Walking on Air: The Aerial Adventures of Phoebe Omlie

Chapter 1

- 3 Chapter One Aviation pioneer Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie was once one of the most famous women in America. In the 1930s, her words and photographs were splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the nation. The press called her “second only to Amelia Earhart Putnam among America’s women pilots,” and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt named her among the “eleven women whose achievements make it safe to say that the world is progressing.” Phoebe Fairgrave began her career in the early 1920s when aviation was unregulated and wide open to those daring enough to take it on, male or female. She bought a plane, established her own flying circus, and did stunts for the movies. She later earned the first commercial pilot’s license issued to a woman and became a successful air racer. During the New Deal, she became the first woman to hold an executive position in federal aeronautics. For twenty years, she was centrally involved in the development of commercial and private aviation policy and production. Yet somehow she got lost to history. She was forgotten partly because of the long shadow of Amelia Earhart, which has obscured the achievements of many daring women pilots, and partly because of the sad circumstances of her decline and death. She - 4 Walking on Air died in poverty and obscurity. Personal papers, documents of her life and achievements, were scattered and gone. She grew up rootless and perhaps that helped shape what she was to become, although one should be cautious about overdetermining a life. She was born into a troubled marriage between Madge Traister and Harry John “Jack” Park, a day laborer, in Des Moines, 21 November 1902, two years behind her only sibling, Paul. Named for her maternal grandmother, Phoebe Jane was six when her parents divorced in 1908.1 Although Madge told her children that their father had died, Jack Park had a distressing way of turning up occasionally until his actual death in a car accident in Missouri in 1962.2 At least twice in later years, Jack tried to make contact with his children : in 1943, he knocked on his son’s door in Omaha, and he once tried to speak to Phoebe after an air meet in Cleveland, but she rebuffed him with the remark that he couldn’t be her “real” father, her father was dead.3 Three years after the Parks divorced, Madge married Andrew E. Fairgrave, who was himself divorced from a childless marriage. In 1915, Andrew and Madge and her two children, Paul, aged fifteen, and thirteenyear -old Phoebe, moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. From 1916 to 1919, Andrew Fairgrave ran a saloon downtown. After that, though his business was still in the same spot, he changed to soft drinks and “near-beer” with the advent of Prohibition.4 Phoebe and her brother attended Mechanic Arts High School, which emphasized training in both the liberal arts and manual arts. The approximately 1,500 students were a diverse mix of children from families with modest incomes, including recent and second-generation immigrants from Ireland, Norway, Austria, Germany, Poland, and Sweden, with a handful of African American families.5 Mechanic Arts self-consciously saw itself as “a working model of the melting pot,” emphasizing equality of opportunity, regardless of ancestry, race, gender, or economic status. Any student could aspire to leadership in the school.6 Phoebe thrived in this environment. She enjoyed working with her hands as well as her mind. In her third year, despite her diminutive size and her gender, she was elected president of her junior class. Her classmates noted that she was “the first girl to hold office as president of a Mechanic Arts class, but we felt that Phoebe was competent and had enough executive ability to manage the class successfully.”7 Her friend, Hugh O’Neill, whom she replaced as junior class president when he moved away, included her in his final poem, “History of the Class of 1920.” She appears in the eighth stanza: - 5 Walking on Air I forgot to mention, you’ll excuse it, I hope, A feminine head of suffragette note— Miss Phoebe J. Fairgrave who took up the stroke When the masculine head disembarked from the boat.8 While at Mechanic Arts, Phoebe was active in the Cogwheel Club, which wrote for and edited the school newspaper, and the Mechanic Arts Literary Society, which compiled...