East to the Dawn (47 page)

So then Amelia had to start looking for a plane, for her Avian was in the toy class, and the race, the first cross-country race sponsored for women alone, would be the event of the year. If she were to make a good showing, she needed something new and powerful. As aviation editor of
Cosmopolitan,
as a star of the lecture circuit, as a vice-president of TAT, she was already right up there in the public eye: she had to take the next step. She had to go for the gold.

The Vega was the hot plane of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Vegas didn't even look like other planes—they looked like speeding bullets, they were so sleek and streamlined. There were no connecting wires, no exposed controls; the fuselage, built of plywood, was curved instead of angular—the engine was covered by a cowling. And Vegas were fast. By the time Lockheed finished building the six different single models that made up the line, they were the benchmark against which all other planes were measured. It was in a Vega that Captain George Wilkins explored the Arctic and Antarctic in 1928. It was in a Vega that Arthur Goebel set a transcontinental speed record, and it was in a Vega that Frank Hawks broke Goebel's record. Everyone wanted one for its speed, but Vegas had other attributes that appealed even to the fledgling airlines, who coveted them for their passenger-carrying capability as well as the long distances they could fly without refueling.

And so on July 30, when Amelia sold her Avian to the Whittelsey Manufacturing Company and that same day took possession of a new plane, it would have been surprising, given her instinct for the newest and best, if she
hadn't
chosen a Vega. She settled on a five-passenger model that
Lockheed was using as a demonstrator in the East. Reportedly it had been flown by Charles Lindbergh, had ferried New York City mayor James J. Walker about, and was reputed to be a fine plane. Eighteen days before the race was to start, Amelia, accompanied by Lieutenant Orville Stephens, an army pilot on leave, uncomplainingly flew it west to Burbank, California, to have Lockheed fine-tune it. But when Wiley Post, then merely one of the Lockheed test pilots, a year away from fame and his round-the-world flight, took it up for a spin, he pronounced it the foulest plane he had ever flown. Lockheed officials, appalled that the Vega was so bad, impressed with Amelia's prowess at being able to fly it across the country without incident, thereupon traded Amelia a brand-new plane for hers, a five-passenger Vega with a 220-horsepower J-5A Whirlwind engine, and scrapped the original one within the year. It was a handsome gesture on the part of Lockheed, but it meant that Amelia had to get used to another new plane.

“A chance to play the game as men play it, by rules established for them as flyers, not as women” was Amelia's delighted description of the Women's Air Derby. The “Powder Puff Air Derby” was the derogatory name the male press gave the race, and it stuck, but nothing could take away the fact that the contest put women's flying on the front pages of the newspapers and captured the imagination of women all over the country. It was an epochal event, the spectacle of so many women flying across the country.

Forty women qualified to compete for the honor of winning one of the lap races put up by the towns along the route—$200 or $250—or winning a piece of the big prize, the $8,000 jackpot for the first overall finishers. Nineteen women, fourteen in the heavier plane class and six in the lighter weight class, actually started out from Clover field, Santa Monica, on August 18. Sixteen reached Cleveland nine days later.

The women all flew solo, although as the rule was finally written, it was permissible to carry another woman as mechanic as long as the mechanic had never soloed, but “no male person will be allowed to ride in this derby race.” Because long-distance flying was still so chancy, another rule stipulated that every entrant had to carry a three-day supply of food and one gallon of water for each occupant. (Ruth Nichols as a matter of habit always carried extra food and water, as did most other pilots.)

The race schedule was complicated. Leaving from Santa Monica, there were overnight stops at San Bernardino, Phoenix, El Paso, Abilene, Dallas, Wichita, St. Louis, and Columbus, with at least one and usually two timed stops at specified places every day. For the daytime stops the
rules were first in, first out; for the overnight stops it was last in, first out. By unanimous vote, the women changed the layover times twice, once for Amelia, who on the second day, landing at Yuma toppled her plane against a sand bank (in which a six-inch piece of concrete was embedded and hidden) and bent the propeller and needed double the stipulated hour and a half to fix it; and once at El Paso, where they voted to delay starting until a storm that would have penalized only the smaller planes with limited gas supplies had passed by.

By the time the women had flown the entire 2,350 miles over the Rockies, across the deserts of the Southwest, and the wheat fields of Kansas, Marvel Crosson, a fine pilot, holder of the women's altitude record, was dead, the victim of a failed engine and a defective parachute. There were other less serious accidents: Ruth Nichols struck a tractor upon landing on a runway that was being graded, destroying her plane; Pancho Barnes overshot a field and totaled hers; Bobbi Trout, the twenty-three-year-old Californian who had held the altitude record until Marvel Crosson took it away from her, drifted into Mexico and flipped her plane over upon landing, destroying her landing gear and propeller. Blanche Noyes found a fire in her plane and successfully put it out; and Opal Kunz got lost, ran out of gas, and landed in a creek bed but managed to take off without damage.

Many papers and many people had a field day reporting on the accidents, and some took it as proof that women shouldn't be flying such difficult races. Only Amelia seemed to think it significant, as she pointed out, that the sixteen women who crossed the finish line represented the highest percent of “finishers” in any cross-country race for men or women up to that time. First-place winner was Louise Thaden of Pittsburgh, and second place, Gladys O'Donnell. Amelia, flying her hot plane rather gingerly, came in third, not a bad showing, for knowing she had the fastest plane, she had loaded herself down with some of the personal baggage of her derby rivals, which started to shift around inside as she came into the Cleveland airport and necessitated her making several abortive passes before she could land. The fliers won $3,600, $1,950, and $875 respectively—excellent prize money; even Amelia's share was more than most women earned in six months.

Huge predominately female crowds waited at the fields, curious to see what female pilots looked like and what kind of planes they flew. Twenty thousand were on the field at Columbus, Ohio, the last stop before Cleveland, waiting to greet them.

The race had a stirring effect on the pilots. All, even those who hadn't had problems, had endured nine long days of dawn takeoffs, tough flying, and
dangerous landing fields. More than piloting came into play. At each airport layover they had had to see that their planes were serviced, supervise the fueling, and check out that the NAA agents who were supposed to guard their planes from the curious, who sometimes poked holes through the fabric-covered wings trying to learn what planes were all about, were indeed in place and watching. No matter how exhausted they were at each stop, they had to endure speeches and luncheons and long evenings of dressing up and socializing at the fried chicken banquets the local Chambers of Commerce and booster organizations in each town put on. The final night was black tie, so they at last got to put on the dinner dresses they had been toting across the country for the jammed-to-overflowing dinner in the ballroom of the Hotel Statler in Cleveland, which drew the affair to a close. The derby was a grueling experience—a trial by fire—and it welded the women together into a group the way a shared experience can do.

Amelia had been interested in forming a women's flying organization at least since the fall of 1927, when she had written Ruth Nichols, then better known than she, outlining the idea to try and enlist her support. They had been refining the idea ever since, and before the start of the Derby in Santa Monica, they had discussed it with others. As they talked up the idea, other pilots began to see the need also. In Cleveland those finishers who had formed such close personal bonds—among them Amelia, Ruth Nichols, Bobbi Trout, Phoebe Omlie, Louise Thaden, and Blanche Noyes—who were gathered under the bleachers watching the events at the National Air Races decided a women's flying organization was an idea whose time had come; they began to make plans.

Back in New York, Clara Studer, the head of the women's department of the Curtiss Flying Service in Valley Stream, Long Island, who wrote a weekly newsletter for women pilots, gave out the first call to organize. She rounded up the four pilots then flying out of Curtiss field: Neva Paris, Frances Marsalis, Margaret Brown, and Fay Gillis, and they signed the letter she wrote on Curtiss stationery and sent out to all the female licensed pilots in America, asking them to attend a meeting on November 2 at Curtiss field. On the appointed day twenty-six women showed up at the Curtiss hangar—one, Viola Gentry, so eager, she hobbled in on crutches, having just been discharged from the hospital; thirty-one absentees sent their enthusiastic support.

The major concern at the meeting was not what kind of organization it would be—that was fairly self-evident—but what to name it. Suggestions ran the gamut from Climbing Vines, Homing Pigeons, and Lady Buzzards to Queens High, Lady Birds, and Cloud Chasers. The issue was finally settled when Amelia's suggestion was adopted: that the name be
the final number of charter members who signed up, whatever it would be. Amelia and Neva Paris then sent letters out to the 117 licensed pilots; ninety-nine joined, so the organization became the Ninety-Nines.

They set out the basic goal: “To provide a close relationship among women pilots and to unite them in any movement that may be for their benefit or for that of aviation in general.” As one of the charter members said, summing up the general feeling, “There is something about flying that inspires sex loyalty in women.”

The fliers decided that at least for the present they would operate informally and have no president, only a national secretary, Louise Thaden, and a treasurer, Blanche Noyes, and regional representatives. At least one flier, Edna Gardner Whyte, remembers that Amelia, although having no formal title, presided over the early meetings. When, in 1932, it was decided to have a more structured organization, Amelia became the first president; Louise became vice president.

Under Amelia's direction the Ninety-Nines published a monthly magazine,
The 99 News,
chronicling news of the members; within a short time Clara Studer, who was later let go by Curtiss because of the Depression, on Amelia's suggestion was its editor. Amelia helped defray her expenses.

Having set in motion the formation of a women's flying organization, Amelia next turned her attention to living arrangements for herself. The old progression of a well-brought-up woman moving from her parents' house to her husband's house was no longer set in stone: there could be a few years solo in between. But where to spend them? Her option as an ex-social worker, to live in a settlement house, could be only a temporary solution for her, and no answer at all for others.