Walking on Air (31 page)

68
.
Commercial Appeal
, 3 October 1927.

69
. Ibid., 4 October 1927.

70
. Ibid.

71
. Ibid.

72
. The sum of 100,000 might have been a bit of an exaggeration, as that would have been about half of Memphis's total population.
Commercial Appeal
, 4 October 1927.

73
. Ibid.

74
. Crump had become convinced, at least in part by Vernon's lobbying, that Memphis needed a municipal airport. Watkins Overton, a descendant of one of Memphis' founders, Judge John Overton, was a member of the inner circle of the Crump political machine and entirely comfortable with his role as Crump's proxy. G. Wayne Dowdy,
Mr. Crump Don't Like It: Machine Politics in Memphis
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 53–54.

75
. McDonald, “Growth of Aviation,” 3.

76
. Fulbright,
Aviation in Tennessee
, 22; Paul R. Coppock, “Mid-South Memoirs: Those Daring Young Aviators,”
Commercial Appeal
, 19 September 1982.

77
. After a friend of his was killed in a Ford flying flivver in 1928, Henry Ford stopped manufacturing the small planes.
New York Evening Sun
, 7 August 1926, as cited in Corn,
Winged Gospel
, 95.

78
. Billy Sunday abandoned the tabernacle to “take up the hallelujah trail” so Don Luscombe and Clayton Folkerts “liberated” it for their purposes. John W. Underwood,
Of Monocoupes and Men: The Don Luscombe, Clayton Folkerts Story
(Glendale, CA: Heritage Press, 1973), 4–8; annotated outline for
The Omlie Story.

79
. By contrast, restored Monocoupes now sell for about $150,000 up to $225,000; see
for example, Pietsch Aircraft Sales on the web: pietschaircraft.com. Underwood,
Monocoupes and Men
, 7. Advertisement in
Moline—The Quad City Airport
, circa 1927, Quad Cities Airport archives.

80
. Velie's mother was John Deere's daughter.

81
. Underwood,
Monocoupes and Men
, 8–11.

82
. Altogether 350 Velie Monocoupes were built between 1927 and 1931. Underwood,
Monocoupes and Men
, 11, 14.

1
. In the 1930s, airplane manufacturers often hired female salespeople to demonstrate that flying was easy and safe. Phoebe was one of the earliest women to take on this role. See Corn,
The Winged Gospel
, 76–77. “Ambassadoress” used in promotional ad copy for Velie Monocoupe, Quad Cities Airport archives.

2
. Promotional ad copy, Quad Cities.

3
. Hours listed in
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, 2 July 1928;
Velie Long Life
pamphlet, Quad Cities.

4
. Official rules booklet, Commercial Airplane Reliability Tour Collection, Ford Research Center.

5
. Forden,
Ford Air Tours
, 63–65.

6
. Scharlau,
Phoebe
, 61;
Aero Digest
, September 1928, 82.

7
. Map in Forden,
Ford Air Tours
, 66.

8
. The first air navigational charts were published in June 1927, but they were “Strip Airway Maps,” covering only the main air routes. Sectional charts did not arrive until the 1930s.
www.avn.faa.gov
.

9
. Quoted in Gene Nora Jessen,
The Powder Puff Derby of 1929
(Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2002), 146.

10
.
Moline Dispatch
, 30 June 1928.

11
. Rules indicated that the first entry registered would be first ship to take off, but this rule was apparently ignored in this instance. Official rules booklet, Commercial Airplane Reliability Tour Collection, Ford Research Center.

12
. Standard instruments listed on Velie application for airworthiness certificate, Department of Commerce. Copy in Quad Cities; enameled ring described in Scharlau,
Phoebe
, 64; the ring is in the collection of the International Women's Air and Space Museum, Cleveland.

13
. In all there were twenty-seven planes on the tour including the pathfinder ship and the army's twelve-passenger plane, which brought up the rear. Several other planes joined the caravan for short legs. Forden,
Ford Air Tours
, 84–85.

14
. Telegram, 6 July 1928, Phoebe Omlie file, Ninety-Nines Museum.

15
.
Minneapolis Morning Tribune
, 25 July 1928.

16
. Crash description and analysis in Senate Doc. 319, Department of Commerce, 17 February 1931, 80.

17
.
New York Times
, 10 July 1928.

18
. Telegram quoted in
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, 10 July 1928.

19
.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, 10 July 1928;
Moline Dispatch
, 6 August 1928.

20
.
Moline Dispatch
, 6 August 1928.

21
. Underwood,
Monocoupes and Men
, 12.

22
.
Ford News
, 15 August 1928.

23
.
Ford News
, 16 July 1928;
Washington Post
, 1 July 1928.

24
. Tour events described by Forden,
Ford Air Tours
, 63–68; photograph showing Phoebe and Estelle in the front row at MGM Studios in Forden,
Ford Air Tours
, 83.

25
.
St. Paul Daily News
, 24 July 1928.

26
. Scharlau,
Phoebe
, 65.

27
. Forden,
Ford Air Tours
, 68.

28
.
Minneapolis Morning Tribune
, 25 July 1928.

29
.
Ford News
, 15 August 1928; Forden,
Ford Air Tours
, 68.

30
. Forden,
Ford Air Tours
, 201;
Detroit News
, 29 July 1928.

31
. She was the first woman to fly a light plane over the Great American Desert and the Rocky Mountains. Reprint from
Detroit News
in
Moline Dispatch
, 6 August 1928.

32
.
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, 6 August 1928.

33
. Ibid.

34
. “Given up for gone, but recovered,” annotated outline,
The Omlie Story
.

35
.
Atlanta Constitution
, 15 October 1928; telephone interview with pilot Donis B. Hamilton, Paragould, 6 January 2009.

36
. Many Monocoupes did not survive. In 2009, two Monocoupes, including a 1928 Velie Monocoupe 70 similar to
Chiggers
, were owned by Golden Age Air Museum in Bethel, Pennsylvania. One of them had been restored by a Berks County, Pennsylvania, aviation pioneer, R. Harding Breithaupt, and hung from the ceiling of his Antique Airplane Restaurant at his Dutch Colony Inn in Exeter Township. There it remained for forty years until the inn and restaurant closed in 2007 when Breithaupt donated the Monocoupe to the Golden Age Air Museum. In the spring of 2009, stunt pilot Andrew King of Virginia “portray[ed] famed female aviatrix Phoebe Omlie behind the stick of the 1928 Monocoupe 70 at the annual Flying Circus Air Show.”
http://readingeagle.com
.

37
.
Memphis Evening Appeal
, 28 February 1929. Official cause of the crash listed as a jammed aileron control wire in Senate Doc. 319, Department of Commerce, 17 February 1931, 25.

38
. NR8917,
Miss Moline
, exists today as a stripped fuselage awaiting restoration in a facility outside Wichita, Kansas. It was salvaged from a farmer's field in 1987.

39
.
Commercial Appeal
, 6 April 1928; announcement also in
Moline Dispatch
, 24 April 1929.

40
.
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, 1 July 1929. Louise Thaden set her record in a Travel Air with “souped up” Hisso engine. Louise McPhetridge Thaden,
High, Wide and Frightened
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004 [reprint of 1938]), 15–24.

41
.
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, 27 May 1929.

42
. Annotated outline,
The Omlie Story
;
Commercial Appeal
, 30 June 1929.

43
. Coppock,
Memphis Sketches
, 126;
Commercial Appeal
, 19 June 1934.

44
. Ad for Curtiss Flying Service,
Commercial Appeal
, 14 June 1929.

45
.
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, 15 June 1929.

46
. Michael Finger, “Flying a Steady Course,”
Taking Flight
(a supplement to
Memphis
magazine), 2005, 10–11.

47
.
Moline Dispatch
, 1 July 1929.

48
.
New York Times
, 30 June 1929;
Commercial Appeal
, 30 June 1929.

49
.
Moline Dispatch
, 1 July 1929.

50
.
Commercial Appeal
, 30 June 1929.

51
.
Memphis Press-Scimitar
, 1 July 1929.

52
.
Moline Dispatch
, 24 July 1929.

53
. Ibid., 23 July 1929. Such a discrepancy was apparently not that unusual. When Louise Thaden set her record, she carried two altimeters. One indicated 27,000 feet and the other nearly 29,000 feet, yet the official barograph recorded a maximum of 20,200 feet. Thaden,
High, Wide and Frightened
, 22–24.

54
.
Moline Dispatch
, 24 July 1929.

55
. Ibid., 19 July 1929.

56
. Ibid. Des Moines to Hastings is roughly 300 miles, to Manhattan 300 miles, to Dodge City 550 miles, to Albany about 1,200 miles. She flew the distance in less than twelve hours.
Moline Dispatch
, 22 July 1929.

57
. The other Monocoupe pilots took first, second, and third against “the Middlewest's foremost fliers” in the light plane races.
Moline Dispatch
, 22 July 1929.

58
. A meet in Los Angeles in 1928, attended by an estimated 300,000 people, launched the era of the National Air Races and established their format: a ten-day program of races, exhibits, and stunts. In 1929, the races moved to the newly completed Municipal Airport at Cleveland. Over the next ten years, most of the National Air Races were hosted by Cleveland, except for 1930 in Chicago and 1933 and 1936 in Los Angeles. “The National Air Races and Aeronautical Exposition,”
Aero Digest
, September 1929, 55–56, 120; Henderson Collection, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland.

59
. Quoted in Susan Butler,
East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 228.

60
. Louise Thaden quoted in Corn,
Winged Gospel
, 75.

61
. Ruth Elder quoted in
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, 18 August 1929.

62
. Rasche quoted in Valerie Moolman,
Women Aloft
(Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1981), 13.

63
.
New York Times
, 12 July 1929, quoted in Butler,
East to the Dawn
, 229; Earhart quote in “Flying Clubs,”
Time
, 24 June 1929.

64
. Lap prizes were usually between $200 and $250 each. “The complete purse involved in this race is one of the richest in the history of aviation,” noted “The National Air Races and Aeronautical Exposition,”
Aero Digest
, September 1929, 56; Planck,
Women with Wings
, 81.

65
. There were also five other shorter races set to converge on Cleveland: the All-Ohio Derby, Rim-of-Ohio Derby, races from Philadelphia, Oakland, California, and the Canadian Derby from Toronto. “The National Air Races and Aeronautical Exposition,”
Aero Digest
, September 1929, 56.

66
. In 1929, the 776-foot-long Zeppelin traveled around the world at an average speed of 70 miles per hour. R. G. Grant,
Flight: The Complete History
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 2007), 121.

67
. Total pilots' licenses issued and renewed by the Department of Commerce in 1929 was 9,824. United States Department of Commerce, Aeronautics Branch,
Annual Report of the Director of Aeronautics to the Secretary of Commerce for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1929
(Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929), 8; Kathleen Brooks-Pazmany,
United States Women in Aviation 1919–1929
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 34; Komons,
Bonfires to Beacons
, 26.

68
. Brooks-Pazmany,
Women in Aviation
, 38.

69
. Jessen,
Powder Puff Derby
, 26.

70
. Thaden,
High, Wide and Frightened
, 132.

71
. Earhart,
The Fun of It
, 154.

72
. Thaden held the altitude record for less than six months; Marvel Crossen topped 23,996 feet on 28 May 1929. Margaret Whitman Blair,
The Roaring 20: The First Cross-Country Air Race for Women
(Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006), 29.

73
. Brooks-Pazmany,
Women in Aviation
, 37–39.

74
. Jessen,
Powder Puff Derby
, 44–47; Brooks-Pazmany,
Women in Aviation
, 39–44.

75
. Brooks-Pazmany,
Women in Aviation
, 35.

76
. Elinor Smith,
Aviatrix
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 100–101.

77
. Phoebe's Monocoupe had a closed cockpit. So did Amelia Earhart's Vega and Edith Foltz's Eagle Rock Bullet.