Walking on Air: The Aerial Adventures of Phoebe Omlie

Chapter 2

- 24 Chapter Two It was time to reassess their options. Two summers of barnstorming had failed to provide a viable income. The Omlies landed in Memphis in late fall, hoping the Mid-South Fair and local exhibitions would provide their last chance to make some money to see them through the winter, but bad weather kept them grounded as their meager funds trickled away. They had to hock their clothes and luggage to the Arlington Hotel where they were staying until they could resume flying and discharge their bill.1 They talked about settling down. Vernon wanted to make a living from aviation that didn’t involve stunting and daredevil flying. Like many barnstormers , his ultimate goal was to establish aviation as a legitimate business. Vernon, who had been briefly stationed at Millington’s Park Field during the war, recognized the potential for a warm weather base in the center of the country, and knew that the area’s reputation for being “air-minded” could accommodate a business like he envisioned.2 Air-mindedness was a kind of “air intoxication” that gripped Americans during the golden age of aviation in the early twentieth century. This romance with the endless possibilities of aviation is difficult to appreciate today when aviation is simply a transportation system. Air-mindedness embodied a sense of awe and mysticism, which gave rise to utopian hopes for the dawn of a New Age of progress and prosperity. So great was aviation’s - 25 Walking on Air impact on the national imagination that “Americans widely expected the airplane to foster democracy, equality and freedom,” wrote aviation historian Joseph Corn, “to improve public taste and spread culture; to purge the world of war and violence; and even to give rise to a new kind of human being .”3 The idea that somehow flying was divine, and aviation could lift people to a realm fundamentally different from the one in which they lived, literally swept its enthusiasts to flights of fancy about its potential to elevate human life to a metaphorical heaven.4 Almost since the advent of flight, certainly from the earliest days of exhibition flying, Memphis had been enthralled with aviation. Before the first decade of the twentieth century had passed, many of the most famous aviators in the world performed in the city. Aviation in America was slow to get off the ground after the Wrights tested their flying machine on the dunes of North Carolina in 1903. Only five people witnessed their twelve-second flight, and the Wrights were secretive about what they were attempting to accomplish for fear that their ideas would be stolen before they could secure patents. As a consequence, the Wrights kept their developments shrouded in secrecy for five years, until 1908, when they demonstrated this amazing new technology to the military. Thus it was not until late in the decade that powered aircraft began to capture the public imagination.5 The first great flying carnival ever held in America launched the era of air meets and exhibition fliers at a ten-day event in Los Angeles in January 1910.6 Four months later, the National Air Meet came to Memphis. When Glenn H. Curtiss, the most famous flier of his time, took off from the backstretch of the racetrack at the Tri-State Fairgrounds, few Memphians had seen powered flight. In Europe, by contrast, large crowds attended exhibitions and record-setting flights, particularly in France and Great Britain.7 Curtiss had established an international reputation the year before, challenging some of the world’s best fliers in a speed contest for the Coupe Internationale d’Aviation, a silver cup and cash prize of 5,000 awarded by James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the Paris Herald, during the world’s first air meet in Rheims, France, in 1909.8 Flying two laps around a 6.2-mile circuit, Curtiss beat France’s Louis Bleriot (just one month after Bleriot became the first man to fly across the English Channel) by 5.8 seconds, averaging an astonishing 46.6 miles per hour.9 Curtiss followed this with another win at the Grand Prix of Brescia, Italy, in September, easily winning the 50,000-lira prize.10 At Memphis, Curtiss roared off in Miss Memphis, his thirty-foot wide and thirty-foot long open pusher plane. The wings were held in place by a - 26 Walking on Air web...