my travels, but I was getting pretty discouraged with the project. Doing the research was like trying to put together a giant jigsaw puzzle. A piece of sky here, a bit of personal information there, a few notices of her accomplishments. This puzzle had such a large number of pieces missing that I didn't think I'd ever fill in enough blanks to uncover enough of her life's story to tell. The pieces were tantalizing indeed, but far too few. And much of what I did have was not the stuff of “legitimate” history. Newspaper clippings, often undated and unattributed, were at best unreliable and often in conflict with each other over the specifics. Most important, because of the circumstances of her death, her personal effects had apparently vanished. Periodically over the years I put the project aside, convinced that I would never be able to complete it.

I worked on other projects. One of them was for a series on public intellectuals published by the University Press of Mississippi. When the director Seetha Srinivasan asked me to consider doing a second book for the series I demurred, saying that I was immersed in another project. When she asked about it, I shared a handful of Phoebe stories. She said that her press would be very interested in publishing the biography and offered to send me a contract. I emphasized everything that I didn't know, but she urged me to tell what I could, reminding me that if I didn't tell the story, however incomplete, it would be lost to history. So I agreed to sign a contract, as long as they were willing to wait what could be a long while.

I had learned that Phoebe was a founding member of the Ninety-Nines, an international organization of women pilots. In 1999, a museum dedicated to the Ninety-Nines opened at the Oklahoma City airport. I immediately contacted them about their archives. They stressed that their primary
focus was on the museum, but I was welcome to come check out what they had. My five-day stay in Oklahoma City yielded disappointingly little—a few clippings, a couple of photographs, some articles from aviation publications. I also found a few letters referring to a manuscript about Phoebe composed by Gene Slack Scharlau. The exchange made it clear that she had tried to get it published but had died before that happened. One of her letters was to John McWhorter, an attorney in Memphis, requesting his help in seeking a publisher. I looked him up when I got home. McWhorter had a couple of cardboard boxes of things he said he recovered when he acquired a house in Memphis at auction. These materials had been in the attic. He couldn't remember precisely where the house was. He mentioned vaguely having had more materials at one time but had given them away to people who inquired. And he promptly gave these two boxes to me. One contained a hand-made rug with a wing design in the center and the words
Rancho Fairom
. The other contained many old clippings, undated, unattributed, yellow and crumbling. There was also a yearbook from Vernon's military aviation training at Ellington Field in Texas, a small disintegrating photograph album, a couple of logbooks, some letters of condolence addressed to Phoebe on the occasion of Vernon's death, and his 1930 pilot's license signed by Orville Wright. Great stuff, all of it adding a few more pieces to the puzzle.

When I asked him about Scharlau's manuscript, McWhorter sent me back to one of my colleagues, Dr. Charles Crawford. McWhorter had asked him for an opinion as to its potential for publication. After locating it in his files, Dr. Crawford passed the manuscript to me. He had not recommended its publication, citing concerns about its lack of documentation. The piece was apparently written by someone who knew Phoebe many years before. I later learned that Gene Slack had been an aviation writer for the
Nashville Tennessean
in the 1930s and 1940s. The style of the biography was chatty and anecdotal and supplied Phoebe's internal thoughts and invented dialogue. I use some of this material in the story, mostly for information that seemed credible and was unavailable to me elsewhere.

A trip to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidential library in Hyde Park, New York, yielded a handful of letters between Phoebe, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Molly Dewson, head of the Democratic National Committee's Women's Division, concerning Phoebe's appointments to a series of aviation-related positions in the federal government. Phoebe had worked in Washington, with a few breaks, from 1933 to 1952. I needed to find out what she did.

I obtained Phoebe's death certificate from Indiana, which provided her social security number, from which I was able to obtain a copy of her federal personnel file. These records helped me navigate through her employment history, including her titles, pay grades, and years of service. But they didn't reveal what she did in those positions. A trip to the National Archives yielded a bit more information. Unfortunately, the entities for which she worked had been repeatedly reorganized and folded into other agencies. None of the finding aids nor the archivists I met had any information about these organizations' files. When I met with the fifth archivist, one who specialized in transportation records at College Park, he surprised me by saying he had heard of Phoebe Omlie. He said he might be able to locate something for me, surmising that they could be in records someone had recently used and hence would be sitting in a holding area waiting to be refiled. After a couple hours, he brought me a folder. It had come from the Amelia Earhart files. But tucked inside were carbons of letters detailing Phoebe's tours of aircraft manufacturers and her survey of the federal airways system in 1934—a few more pieces of the puzzle aimed toward understanding her work in government.

I took a trip to Dearborn and the Ford Museum to look at the records of the Ford Reliability Air Tours, and to Cleveland, the scene of her air-race triumphs. The Ford Museum had documentation about the Air Tours and a terrific photograph of Phoebe at the end of her tour in 1928. More records at the Case Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland helped me clear up some confusion and inconsistencies in the press coverage regarding Phoebe's other races.

A chance meeting at a reception put me in contact with a young woman from Como, Mississippi, where Phoebe had retired. Meg Bartlett told me her husband's family had deep roots in the area. Moreover, her husband's father had worked with Phoebe in Washington and may have influenced her decision to settle there. We visited the site of Phoebe's ranch, and I traced her property in the county records. A series of misfortunes left Phoebe, at the end of 1960, essentially broke. And there the trail ended. Fifteen years of Phoebe's later years remained unaccounted for, and she was no longer a celebrity I could trace through newspaper coverage.

At an aviation writers' conference in Memphis, I was introduced to an experienced genealogist who offered to help me find Phoebe's family. With her help, I found one of Phoebe's nieces and two grandnieces. From them I learned lots of family gossip, but it was clear that I knew more about Phoebe
than her relatives did. I was happy to share with them some pieces I'd written and some photographs, but for all practical purposes, they could add little to my research.

Over the years, every six months or so, my editor at the University Press of Mississippi would send me a gentle inquiry. I always answered the same: I was very busy with other responsibilities, but I had not abandoned the project; I had found some more information, but not nearly enough, and I still didn't know if I would be able to complete the biography.

I took a sabbatical in the fall of 2007. I would dedicate this time to one last push to find out about her last years. If I failed, I'd either abandon the project or write the biography with an explanation that this was all I knew and would likely ever know about the life of Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie. I started writing the manuscript in that manner even as I pressed on with my investigation.

Despite the strong possibility of disappointment, I decided to return to the Ninety-Nines Museum in Oklahoma City. Perhaps they had gotten better organized by now, and this time I would try to look at files of other fliers who might have stayed in touch with Phoebe over those later years. After about a week in the archives, I thought I had gotten about all I could. I had found more information in her file, and some tidbits in others'. Nearing the end of my stay, I learned that the records of aviation journalist H. Glenn Buffington had been donated to the museum. Buffington was the author of several of the articles about women fliers that I'd collected, including a few about Phoebe. Although they had not yet been organized, I was allowed to see the records, and they provided the final key I needed.