Walking on Air (6 page)

When America sent troops to France in 1917, the Army Signal Corps began teaching men to fly at the landing strip at the Memphis Driving Park until the facilities at Millington's Park Field were completed.
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The winter of 1917 was among the worst in Memphis history. The Mississippi River froze over as temperatures dropped below zero for several days. Some area residents believed that somehow the airplanes had stirred up the terrible winter weather.
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With the spring thaw, the sod fields at the airbase turned to deep mud, forcing the Air Service to once again use the Driving Park for pilot training.
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In 1919, the Memphis Aerial Company flew from the Driving Park.
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In the fall of 1922, when the Omlies arrived in Memphis, their airplane was parked in the middle of the track at the old Memphis Driving Park, from which they did their flying for the fair. Given its history and long association with aviation, the park seemed like the perfect venue for them to build a business. The landing field was in good shape, the steel grandstands could accommodate 3,500 people, and it was a ten-minute streetcar ride from downtown Court Square. Vernon and Phoebe struck a deal with the Memphis Business Men's Club, which managed the park, and began to host exhibitions and offer rides and flight training. Vernon taught his wife to fly and to master the rudiments of airplane mechanics, making her a full partner in his enterprise.
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Gradually the Omlies gathered together a clique of air-minded Memphians, many of them World War I veteran fliers like Vernon, to talk about the future of aviation in Memphis.

By 1924, the activities at the Driving Park had clearly outgrown the facilities. After that year's Armistice Day parade, the group of fliers gathered in front of the Hotel Chisca at the end of the march and discussed the need for a real airport. The following year, Armistice Day 1925, the group met in a luncheon to finalize the organization of the Memphis Aero Club and elect Everett Cook as their first president. Their first effort was petitioning
the government for the abandoned Park Field at Millington. Cook enlisted the aid of Senator Kenneth D. McKellar, but to no avail; the government refused to relinquish the land.
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When efforts to interest city fathers in funding a municipal airport also failed, the Aero Club pooled their resources and leased seventy acres of cow pasture at Woodstock, on the old Millington Pike north of Memphis, not far from the Driving Park.
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With the help of the Shelby County Commissioners, they graded the field. The street car company furnished cinders for the runway, and the Illinois Central Railroad hauled them to a siding next to the field for free.
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The first plane to land there, 26 June 1926, was piloted by Vernon Omlie, described in the press as “for five years the torch-bearer for aviation in Memphis.”
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This first official Memphis airport was dedicated the following Armistice Day, 11 November 1926, and named for Lt. Guion Armstrong, a Memphis pilot killed in France during the war. More than “three score of airships” flew in for the ceremony from as far away as Chicago. A special train departing from the Poplar Street Station was available for a sixty-cent fare. Nonetheless, “the roads out of Memphis were jammed with traffic from one end to the other” as some 12,000 spectators attended this grand “coming out party” for the Memphis Aero Club. The paper reported “thrills galore and hair-raising emotions” as over one hundred aviators competed in two closed-course races, and the U.S. Army pilots and National Guard Squadron demonstrated formation and combat flying. Phoebe was the star of the show:

Taking the olive branch for the most daring and thrilling stunt was Phoebe Fairgrave, in private life Mrs. Vernon C. Omlie, wife of the manager of the port. Phoebe did some stunts which to hire certain newspaper men [to] do would make the war debt look like a postage stamp. She walked the planes [wings] of her husband's ship, hung from them by her toes, at one time hung from one end of the ship by her teeth and wound up her day by leaping from the plane in a parachute.
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Only two days later, the great Fokker Trimotor airplane,
Josephine Ford
, landed at Armstrong Field, just six months after making the first successful journey over the North Pole, thus, as a reporter gushed, “establishing contact between this city and the Artic regions.”
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After Richard E. Byrd and his pilot Floyd Bennett flew over the North Pole on 9 May 1926, the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics sent the plane around the United States to demonstrate the possibilities of commercial flying.
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Bennett and his passengers, representatives from the U.S. Commerce Department and the Guggenheim Fund, were greeted by the Omlies and feted by the Memphis Aero Club with a lunch at the Peabody Hotel, a tour of the city, and dinner at the Lions Club.
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With the opening of her first airport, and the hosting of this celebrity of the air, Memphis became an important hub for aviation routes across the nation.
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The Omlies established Mid-South Airways at Armstrong Field, offering flying lessons, aerial photography, air-taxi charters, cargo transport, crop-dusting (pioneering the practice of combating the boll weevil from the air), and aerial mapping of the river, power lines, and various commercial developments.
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Phoebe eagerly took on the duties of secretary, office manager, flight instructor, transport pilot, and mechanic for their new business.
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Vernon began active lobbying for a municipal airport, taking local dignitaries, including former mayor E. H. Crump, for free rides to see Memphis from the air.
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After Mid-South Airways secured the Waco agency, to sell and maintain Waco airplanes, Phoebe added sales manager to her duties.
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In 1927, the Mississippi River Valley was inundated by one of the nation's most destructive natural disasters. Abnormally high amounts of rain had fallen throughout the Midwest during the fall of 1926. This was followed by record-setting snowstorms in the north and heavy rains in Tennessee and Kentucky that winter. The rain and snow melt saturated the earth and overflowed creeks and tributaries along the Ohio and Mississippi, setting the stage for a massive flood in the spring of 1927. Floodwaters began to break through the levees built to contain the river, eventually breaching them in 145 places, flooding farmers' fields and numerous towns and villages from Missouri to Louisiana, some to depths of thirty feet. The city of Memphis became an emergency depot, struggling to care for thousands of refugees pouring in from all directions.
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Responding to the disaster, President Coolidge appointed his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, to coordinate rescue and relief efforts from a headquarters in Memphis. Hoover put the Red Cross in charge of responding to the emergency. They faced immense problems with communication and distribution of supplies and services throughout the flooded region. There was a complete paralysis of ordinary communication: no mail, telegraph, or telephone service. As the scope of the disaster became clearer, the agency rapidly outgrew its offices downtown and relocated into the enormous Ford Motor Company assembly plant with its huge warehouse space served by a railroad spur.
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On the twentieth of April, “a great concentration camp for refugees” was set up at the Tri-State Fairgrounds. More
than five hundred people arrived the first day. “Many were half-clad, caked with mud and in a dazed condition from the sudden loss of all their worldly possessions.”
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During the emergency, the airplane became an indispensable means of fast communication and distribution of vital commodities to the stricken area. Aviators of the U.S. Navy and the National Guard assisted the Red Cross with information on levee breaks and flood depths. The Omlies, as well as other members of the Memphis Aero Club and anyone else with available aircraft, took to the air to do what they could. “The Omlies were everywhere, flying above the ugly, yellow torrents, carrying photographers and newsmen, doctors, nurses, medicines, antitoxins and food.”
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When the bridge washed out at Memphis, the Omlies hauled the mail from Memphis to Little Rock. They dropped food to people marooned on rooftops, in trees, along levees. They transported messages from rescue headquarters to inundated areas and back again. They patrolled the levees to spot “sand boils,” indications of ruptures. They flew news reporters and photographers to document the disaster, Phoebe's aerial photographs supplementing those of the professionals.
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Every day for nearly eight weeks the front pages of the Memphis newspapers, the
Commercial Appeal
and the
Press-Scimitar
, carried accounts and photographs of the flooded areas, along with wrenching stories of tragedy and heroism. The flying itself was heroic, without the option of a safe landing in case of a flight emergency. Phoebe later recalled, “At three thousand feet altitude you couldn't see dry land half the time, and we were flying tiny land planes.” Several people were killed in airplane accidents during the emergency, including the general reconstruction officer of Mississippi Valley Flood Relief for the Red Cross Earl Kilpatrick, who died when his plane plunged into the water while flying between Vicksburg and New Orleans.
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The Omlies had one Waco fitted with pontoons so that they could land passengers, rescue the marooned, and deliver nurses and medicines. One day Phoebe flew down to Mississippi to rescue a boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog and was stranded in the second story of his home. She had to land the plane on the water such that the current would drift her past the house and allow the boy to climb from the window to the plane. Her skill saved that boy and likely countless others.
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In the flood of 1927, twenty-six thousand square miles were inundated, an area roughly equal to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined. Along the lower Mississippi, the flood put as much as thirty feet of water over lands where 931,159 people had lived; flooded
homes numbered 162,017. An estimated 330,000 people were rescued from treetops, roofs, chimneys, telegraph poles, railroad cars, levees, and patches of high ground. Not until mid-August, more than four months after the first break, did all the water leave the land.
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The Red Cross built 154 tent cities in seven states and a total of 325,554 people, the majority of them African American, lived in these camps for as long as four months. An additional 311,922 people outside the camps were fed and clothed by the Red Cross. Direct losses to the seven affected states (Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana) were calculated to be $236,334,414, with indirect losses estimated at $200 million more. Officially, the Red Cross reported 246 people drowned, but the death toll was almost certainly higher because it was impossible to know how many bodies were buried under tons of mud or washed out into the Gulf.
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For the Memphis aviators who flew in the rescue efforts, the disaster had one positive benefit: it clearly demonstrated the critical function of the airplane as a transport vehicle. “It was eight weeks of tough work, with mighty little sleep,” Phoebe recalled, “but it helped a lot to prove the usefulness of airplanes in disaster relief.”
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And it helped to transform public perceptions of the pilots who flew them from thrill-seeking performers to purveyors of a legitimate business with real utility in the community.

In the midst of the disaster, Vernon and Phoebe were also preparing to apply for United States pilots' licenses. In 1927, the federal government began formally regulating commercial and civil aviation. Until this time, anyone who could obtain an airplane, or build one in his backyard, could fly it. Pilots had no licenses, no rules or regulations; there were no restrictions on aircraft. In the air he could do as he pleased, perform outrageous stunts over populated areas, land and take off wherever he chose. Flying was for the reckless, often with tragic results. Responding to a clamor to assume control of “the chaos of laissez faire in the air,” the federal government finally set up a regulatory apparatus under the Air Commerce Act of 1926.
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The Aeronautic Bureau of the Department of Commerce was charged with fostering air commerce, establishing airways, and licensing aircraft, engines, pilots, and mechanics. Having heard about the coming regulations, Phoebe submitted her application for a transport license and an aircraft and power-plant (mechanics) license on 16 February 1927. She requested and obtained a Letter of Authority from the chief of the Air Regulation Division, authorizing her to act in those capacities pending examination. Phoebe, along with her husband, took the written and flight tests on 22 April 1927, in between flood rescue missions.
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Since soloing in 1923, Phoebe's accumulated flying time far exceeded the necessary minimum of 200 hours. A transport license permitted her to fly interstate, in any type of airplane, carry passengers for money, and teach others to fly. To qualify for an aircraft mechanics license, she needed a minimum of two years experience in shop practice, including work on internal combustion engines, one year of which must include actual practice of maintenance on aircraft engines and actual experience building, maintaining, or repairing aircraft. She had to pass a written examination and satisfy her inspector that she could overhaul an aircraft engine and adjust the ignition system.
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On 28 June 1927, she received Transport Pilot's license No. 199 (Vernon applied the same day and got license No. 200) and her Aircraft and Engine Mechanics License No. 422, becoming the first woman to obtain a pilot license from a civilian agency of the U.S. Government and the first woman issued an aircraft and engine mechanic's license.
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