Walking on Air (28 page)

In those files I found several letters Buffington had written to Phoebe in the late 1960s. They had been forwarded, sometimes several times to addresses around the country, but eventually returned as undeliverable. Also in his files were copies of letters sent to Louise Thaden asking: where's Phoebe? While Louise frequently replied that she didn't know, I now knew who had kept in touch with Phoebe during those lost years. Thaden's papers were not housed there, but the museum provided me with the name and contact information for Louise's daughter, Pat Thaden Webb. She would ultimately lead me to the breakthrough I had long been seeking.

On my behalf, Pat contacted a former chairman of the Ninety-Nines Museum, Lisa Cotham, about my quest. Cotham sent me an email:

While with the Museum, I received a letter with information as to the whereabouts of Phoebe's last worldly possessions, who had them, etc.
My interest was in acquiring Phoebe's memorabilia for the Museum. My initial conversation with the “owner” was that she would not release anything because she promised Phoebe on her deathbed that she would see to it that her biography was written. That has been several years. With your permission, I'd like to approach this woman again with information about your book. You may obtain more information from her, and maybe we can work together to achieve all our goals—Phoebe's story told and her memorabilia preserved.

Lisa supplied me with the name and contact information for the woman who was with Phoebe when she died: Della May Hartley-Frazier. It had been over thirty years since Phoebe's death, and nearly that long since Lisa had been contacted about the possessions. What were the chances that she'd still have them?

I called Della May to introduce myself. It took several conversations and sending her copies of my books and pieces I'd written about Phoebe to convince her that I was a serious scholar and writer. I assured her that I had no designs on the materials. All I wanted to do was see them and use their contents to write the very best biography I could. She said I sounded like a very nice person (a good sign), but that she wanted some legal advice (maybe not a good sign).

I impatiently waited the two weeks she requested before calling her back. She said that the papers were a mess, and that she would have to get her niece to help her sort them out before I could see them. (Sort them out!? Terrible words to a historian.) I gently suggested that I might be a better judge of what was valuable in the papers than her niece. I offered to come to Indianapolis, go through everything, sort and organize what had value. Della May told me about her deathbed promise to Phoebe and her concerns about the final disposition of the papers, saying she had been “praying to God every day to help” her resolve her dilemma. I said, “Della May, we are the answers to one another's prayers. Without you, I cannot finish this biography, and without me, you cannot fulfill your promise to Phoebe.” Okay, she said, come on.

At Della May's home in Indianapolis, I found four large cardboard boxes and a small pile of personal items, including a battered suitcase, a traveling typewriter, and some clothes still in the dry cleaner's bags. Among the treasures were stacks of crumbling clippings about her career and the political concerns that consumed the last years of her life; photographs covering a span of seventy years, from a formal baby picture to snapshots of her taken
two weeks before she died; her first scrapbook, begun in 1921, in which she called herself an “air nut”; pieces of her autobiography and extended essays describing her role in federal projects, and why she left government in 1952; dozens of letters to friends and contemporaries and their replies, many neatly clipped together. These materials helped me fill in many of the missing puzzle pieces.
¹

Although there remain many things about Phoebe that I do not and can never know, her story here is as complete as I can make it.

1
. Marriage between Madge Traister and H. J. Park listed in
Iowa Marriages, 1851–1900
, Appanoose County, 30 April 1898; divorce listed in
Des Moines Daily News
, 7 July 1908.

2
. Federal Census, 1910 Polk County, Des Moines, Iowa, lists Madge Park as widowed with two children: Paul Park and Phebe Park (Madge's mother was named Phebe Jane Corder). A copy of Phoebe's birth certificate lists her as Phoebe G. [
sic
] Park, Omlie Collection, Memphis Public Library.

3
. Paul's daughter, Deloris Navrkal, reports that until the knock on his door in 1943, Paul thought his father was dead. Author telephone interview with Navrkal, 5 November 2007. The story of Park and his daughter is in unpublished manuscript, Gene Slack Scharlau,
Phoebe: A Biography
, 1, in author's possession.

4
. Andrew Fairgrave married Rose McIntyre in 1895 and divorced three years later. Fairgrave listed as living in Des Moines and operating a saloon in 1915 Iowa census; Fairgrave saloon listed in St. Paul City Directory for 1915 until 1919; “soft drinks” thereafter. Phoebe's request for a copy of her birth certificate noted that she was “born Phoebe Jane Park, my mother later married Andrew Fairgrave whose name I adopted,” Omlie Collection. There is no evidence that Andrew formally adopted Madge's children. Andrew ran a “near-beer” saloon in St. Paul in 1921 according to Glenn Messer, interview by Gene Scharlau, 1982, International Women's Air and Space Museum, Cleveland (IWASM).

5
. The 1920 Senior Class statistics listed nationalities of the graduates: eight Swedish, seven German, four ½ Norwegian, three ½ French, two ½ Irish, two ½ Scotch, two Danes, two English, fourteen Jewish, and twenty-eight American, in
The M
(newsletter of Mechanic Arts High School) 21 June 1920. Graduates of Mechanic Arts included civil rights leader Roy Wilkins (class of 1919) and Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun (class of 1925). John W. Larson, “‘He Was Mechanic Arts': Mechanic Arts High School: The Dietrich Lange Years, 1916–1939,”
Ramsey County History
41, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 4–17.

6
. Thomas Minehan,
The M
, February 1919, in Larson, “‘He Was Mechanic Arts,'” 7.

7
. Class notes in
The M
, June 1919, 60.

8
.
The M
, June 1920, 21.

9
. Phoebe averred that dramatic lessons bolstered her self-confidence “maybe a bit too much,” in an early attempt at autobiography she called
The Omlie Story
, 12.
The Omlie Story
, and a similar piece labeled “third draft,” in Omlie Collection.

10
.
The M
, June 1920, 52, and November 1920, 33;
The Omlie Story
, 19.

11
.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, 10 September 1919.

12
. Ibid.

13
.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, 9 September 1919. The planes, owned by the Curtiss-Northwest Airplane Company, were flown by V. C. Omley (this is Vernon C. Omlie), C. F. Keyes, Ray S. Miller, and M. A. Northrup.

14
.
The Omlie Story
, 9–10.

15
. Katherine Stinson also did exhibition flying in the Midwest at this time. She had been flying since 1912, and on 18 July 1915, at Cicero Field in Chicago, Stinson became the first woman to perform a loop. Noel E. Allard and Gerald N. Sandvick,
Minnesota Aviation History 1857–1945
(Chaska, MN: MAHB Publishing, 1993), 41.

16
. Allard and Sandvick,
Minnesota Aviation History
, 29–31, 41–42.

17
. Information on Curtiss Headless Pusher from Albuquerque Museum,
www.airmind ed.net
.

18
.
Oneonta (New York) Daily Star
, 20 November 1916. This flight also discussed by Amelia Earhart in
The Fun of It
, (Chicago: Chicago Academy Publishers, 1992 [reprint of 1932]), 186–188.

19
.
Kokomo Daily Tribune
, 5 December 1916; incident also described by Amelia Earhart in
The Fun of It
, 188.

20
.
http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/law.html
.

21
.
Lancaster (Ohio) Daily Watch
, 5 August 1918.

22
.
Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette
, 5 July 1917.

23
.
Fort Wayne Daily News
, 8 June 1917.

24
.
Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette
, 6 January 1917.

25
. Playbill detailing stunts published in
Des Moines Sunday Capital
, 14 August 1921.

26
.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
, 7 September 1919. Phoebe's name was not among those listed as attending or going for a ride that day; these girls were described as members of “local society” at White Bear. Lieutenant Miller would later provide Phoebe with her first airplane ride.

27
. The JN4D, powered by a 90 horsepower Curtiss OX-5 engine, was the first mass-
produced American aircraft, purchased in quantity by the U.S. military during the war, and used as a primary trainer. The Jenny was notoriously unstable. The plane's huge wings made it very susceptible to wind gusts, its controls were very stiff, and the plane was easy to spin but difficult to recover. About 6,750 Jennys were produced by war's end. Joe Christy,
American Aviation
, 2nd ed. (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: TAB Books, 1994), 16. Curtiss-Northwest Field was on Snelling and Larpenteur Avenues near the state fairgrounds in St. Paul.
The Omlie Story
, 16–17.

28
.
The Omlie Story
, 19–22.

29
.
The Omlie Story
, 22–25; this story repeated by Flora G. Orr, “Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie: Special Assistant to Air Intelligence, N.A.C.A.,” in
Holland's: The Magazine of the South
, September 1935, 32, clipping in Tennessee State Library and Archives.

30
. This is an astonishing amount of money in 1920, when the average annual income for all workers was $1,489. Inflation Calculator, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
. Curtiss-Northwest had bought the planes from the government for a few hundred dollars each, then resold them for the princely sum of $3,500. The cost of Jennys quickly plunged as more flooded the market; by the mid-1920s one could be had for as little as $300.
Omlie Story
, 3rd draft, 66; Nick A. Komons,
Bonfires to Beacons
:
Federal Civil Aviation Policy Under the Air Commerce Act, 1926–1938
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 10–12.

31
. The $15 fee verified in a description by William Kidder of the airport's opening in 1918, when they had such a large crowd vying for rides at this fee that the management took in several thousand dollars that day. Allard and Sandvick,
Minnesota Aviation History
, 140;
The Omlie Story
, 26.

32
. Locklear appeared at the Minnesota State Fair in 1919, where he did wing walking and a plane-to-plane transfer. Some 200,000 attended the fair that day and it is possible Phoebe was one of them. Allard and Sandvick,
Minnesota Aviation History
, 41. Phoebe had a picture postcard of Locklear “entertaining Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties at Curtiss Field—St. Paul, Minn.” in her Scrapbook, Omlie Collection. Locklear was killed in 1920 during the filming of a nighttime crash for William Fox's film
The Skywayman
. Apparently blinded by the studio's searchlights, he spun into the ground. Don Dwiggins,
The Air Devils: The Story of Balloonists, Barnstormers, and Stunt Pilots
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966), 152; Robert Wohl,
The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 113.

33
. Hardin's new design featured a series of springs between the pack bottom and a fiber board that ejected the canopy from the pack. The military rejected Hardin's chute as “too weak, bulky and uncomfortable.” Dan Poynter,
The Parachute Manual: A Technical Treatise on Aerodynamic Decelerators
(Santa Barbara, CA: Para Publishing, 1984), 163;
The Omlie Story
, 27–28.

34
. The Hardin Parachute Company, Inc., was located at 515 Metropolitan Bank Building, Minneapolis.

35
.
The Perils of Pauline
was an episodic cliffhanger serial that ran in weekly installments at movie theaters beginning in 1914 and running throughout the 1920s. Only a few episodes survive, none of them, alas, involving aerial stunts. Movie studios often generated
“generic” footage of the drama and dangers of flying that were used in news-reels and in many, mostly undistinguished, films with titles like
Broken Wing, Speed Girl
, and
Wings Outstretched.
Fox produced a host of aviation films, including
The Air Hawk
(1925),
Aflame in the Sky
(1927), and
Air Circus
(1928), as did other motion picture companies. For a list of films featuring flying during the 1920s and 1930s, see H. Hugh Wynne,
The Motion Picture Stunt Pilots and Hollywood's Classic Aviation Movies
(Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, 1987), 171–176.

36
.
The Omlie Story
, 28–29.

37
. Fox Film Corporation, William Fox (New York) president, local manager M. J. Weisfelt, at 807 Produce Exchange Building,
Minneapolis City Directory
, 1920 and 1921. William Fox founded Fox Film Corporation in 1915 and produced hundreds of early silent films, serials, and feature films. Fox merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935 to become Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

38
.
The Omlie Story
, 29–31.

39
. Ibid., 31–32.