# The Fun of It/Chapter 13

SOME FEMININE FLYERS
PERHAPS no woman flyer is more interesting than Anne Lindbergh. That is because of her own personality, the fame of her husband, and the way in which she has tackled flying.
Anne Lindbergh is an extremely gentle person, essentially modest, totally lacking mannerisms, pretenses and superiorities. She is small, yet she has a charming dignity when surrounded by people. Most notable of her physical features are her large blue eyes which look out from long lashes, often with a quizzical gleam, directly and frankly at everyone—except perhaps news photographers! Her bobbed brown hair is combed back in a natural wave from a wide intelligent forehead. Her skin is fair and clear. About her mouth a smile always seems to lurk.
Her dress is simple, like her direct manners. As pilot or passenger, she shuns affectations. Ordinary street or sport clothes suffice, except when she plans to fly in an open cockpit where cold makes flying suits more comfortable. Then, her diminutive figure engulfed in ungainly togs, she looks like a tiny teddy bear beside her six-foot-something husband.
Mrs. Lindbergh, who first soloed at the Aviation Country Club at Hicksville, Long Island, obtained her private license in 1931.
“What kind of individual is Mrs. Lindbergh, ​anyway?” a reporter asked me. “What does she do? What does she say? You know to the world she is a woman of mystery.”
Under the circumstances I could tell him noth­ing. But there are no secrets about her—just nat­ural reticences. Mrs. Lindbergh is an unusual per­son but not mysterious. She does what she wishes. She reads, writes, and drives her own car. She slips out of the house when she pleases and goes where she pleases. I do not know what games, if any, she likes or what sports.
“Do you really like to fly?”
“What actually are the sensations of flying?”
Those two questions are most often asked Mrs. Lindbergh—mostly by other women. That second query, of course, is asked of all who are associated with aviation in any capacity. As to the first, I think it will surprise many to know that even before she met Colonel Lindbergh, Anne Morrow was enough interested in flying to have decided she would herself learn to handle an airplane sometime.
Mrs. Lindbergh once said substantially this to me in California. She was quiet, sincere, simply making a statement to another woman who, like her­ self, travels mostly by air. In speaking of her own flying, she was careful to make her attitude clear. It was not to be her business, but she felt that any woman who took it up professionally could find in it the greatest interest and enjoyment.
She went on to outline what one might call “the philosophy of flying” of one who is undoubtedly to­​day America’s best-known woman—flyer and flyee combined. It is simply this, that aviation is one of the most progress-bringing occupations today. It is a new kind of transportation, and as such, is an important part of living. It does not lie so close to humanity’s primal needs as food-getting or shelter requirements, but it means a great deal in satisfac­tion and comfort and in the distribution of much that is desirable.
I first met Mrs. Lindbergh at the opening of the forty-eight-hour coast-to-coast service inaugurated by Transcontinental Air Transport when I was one of the passengers on the first-west-bound plane. Colonel Lindbergh brought the first one eastward from Los Angeles, and in Arizona changed to one I was on, piloting it to the coast. With him was Mrs. Lindbergh. Later we met again, as we found ourselves houseguests in the same hospitable Los Angeles home. I think our hosts were no more surprised to have flying guests appear from Long Island than from Long Beach twenty miles away, For aviation has shrunk the continent to less than 12 hours of speed flying, or 36 hours by regular commercial planes.
In fact, so quickly do miles slip away for air travelers that those who are accustomed to thinking in terms of flying often startle their friends who do not. I know I often have to be “whereabouts unknown” for several hours in order not to worry peo­ple who are expecting me to arrive somewhere at a given hour.
​An illustrative instance happened on a recent visit to the coast. I found one day that I had to make a speech at a dinner in a middle western city. My course by air from Los Angeles was about thir­teen hundred miles each way. Of course I flew. The morning of the day of the dinner I was thirty-six hours away by train schedule from the well-known banquet chicken. I didn’t dare let my hosts know where I was lest they despair of my arriving. As it was, I think I turned up a good two hours be­fore my engagement.
It seems to me one of the most significant char­acteristics of the Lindberghs is their habit of doing everything together. Even on the first flight of the new orange-and-black airplane, Mrs. Lindbergh went aloft. She is a willing and capable crew on long flights. I have often heard the Colonel speak of the days when he flew alone and found difficulty in doing certain things. Now he increasingly counts on her active cooperation. One of her responsibili­ties is photographing; or she may take the controls when her husband is occupied with “shooting the sun,” for instance. Indeed, when they made their transcontinental record of fourteen and three-quar­ters hours from coast to coast, Mrs. Lindbergh, us­ing a sextant, acted as navigator. On the trip to the Orient, she added the duties of radio operator to these.
Both of these people consider flying a matter of routine. When they start across the continent, each of them usually takes but a single suitcase. The ​only extras they wear are parachutes. Mrs. Lindbergh has never had to use one of these life preservers of the air, but the Colonel has four times qualified for the mythical Caterpillar Club whose membership consists solely of individuals who have made an emergency jump.
About baggage. When I flew out to California that time (there have been many transcontinental crossings since), my secretary was with me. We took much work with us, planning to conduct an itinerant office as we went. Coming from the cold of the wintry east to the summer of California with six weeks before us, we naturally had a good deal of baggage. Actually with parachutes and emergency rations, I think the indecent total was thirteen pieces.
When we left for the return journey, Colonel Lindbergh saw this mountain of baggage piled high in the car.
“And what might that be?” he asked disapprovingly.
During our explanation, I sensed he was making a comparison with the impedimenta of a typical Lindbergh journey.
He turned to his wife with a grin. “Don’t you get any foolish ideas from this,” he admonished.
But I had a large plane in which I could easily carry half a ton so I didn’t feel so guilty of violating any air tradition as I might.
In passing, I should like to say that pluck seems to me to be one of Mrs. Lindbergh’s most dominant ​characteristics. Under her gentleness lies a fine courage to meet both physical and spiritual hazards with understanding. In addition to the business of the colonel’s flying, the pair have used the air for exploration, over sea and over jungle, and have had the informal fun of “sitting down” in western desert places and making camp where they would.
For them, aviation is essentially not a “cause.” But being asked to do all kinds of things “for aviation,” as if it were a charity or a patriotic duty, is an old story for the Lindberghs. Important as aviation is in their lives, they cannot think of it in any such light. It is a profession and a present reality and quite as much a matter of fact as any other twentieth-century development.
The first transport license issued to a woman went to Phoebe Omlie. Mrs. Omlie started her flying career in 1920 as a parachute jumper and wing walker, breaking the women’s altitude record on July 10, 1921. Later, with her husband, Captain Omlie; a world war instructor who had had eleven years of flying experience, she established the largest flying school in the south, the Mid South Airways at Memphis, Tennessee.
In the early years, Mrs. Omlie did considerable flying instruction herself. Then one day a student “froze” on the controls and she wasn’t able to break him loose.
Sometimes certain types of individuals become rigid with fear and hold so tightly to nearby objects that their grasp cannot be broken except by ​knocking them unconscious. In a panic, a man may cling to the wheel of an automobile and go over a precipice unable to move a muscle. Or a drowning man fasten on his rescuer such an iron grip that both may be pulled under.
So in the old days, particularly before medical examinations were required, student pilots now and then reacted similarly. They held the controls so firmly that their instructors had no recourse but to hit them with whatever tool could be reached. Today, there may be had a mechanically opening release which acts from the pilot’s cockpit to disengage the dual controls if necessary. Then, the instructor kept with him a belaying pin of sorts for use in emergency.
Probably Mrs. Omlie was too small to reach her man in the front cockpit, and she had to sit helplessly waiting till they crashed. She still carries a scar from that accident and since then has done little or no primary instructing.
For years Mrs. Omlie has flown a Monocoupe for the company which manufactures them at Moline, Illinois. She is one of the best known pilots of this type of craft in the country, and with it has won races and established records. For this job she leaves her husband to carry on alone at Memphis for a few months each summer while she goes north.
A commercial side of the Omlie family’s activities is crop dusting, an increasingly important phase of aeronautical work with agriculture. Especially in ​the south where much has to be done to combat the boll weevil in the cotton district, airplanes have been utilized to spray poison from the air.
Mrs. Omlie also showed her skill and unselfish courage in the Mississippi Valley flood disaster which did vast damage in the regions around Memphis. Medicines and Red Cross nurses were needed in the stricken area, but bridges were down and roads submerged. In this emergency Mrs. Omlie, using her plane, carried medical supplies and food rations to numberless sufferers. Today the Omlies are continuing with their school at Memphis and have, I believe, a sound and promising business.
Another couple I happen to know who are making a living together out of aviation are William and Frances Marsalis. They conduct a school at the New York Municipal Airport. Frances Marsalis, who is known as well by her own name of Harrell, has done as much exhibition flying as any other woman active today. She has toured the country with the Curtiss Exhibition Company, stunting and doing formation flying. And if students wish a woman instructor, Mrs. Marsalis takes them on. She is a sound flyer and an experienced one.
Then there are the O’Donnells, Gladys and Lloyd, of Long Beach, California, and the Haizlips in St. Louis.
Another air husband and wife combination is Louise and Herb Thaden. He was a flyer during the war and later was associated with a Pittsburgh ​group which put out an all-metal plane that he designed. Later, he accepted a position in a technical capacity with General Aviation, a General Motors subsidiary which took over the Fokker interests. Louise Thaden demonstrates her husband’s planes and ferries company officials about. At one time she held the women’s endurance record and, as I have written, won the first derby. She held the office of National Secretary of the “99s” for two years and is reckoned one of the ablest women flyers.
Together she and I once carried out an interesting experiment showing the value of air transportation. A few weeks after her son was born, the National Air Races were held in Chicago. Of course, all pilots hope to be present wherever they are, if only for one day. The doctor had forbidden Mrs. Thaden to go.
“Why,” he said, “do you think I would allow you to jolt along in a train for eleven hours—and come back worn out?”
“How about going by air?” his patient inquired.
“How long will it take?”
“Oh, about three or four hours.”
“Well, if you let someone else fly and take it easy—and come back in two days, I might consent.”
Mrs. Thaden knew I was going from New York so she telephoned and asked me to stop by Pittsburgh and pick her up. Of course, I did and we made Chicago in three hours. The doctor admitted the trip had done her no harm when she returned. ​By the way, her son has had many hours in the air and he isn’t yet two. But so have most of the young children of air families.
One of the most picturesque of present-day women flyers is diminutive Laura Ingalls. She started to learn to fly at an eastern field, as I understand, but the instructors there discouraged her. They tried, at least. But Miss Ingalls doesn’t stay discouraged long. So she transferred her activities to another school and thence in due course emerged with a license.
Especially notable is her ability as an aerial acrobat. She established a feminine record for loops with 980 of them consecutively, doing it as an exhibition and receiving a dollar a loop. Later she tried barrel rolls and succeeded in making 714 of these which is the record for both sexes.
Some critics protest against such exhibitions. I myself cannot see what harm they do. Certainly their execution requires sturdy equipment and skill and determination on the part of the pilot. They may not point the way to progress in aviation but they demonstrate its possibilities. As for women’s doing them, that probably will be necessary for some time—for contrary to legal precedent, they (women) are considered guilty of incompetence until proved otherwise.