The Happy Bottom Riding Club
Subtitle: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes
Publisher: Random House
Published: May 23, 2000
Language: eng
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780375501241
Description: "Florence "Pancho" Barnes was a California heiress who inherited a love of flying from her grandfather, a pioneer balloonist in the Civil War. Faced with a future of domesticity and upper-crust pretensions, she ran away from her responsibilities as wife and mother to create her own life. She cruised South America. She trekked through Mexico astride a burro. She hitchhiked halfway across the United States. Then, in the late 1920's, she took to the skies, one of a handful of female pilots.

She was a barnstormer, a racer, a cross-country flier, and a Hollywood stunt pilot. She was, for a time, "the fastest woman on earth," flying the fastest civilian airplane in the world. She was an intimate of movie stars, a script doctor for the great director Erich von Stroheim, and, later in life, a drinking buddy of the supersonic jet jockey Chuck Yeager. She ran a wild and wildly successful desert watering hole known as the Happy Bottom Riding Club.

In the Happy Bottom Riding Club, Lauren Kessler presents a portrait of a woman who didn't play by women's rules, a woman of large appetities - emotional, financial, and sexual - who called herself "the greatest conversation piece that ever existed.""--BOOK JACKET.