Walking on Air (4 page)

The hazards of a double drop were more than double because of having to depend upon two parachutes opening instead of one, and the second chute was necessarily smaller so that it could be worn. The drag chute had less lift and was less maneuverable than the main chute, and this had sometimes dangerous consequences. Her first double parachute jump (only her third jump and less than a month after the first), which she insisted on executing despite rain and wind, took her more than a mile from her intended landing place. Unable to control the drift of her drag chute, she floated into the middle of a small lake. Fortunately, the air trapped in the canopy acted as a sail and the wind carried her some 150 feet to the bank.
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On her way down at an exhibition at Ottumwa, Iowa, she hit “an air pocket,” the chute lost its lift, and she fell into a field of timothy. She tried to take the fall on the run but twisted her leg and sprained her ankle. As the crowd rushed to her aid, she got to her feet and walked to a waiting automobile. “That was the bravest thing I ever did in my life, I guess,” she later told a reporter. “The ankle really hurt like blazes.”
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A few weeks later, while attempting a double drop in Des Moines during an American Legion air show, she had a much more serious accident. As she was coming down with the drag chute, she noticed a tangle of utility wires at the edge of the field. She managed to skid the small chute sideways but not enough. She struck high-tension lines hard enough to bounce away, but not before 2,300 volts went through her body. Some 3,000 people were watching as the current knocked her unconscious and she fell to the ground. She regained consciousness later in the hospital where she was treated for severe burns. The hot wires had seared her flesh to the bone in half a dozen places. The current had blown out the bottom of her foot.
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As she lay in the hospital, her main concern was not her own recovery, but whether her mother would find out how badly she was hurt. Phoebe tried to discourage the press from making this a big story. She told a reporter that she wasn't “hurt a bit,” and begged him: “Don't put it in the papers. I don't want my mother to worry.”
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After he did so, she decided she needed to counter the accident coverage with coverage of her return to the sky. A cameraman from one of the motion picture studios was waiting for her to get back to work, so she told him she would go up. With her hands and legs wrapped in bandages and her arm strapped to her side, she climbed into the cockpit and asked a reluctant Vernon to take her aloft. Once she was in the
air, she extricated her injured arm from the bandages and inched her way across the wing of the plane. She later described the incident:

On my one hand I could use only two fingers, the others being burned. But really it didn't hurt—much. Everything went splendidly until the camera plane swooped up for a close shot. I got the full blast from its propeller and, taken without warning, I lost my grip entirely. I was falling backward, but the Lord and luck didn't desert me. I doubled a leg and it caught on one of the struts. The camera got it all.
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The local newspaper reported that she had returned to work, so apparently she had only been slightly injured. She mailed the news clipping to her mother. But “the truth is I didn't get back to work until two weeks later.”
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Six months after her first plane ride and barely two months after her first jump, Phoebe decided to go for the world's record parachute jump for women. On 10 July, she climbed into a specially rigged high-performance Curtiss Oriole for the attempt. Even though the day was very hot, she dressed warmly in anticipation of the altitude, and because there were so many lakes in the vicinity, she wrapped a partially inflated inner tube around her body in case she should land in water. Aboard the plane with Phoebe and Vernon was the official recorder of the Minneapolis Aero Club to verify the record. As 15,000 people gazed into the sunlight trying to follow the Oriole, the big plane strained to climb into the thinning air and out of sight. It took an hour and ten minutes to get to their target altitude of 15,000 feet. The temperature dropped rapidly as the plane climbed; frost formed on her goggles and the motor started to miss in the thin air. At 15,200 feet, struggling for breath, she climbed out of the plane and began to make her way to the parachute. She was too short to climb down on the landing gear of the Oriole, so she had tied the chute to the wing strut. She had never before been out on the wing of such a fast airplane. The wind whipped her about as she inched along from handhold to handhold. She struggled to clip on her harness “with my hands numbed and my body shaking from the intense cold.”

On account of the rarefied atmosphere, I dropped like a bullet for about 5,000 feet, then the parachute started to quiver but did not open immediately. Finally the chute opened and I started a more gradual descent to the earth. After reaching about 10,000 feet, I hit an air pocket. My chute nearly collapsed and I fell for about 1,000 feet after which the chute opened again. I fell through several of these pockets in the course of my
descent …. It took 20 minutes from the time my chute opened until I reached the ground, this ending the biggest event in my career.
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She had gotten sick because of the violent tossing and swinging of the parachute on the way down, she told reporters, adding, “It was terrible; I never want to try it again.”
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But she had handily broken Mabel Cody's record of 11,000 feet, set in Chicago the previous summer.
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After they all got back to the field, Vernon invited her to dinner at the elegant Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis to celebrate. It was their “first real date,” she recalled, and the beginning of a blossoming romance.
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The Phoebe Fairgrave Fliers kept up an incredibly grueling schedule during the summer of 1921 with sixty performances in Iowa, eleven in Illinois, nine in Missouri, eight in Minnesota, eight in Mississippi, and seven in Tennessee.
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These were sometimes associated with fairs or carnivals, but more often they simply flew over small towns dropping handbills to attract spectators and negotiated with farmers to use their pastures for temporary runways.
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The stunts would attract attention and, with luck, induce folks to go up and see their world from the air. Income depended on “passenger hops.” Few itinerant barnstormers did well financially. An oft-repeated anecdote has a barnstormer, when asked what he thought was most dangerous about barnstorming, reply, “The risk of starving to death.” The Phoebe Fairgrave Fliers would often go many days without carrying enough passengers to meet expenses.
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Midway through the summer, they linked up with accomplished stunt flier Glenn Messer, who had managed his own flying circus for two years. Messer was widely known for his demonstrations of orthodontic prowess. He often hung by his teeth from various points on his airplane. To drum up publicity on the ground, he would demonstrate his strength by pulling, with his teeth, a two-ton truck loaded with forty children the length of a city block.
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Although he had been relatively successful on his own, Messer knew that teaming up with this fearless young woman and her pilot had potential. Messer found himself charmed by the couple's “strong bond of good fellowship” and their playfulness with each other. Vernon would be “sitting around and she'd run up and push him over,” he said. “He was very attentive to her and she hung around him all the time.” Vernon, a skillful and cautious pilot, was “pleasant and good natured and hard to get excited,” recalled Messer. Phoebe, on the other hand, was “very headstrong about her ideas … she was kind of like a man, rough and ready and scared of nothing.” Shrewd and smart and sure of herself, Phoebe had high expectations
for the success of the combined Messer-Fairgrave Flying Circus. Together they would perfect and perform more spectacular stunts for the movies and better compete with the larger circuses for lucrative fair contracts.
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One of the new stunts the team hoped to refine involved changing from plane to plane in the air. They found a barn in Iowa that had a central runway from end to end, and rigged a trapeze bar from the rafters. While Messer hung by his knees with his arms extended, Phoebe stood on the seat of an old buggy as Vernon piloted the team of horses. As Vernon drove the buggy through the barn, Phoebe would reach up to grasp Messer's hands and be pulled up alongside him on the trapeze. Gradually they increased the speed of the horses to a fast trot until she could connect with Messer on every pass. When they thought they had the stunt perfected, they alerted Fox to send a camera crew to film it. Three planes took off and jockeyed into position: the upper plane carrying Messer and the trapeze, the lower plane with Phoebe and Vernon, and the third supporting the movie cameraman.
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Messer was hanging from the axle of the upper plane, hands down, ready to grasp Phoebe, as the two pilots tried to get into a good position for the camera. Suddenly the lower plane hit an up-draft. Phoebe, standing near the right wingtip of the upper wing on the lower plane, with her toes hooked under two guy wires, saw the upper plane's propeller coming rapidly toward her. She dropped to her knees, reached under the leading edge of the wing and grabbed a strut. Then she flipped forward and over the edge, and shin-nied down to the lower wing, safely out of the range of the whirling prop. The wing of Omlie's plane crashed into the landing gear holding Messer and locked there. They were charging across the sky at 80 miles per hour with both planes locked together. “More in desperation than anything else,” Vernon later recounted, “I kicked hard right rudder and the wing tore loose. Just enough of the aileron [the control surface on the trailing edge of the wing] was left to let me manage the plane.” After landing, he patched the aileron “with a couple of pieces of haywire” and, since the movie people were still eager for the footage, they went back up and did it all again, this time successfully. Folks watching from the ground praised the troupe for their marvelous showmanship, particularly in “that ‘fake crash' in mid-air.”
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Talking it over later, the trio agreed to make the stunt a bit less dangerous. After that, Messer hung by his knees from the lowest rung of a twenty-foot rope ladder to grab Phoebe's hands, leaving a margin of unoccupied air between the planes.
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Phoebe also worked with Messer to perfect a car-to-plane transfer. This was particularly difficult because of the necessity for high speed on the part
of the automobile and the extraordinary steadiness required of the plane at a very low and unstable altitude. She had not, she told a reporter, heard of any deaths from wing-walking, “but there were a few in the car-to-plane transfers—people would jump and miss—first law is never to let go of one grip until you have the other firm.”
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Despite her apparent confidence, the Messer-Fairgrave Circus never did quite perfect this stunt. Still, Phoebe thrived on the attempt. The very best thing about all this stunting was, she said, that “flying never gets monotonous. There's always a new thrill or a new risk that keeps you on your toes every minute you're in the air and makes your blood tingle to the tips of your toes.”
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The Messer-Fairgrave troupe played fairs and air shows throughout the rest of the summer, while continuing to sell stunts to the movies.
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Crowds estimated from 2,000 to 15,000 attended the meets. Featured air shows were such a strong draw that many times the whole town shut down to attend them. In October, in the town of Mexico, Missouri, students were released from school and downtown merchants closed their doors for the afternoon.
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While the shows often attracted large crowds, many spectators did not pay. This was a continual problem for promoters. At Cedar Rapids, of the estimated crowd of 14,000, only about 1,000 paid the admission fee to the fairgrounds. Parked cars blocked the roads leading to the fairgrounds where spectators watched the show for free. At Phoebe's Baldwin Park show the newspaper reported, “Probably a thousand people lined the road banking their cars in the middle of the road rendering passing difficult for those who wished to attend. These people watched the show from their machines, refusing to pay admittance, and hundreds of others lined the fences at either side of the field, refusing to pay admission and watching the show.”
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The stunts were dangerous and mishaps common, during the shows and in between. For example, when the circus arrived at Cedar Rapids, Vernon couldn't spot the field. He made a forced landing in a potato patch, broke the tip off his propeller, and seriously bruised himself and his passengers, Phoebe and Paul. The next day, show day, the wind was very strong. As Phoebe and her team of six men worked to open and refold her huge parachute, the wind caught it and dragged the team several feet before catching on the side of a truck and lifting it off the ground. Phoebe got a cut on her wrist from the friction of trying to hang onto the cord, and Vernon severely cut his hand. They decided not to jump that day.
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At one big show at Swaney Field in Des Moines that featured twenty-three planes, Phoebe made four attempts to transfer plane-to-plane to Glenn hanging from the trapeze. The first three failed because unstable air prevented the planes
from getting close enough together. Undaunted, they finally succeeded in the late afternoon. Phoebe's spectacular double parachute drop closed the show at twilight.
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In addition to the day-to-day hazards, barnstormers were frequently reminded about the dangers they faced every time they performed. So many of their numbers did not survive the season.
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In July, Phoebe won a parachuting competition against Bud Bridgens. She pasted the clipping in her scrapbook. Just a few weeks later, Bridgens died when his parachute failed to open during a show in Rockport, Illinois. She clipped the notice and pasted it alongside the other in her scrapbook.
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In early 1922, the
St. Paul Dispatch
composed an obituary for Phoebe and placed it in their files for retrieval in a hurry. Clearly they did not expect her to grow old in this profession.
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