Walking on Air (5 page)

As the weather cooled and summer changed to autumn, the Messer-Fairgrave Flying Circus moved south. At the end of October, the troupe ended up broke in St. Louis. Messer split off and headed home to Alabama; Phoebe's brother, Paul, had left a few months earlier.
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In early November, Phoebe was back in St. Paul in time to fly over Lexington Park to drop the football on the gridiron to open the Mechanic Arts-Central High game. What a thrill that must have been for the recent graduate.
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Vernon and Phoebe carried on, now once again the Phoebe Fairgrave Fliers. They played to smaller and smaller crowds, battling bad weather and mounting debt. In Cairo, Illinois, in December, the weather was bitter cold and few tickets were sold. Phoebe did handstands on the upper wing, performed a trapeze act on a bar suspended from the landing gear, and double jumped, but they took only two passengers for rides.
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They went on to Memphis after that to do a benefit at the Tri-State Fairgrounds. When bad weather grounded them, Phoebe supplemented their income with lectures and films of her work for the movies. She spoke at Fulton, Kentucky; Clarksdale, Mississippi; and in Memphis at the Princess Theater. Her posters called her “Miss Phoebe Fairgrave, Movie Actress and Aviatrix.”
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The barnstormers secured permission to store their airplane in one of the hangars at the then-abandoned World War I training base at Park Field outside Memphis and took the train back to St. Paul.
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Vernon and Phoebe were married in her parents' home on 18 February 1922. The next day, the headline on the local front page announced “Wedding to Pilot Vernon C. Omlie Comes as Surprise to St. Paul Friends.” Phoebe sounded a bit defensive when interviewed by the press, but she was clear about her priorities: “Why shouldn't I marry him? Lt. Omlie was the only aviator who didn't tell me that I was a silly kid and that I ought to have some respect for my neck.
And he was the only one who would take me up to go after that record. Now I'm sure that I have a husband who won't interfere with my professional career—and I must jump.”
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The couple left immediately for a honeymoon in Chicago where they attended the National Convention of State Fairs, hoping to obtain contracts for the coming season. They were competing against large multi-plane organizations like Ruth Law's, which could secure lucrative contracts with up-front money. Small-time operators like the Omlies obtained most of their income from taking rubes for rides. Phoebe was carrying in her pocket an urgent telegram that must have given her some considerable pleasure. It was from Ruth Law offering her a position with the Ruth Law Flying Circus. The message noted that she already had three “girl acrobats” but that she would give Phoebe preference; she asked her to name her price but included the admonition to “remember advertising you receive with us worth more than money to you.”
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The invitation was tempting, but the Omlies opted for their own show. They teamed up with Charley and Kathryn Hardin. The Fairgrave-Hardin Flying Circus specialized in parachute jumps; besides Phoebe's double parachute drop, Kathryn and Phoebe would do parallel jumps from either end of the wing. Charley would sometimes jump with five, even ten, parachutes strapped to him, opening one at a time with a free fall in between. His most spectacular stunt was to jump at night trailing burning torches.
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But 1922 turned out to be yet another summer spent trying to make ends meet. They flew exhibitions across the upper Midwest: St. Paul, La Crosse, Grand Forks, Litchfield, Minnesota. The Hardins dropped out in late summer and the Omlies gradually drifted south: Caruthersville, Steele, Kennett, and Hayti, Missouri; Stuttgart, Arkansas; Dyersburg, Union City, and Dresden, Tennessee. They finished up at the Mid-South Fair in Memphis in the fall, discouraged and broke.
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It was time to reassess their options. Two summers of barnstorming had failed to provide a viable income
. The Omlies landed in Memphis in late fall, hoping the Mid-South Fair and local exhibitions would provide their last chance to make some money to see them through the winter, but bad weather kept them grounded as their meager funds trickled away. They had to hock their clothes and luggage to the Arlington Hotel where they were staying until they could resume flying and discharge their bill.
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They talked about settling down. Vernon wanted to make a living from aviation that didn't involve stunting and daredevil flying. Like many barnstormers, his ultimate goal was to establish aviation as a legitimate business. Vernon, who had been briefly stationed at Millington's Park Field during the war, recognized the potential for a warm weather base in the center of the country, and knew that the area's reputation for being “air-minded” could accommodate a business like he envisioned.
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Air-mindedness was a kind of “air intoxication” that gripped Americans during the golden age of aviation in the early twentieth century. This romance with the endless possibilities of aviation is difficult to appreciate today when aviation is simply a transportation system. Air-mindedness embodied a sense of awe and mysticism, which gave rise to utopian hopes for the dawn of a New Age of progress and prosperity. So great was aviation's
impact on the national imagination that “Americans widely expected the airplane to foster democracy, equality and freedom,” wrote aviation historian Joseph Corn, “to improve public taste and spread culture; to purge the world of war and violence; and even to give rise to a new kind of human being.”
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The idea that somehow flying was divine, and aviation could lift people to a realm fundamentally different from the one in which they lived, literally swept its enthusiasts to flights of fancy about its potential to elevate human life to a metaphorical heaven.
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Almost since the advent of flight, certainly from the earliest days of exhibition flying, Memphis had been enthralled with aviation. Before the first decade of the twentieth century had passed, many of the most famous aviators in the world performed in the city.

Aviation in America was slow to get off the ground after the Wrights tested their flying machine on the dunes of North Carolina in 1903. Only five people witnessed their twelve-second flight, and the Wrights were secretive about what they were attempting to accomplish for fear that their ideas would be stolen before they could secure patents. As a consequence, the Wrights kept their developments shrouded in secrecy for five years, until 1908, when they demonstrated this amazing new technology to the military. Thus it was not until late in the decade that powered aircraft began to capture the public imagination.
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The first great flying carnival ever held in America launched the era of air meets and exhibition fliers at a ten-day event in Los Angeles in January 1910.
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Four months later, the National Air Meet came to Memphis. When Glenn H. Curtiss, the most famous flier of his time, took off from the back-stretch of the racetrack at the Tri-State Fairgrounds, few Memphians had seen powered flight. In Europe, by contrast, large crowds attended exhibitions and record-setting flights, particularly in France and Great Britain.
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Curtiss had established an international reputation the year before, challenging some of the world's best fliers in a speed contest for the Coupe Internationale d'Aviation, a silver cup and cash prize of $5,000 awarded by James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the
Paris Herald
, during the world's first air meet in Rheims, France, in 1909.
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Flying two laps around a 6.2-mile circuit, Curtiss beat France's Louis Bleriot (just one month after Bleriot became the first man to fly across the English Channel) by 5.8 seconds, averaging an astonishing 46.6 miles per hour.
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Curtiss followed this with another win at the Grand Prix of Brescia, Italy, in September, easily winning the 50,000-lira prize.
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At Memphis, Curtiss roared off in
Miss Memphis
, his thirty-foot wide and thirty-foot long open pusher plane. The wings were held in place by a
web of bracing struts and cross wires, the plane's single seat placed in front of the exposed motor with virtually nothing underneath. He made a circuit at thirty feet off the ground, then climbed to seventy-five feet, turned and headed for the grandstand. “As the airship sped down the ‘homestretch,'” the newspaper reported, “the thousands leaped to their feet and cheered lustily.” There were three crashes during the meet, caused by a combination of wind, fragile aircraft, and a racetrack infield too small for safe takeoffs and landings: Curtiss crashed near the bleachers knocking a spectator off his feet, Charles Willard tore off a tire as he tried to land and crashed into a fence, and J. C. Mars's plane caught a gust of wind and struck an automobile occupied by five spectators, one of whom was injured by the propeller.
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Undaunted, on the second day of the meet, Curtiss took his wife, Lena, for a plane ride in which she became the third woman in America to go up in an aircraft. “Thousands in the grandstand were brought to their feet with a vociferous roar of applause when the biplane raced past with the plucky little woman as its passenger.”
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From Memphis, Curtiss went to New York where he flew his
Albany Flyer
down the Hudson River from Albany to New York City, winning a $10,000 prize put up by the New York
World.
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The largest and most spectacular of all the flying exhibition companies in 1910 was the Moisant International Aviators, Inc.
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The Moisant brothers, Johnny and Alfred, brought their flying circus to Memphis in December 1910, after being rained out in Chattanooga.
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The company chartered seven railroad cars to carry their eight planes, a Fiat racer, two dozen mechanics, thirty roustabouts, and eight aviators: Johnny Moisant, famous for flying the English Channel one week after seeing his first plane, and fresh from winning $10,000 in the Statue of Liberty race at an average speed of 60.6 mph, two miles faster than was thought possible for his 50 hp Bleriot biplane; Roland Garros, who had recently set an altitude record of 1,500 feet in the tiny 35 hp bamboo and silk Santos-Dumont Demoiselle, the smallest flying machine in the world, earning him the nickname “the Cloud Kisser”; Rene Barrier, a tall rangy Frenchman with a law degree and nerves of steel; Rene Simon, known as the Fool Flyer, who did an inside loop purely by accident, then tried for a month before he managed to do another; and the tiny Swiss, Edmond Audemars, weighing in at less than one hundred pounds, who specialized in flying Demoiselle formations with Garros.
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Three Americans rounded out the company: former stunt parachuter Charles K. Hamilton, scarred from head to toe from his various aviation misadventures; John J. Frisbee, an ex-balloonist and parachuter; and Joseph Seymour, who was
both a flier and an auto racer whose stunt was to race his high-powered Fiat against the planes.
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Despite high winds and freezing temperatures, the fliers spared no effort to put on a good show. This indeed was “the kind of crowd pleasing that killed pilots.” Exhibition aviators took enormous risks to keep flying despite the weather. Crowds that attended these aerial circuses often grew violent when aviators declined to fly in bad weather. As a consequence, pilots would take off when they shouldn't and many were killed. They knew that the crowds came to see them flirt with death. The Moisant International Aviators emphasized this point by featuring portraits on advertising posters of their pilots who had been killed performing.
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Johnny Moisant opened the show in the Bleroit with which he had won the Statue of Liberty race, taking off “flying straight into the teeth of a gale that at times held his 60 mph Bleriot at an absolute standstill, 1,500 feet above the earth, and in a temperature below the freezing point.” He made twelve circuits of the one-mile track at the fairgrounds while the “spectators went wild with enthusiasm.”
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Three days of rain, sleet, and snow followed the opening, but once the skies cleared, the show resumed. On 7 December, Rene Barrier broke the world's speed record at Memphis. Barrier and Moisant flew head-to-head around a 16-mile course from the Tri-State Fairgrounds to and around a mark on Hen and Chickens Island, twice around a mark on Presidents Island, and back. “Business in Memphis was practically at a standstill,” as tens of thousands of Memphians watched from roofs of houses and downtown buildings and along the riverbank. Moisant's choice to climb to 7,000 feet apparently cost him the race, as Barrier chose to stay at 3,000 feet despite fog that obscured the tops of some of Memphis's taller buildings. Barrier completed the circuit in ten minutes fifty-five seconds with an average speed of 87.93 mph. Moisant took forty-three seconds longer. The flamboyant Moisant, though, had the big finish: he held his altitude until he was directly over the fairgrounds, then put his plane in a steep dive to the landing.
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Day after day, the newspaper carried the circus's exploits on the front page with giant headlines, proclaiming “INTERNATIONAL AVIATORS FULFILL EVERY PROMISE MADE TO MEMPHIS.”
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The large crowds and enthusiasm encouraged local businessmen to raise $10,000 to prolong their stay.
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Held over by popular demand, the show remained in Memphis for sixteen days, “the longest continuing flight exhibition ever held in the United States.”
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After the great success of these popular exhibitions, the infield of the former harness-racing track north of town, the North Memphis Driving Park, became the focus of a variety of aviation activities as local entrepreneurs and visiting fliers used the long flat surface of the former infield golf course as a makeshift landing field.
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Built before the turn of the century, the North Memphis Driving Park had hosted huge crowds as part of the Grand Circuit of harness racing, but such activities came to an abrupt halt in 1906 when the Tennessee General Assembly made it unlawful to bet on “any trial or contest of speed or power of endurance of man or beast.”
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Without the gambling incentive, harness racing quickly lost its popularity and cache.
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