Before Amelia (41 page)

The Curtiss machine went up easily, circled the fairgrounds, then, as it prepared to land, the tip of a wing struck the limb of a tree in the center of the racetrack enclosure. The machine fell to the ground, turning turtle, pinning the pilot underneath. Her skull was crushed, there were several serious breaks, and Julia died a few minutes after reaching the hospital, never regaining consciousness.

Marjorie Stinson, who researched the question of Julia's nationality, wrote of the crash: “Her plane was gathered up and shipped to the factory, but Mrs. Clark's remains did not fair so well. She was abandoned at the morgue, with a broken skull, shoulder and thigh, dead, unclaimed.” When word arrived from her mother, the body was taken to the Metcalf undertaking establishment and prepared for shipment. On the evening of June 19 her body was shipped to Denver on orders from H. C. Ulen, whose company had employed Julia in earlier years in Chicago. Ulen paid the expenses Julia had incurred in Springfield and accompanied the body to Kansas City, where another Ulen employee took over for the journey to Denver. Julia's husband remained in Ironton. According to the
State Regmster,
H. C. Ulen spoke very highly of the deceased, who “had been deserted by her friends in the aviation world.”

Julia's career ended before she debuted. Her proficiency as a flier is questionable—we cannot really judge. There is much we don't know about her life, but one distinction is hers, a dubious one: She was the first woman pilot in America killed in an aeroplane crash. Poor Julia! Two weeks later, Harriet Quimby became the second woman pilot to die in a crash.

Bernetta Adams Miller followed Katherine Stinson to become the fifth American woman to win a pilot's license. Born in Canton, Ohio, on January 11, 1886, Bernetta was graduated from Genesee (New York) Normal School. She tried to establish a career in business but gave it up for flying.

Bernetta A. Miller learned to fly at the Moisant Aviation School on Long Island. Here she is standing in front of a Moisant monoplane.
CRADLE OF AVIATION MUSEUM, GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

In the summer of 1912 she enrolled at the Moisant School in Mineola, on Long Island, New York, where Shakir S. Jerwan was the instructor. For the next two months and three days, she followed the same course of instruction under Jerwan's tutelage as Quimby and Moisant had before her: first, grass–cutting in the single–seater machine with only verbal comments, gradually progressing to short straightaway hops. Bernetta wrote years later that she came closer to death in the grass–cutting stage than when flying thousands of feet in the air or in landing.

Apparently, the chief construction mechanic had been working on the machine and had whittled away part of the block that kept the machine from taking to the air. Suddenly a surprised Bernetta was in the air, before hitting the ground. It could have been serious, but she was only shaken up. When she had mastered control sufficiently, she advanced to a fifty-horsepower Gnome engine Moisant monoplane, on which she practiced for a month for her pilot's tests.

By early September she was ready, but the weather was uncooperative. Finally, on September 16 she completed her tests in a manner that was pure Bernetta, before Aero Club observers club secretary Delano and Lieutenant Gustave Salinas of the Mexican Army. It was a night flight. The
Sun
described her flight as something out of the ordinary: “Moon Blinks to See Girl Win Air License.” Her competency was apparent in the confident way she took off—holding steady in choppy air—and headed skyward fifteen hundred feet, as required before turning downward to perform ten figure eights around flags held by observers. Writing later about her test, Bernetta said the darkening sky and evening mist made distinguishing the markers difficult. When it was time to land, she flew over the landing area several times, unable to see the marker. Fortunately, the observers on the ground realized her predicament and raised a white sheet so she could land “in proper order.” The
Sun
congratulated her on landing but twenty feet from the designated spot.

Following measurements of the landing, the sealed barograph was taken for examination and ten days later “the little leather booklet” reached her, the official proof that she was the 173rd to receive the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale aviator's license. Bernetta always counted herself the third woman in America to win it, unaware of Julia Clark and Katherine Stinson, who preceded her.

Learning to fly an aeroplane proved easier for Bernetta than finding the right costume for flying. The shops offered nothing, she told journalist Elizabeth Hiatt Gregory years later, that would individualize a person. Consequently, she dreamed up her own costume: a hunting suit, which included boots, of course, with a hat especially designed to stay on the head. The costume seemed all right then, but “now it is a scream.”

As a member of a very select group of women, Bernetta dreamed of a career in aviation and was disappointed when it failed to develop. She was not interested in exhibition flying, being much too rational to indulge in the acrobatic activities that were part of flying at that time. She signed on as a Moisant flier and flew regularly to gain experience, but she eschewed the carnival aspect of exhibitions.

In October, Bernetta was chosen to demonstrate the Moisant monoplane to the government in College Park, Maryland, where the Army Signal Corps had a training school. She had no illusions about her choice. Many people considered the monoplane to be particularly dangerous and difficult to fly because of the prominent success of the Wright and Curtiss biplane models. Bernetta knew the Moisant Company hoped she could overcome some of the fears by showing “if a mere woman could learn to fly one, so surely could a man.”

Recalling her experience, Bernetta wrote that her arrival at College Park came at a bad time. A fatal crash the day before, its cause unknown, made the army pilots, Henry “Hap” Arnold among them, greet her with tolerant skepticism and no real enthusiasm. Their feeling was: “It was bad enough to shovel up a man; they did not welcome the idea of having to shovel up a woman.”

Harold Kantner, another Moisant pilot, was also at College Park with Bernetta. A careful pilot, not given to stunting, he was killed later in an aeroplane accident. Kantner had made it clear to Bernetta that he did not approve of women's flying, which did not contribute to the venture of demonstrating the monoplane. Bernetta readily admitted that Kantner was a better aviator than she—he was a year ahead of her—and, more important, he was an excellent mechanic.

During the week at College Park, Bernetta seemed to get all the publicity, which didn't help relations with Kantner, although he made a memorable flight from the airfield to Washington, D.C., and returned. She remembered being questioned endlessly by reporters at the Willard Hotel: “Why do you want to fly?” Another reporter studied her at a distance for hours, behavior that translated to Bernetta as “how queer journalists thought aviators were.”

Orville Wright had come to College Park to investigate the Wright aeroplane crash. A date was arranged to introduce Bernetta to him. On that day one of the pilots had taken up one of the rebuilt Wright biplanes and was stunting with it, instead of giving it a shakedown flight, when Wright appeared on the scene. Bernetta recalled, “A madder man I had never seen as he made a rush from the field. It was not time for introductions.” She made a number of flights during the week but kept no log. While none of the flights was far or outstanding, “at least there were no accidents.” Unlike aeroplanes the army pilots flew, the Moisant monoplane landed with full power, because there was no way to regulate it. Wing loadings were probably never more than three or four pounds to the square foot, and the pilots knew nothing of aerodynamics.

Bernetta was told to try landing with what is known today as a “dead stick.” A briefing might have helped first. The sensation of gliding through the air without power was eerie; the wind whistling through the wire, uncanny, For a pilot who had never made a bad landing, this time it was bumpy—fortunately, on bicycle tires.

Adding to Bernetta's discomfort, the field at College Park was not a suitable flying field. The takeoff and landing area had woods on one side of the uneven field, while train tracks, telegraph poles, and wires bordered the other. There were no nearby emergency landing spots, other than swampy earth with stumps of trees still standing, which were not always visible from the air. The field was a far cry from the Mineola site on Long Island.

The Moisant demonstration failed to change the government's opinion on aeroplanes. Biplanes remained the choice for the infant flying service. However, Bernetta enjoyed her visit, found Washington people friendly, and regretted later that she had not agreed to fly over Washington during a suffrage parade. Uncertain of her bearings in a strange landscape—“geography has such a way of changing when one is in the air”—and realizing she was inexperienced, really a fledgling flier, she declined the offer to be the first woman to fly over Washington. “Sensible” was the word for Bernetta.

Returning to Long Island, she continued to practice, hoping to extend the women's altitude record. On January 20, just ahead of a fierce winter storm rolling in from the west, she reached eighteen hundred feet, the cold so intense that she had just decided to come down when the dome of the oil register on her machine cracked with a sharp bang. At once, oil spattered her face, almost blinding her. Acting quickly, she turned off her motor and volplaned to the ground, landing within yards of where she went up. The
New York Herald,
the only paper to mention the event, wrote: “She has postponed her next altitude flight until warm weather.”

Little is known of Bernetta's activities in the next several years. An undated special to the
New York Herald
indicated movies would be made of her flying the Moisant monoplane, which would be used to instruct future aerial pupils before they go up. Apparently she flew for her own sport for a while before giving it up completely.

An unidentified newspaper clipping in 1913 related her thoughts under the heading: “Woman Aviator Regrets It.” The article quoted Bernetta's belief that “aviation is dead.” Citing the lack of government interest or assistance and the misplaced emphasis on getting rich rather than love of the sport or the idea of doing anything for posterity, the article was a painful comment from a serious flier. Pointing to European countries that were doing wonders, she noted they were not trying to make money out of aviation. The governments were paying the toll, “but not for spectacular purposes.” They were experimenting and giving assistance. Miller hated to see the country “that made flying possible allow other nations to excel us in its perfecting.”

From time to time, Bernetta wrote about her early experiences and corresponded with Elizabeth Hiatt Gregory, a journalist interested in women's role in aviation from the earliest days. In a 1935 letter, she suggested that Gregory might do an interesting article from the psychological standpoint on why “so many women went into the game and out so soon. . . . Did they find it too expensive as I did or did they make enough to retire? I doubt that they lost nerve.” Then later: “Of course in those days, there wasn't so much that a woman could do unless she had tremendous backing and so many men expressed themselves as not wanting to see a woman shovelled up.” Miller was cheered by Amelia Earhart's performance. “Fortunate she to have a husband who is interested and ready to greet her at every arrival.”

During the First World War, Bernetta, her love of adventure and desire to be useful still intact, served overseas with the YMCA as an accountant, then moved to the front, assigned to the 325th Regiment, Eighty–second Division. Sent to the Toul sector of France, she “rendered the greatest services before and during the St. Mihiel offensive, caring for the wounded in the advance field hospital. She was in the Argonne during the last offensive.” The French government honored her with the Croix de Guer re, and the American military recognized her services with a citation.

Following the war, she worked at educational institutions, notably as bursar for the American College in Constantinople (now Istanbul) for seven years, before returning to America in 1933. She tried freelance writing, but the Depression economy made this difficult. That same year, she found a job as bookkeeper at St. Mary's Hall–on–the–Delaware, a school for girls, in Burlington, New Jersey, where she remained until 1941.

Years later a colleague at the school wrote her impressions of Bernetta Miller. Unquestionably, “she was an individual!” A tall woman with short hair, she might have been considered plain except for “her smiling, friendly manner.” She cared little for dress; she would never be “modish.” Her friends learned she had traveled all over Europe, liked beer, and had a passion for oriental rugs. She was a collector and connoisseur of antique orientals, which, as needed, she shampooed on hands and knees.