The petite brunette shielded her blue eyes with her hand and gasped in disbelief as the two jousting pilots looped and spun their WACO 9s above the busy Lincoln highway, coming within inches of colliding before darting apart. Motorists stopped abruptly, abandoning their cars to watch the aerobatics, convinced that a catastrophe was inevitable on that day in 1927.
Dewey Noyes and Merle Moltrup were airmail pilots by day but daredevils at heart. They would have cavorted in the skies regardless of the crowd, but Noyes was particularly wild that day because he was trying to impress the young woman below.
Blanche Wilcox had already made up her mind to marry Noyes—if he didn’t kill himself first. They had first met in at a dinner party for Charles Lindbergh in Pittsburgh earlier in the year. The Lone Eagle was on a tour of seventy-five cities, being honored for his historic solo Atlantic crossing while he mustered support for the creation of municipal airports. Blanche, a twenty-seven-year-old stage actress from Cleveland, was in town doing a play.
Lindbergh was treated like a god wherever he went that summer, but Blanche was intrigued by the “very charming, red-headed gentleman” named Dewey, who talked nonstop about the thrill of flight. He had grown up in Vermont, where he flew gliders over the mountains at age fifteen. After a friend spun in and died in a plane crash, Dewey and his brother salvaged the wreckage and built their own plane, then taught themselves to fly it.
By the time he arrived in Cleveland in 1925, Dewey had been involved in two or three aviation businesses, as either an employee or owner. He had barnstormed across New England, where he had a minor following of fans. In Cleveland, Dewey joined forces with Clifford Ball, who had just secured the contract for the U.S. airmail route from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. In April 1927, Dewey became the first pilot on the route.
Blanche Noyes, November 1928. (Courtesy Cleveland State University)
Early airmail pilots were sky cowboys. The job was so dangerous that these pilots were referred to as members of the “Suicide Club.” Lindbergh started his flying career as a barnstormer and advanced to airmail pilot before he became an international hero. Flying the mail tested even the most experienced pilot’s skill and nerve; airmail biplanes were fitted with the most rudimentary instruments, and the pilots had only railroad tracks and roads as navigational markers.
The U.S. Postal Department was determined to make the revolutionary delivery system a commercial success. To keep their contracts, businessmen like Ball had to guarantee that the mail would arrive on time, despite breakdowns, hazardous weather, and crashes. Just surviving the intense cold in open cockpits or thin-shelled, unheated cabins was an ordeal. But Dewey thrived on it, and his enthusiasm attracted Blanche.
At the Lindbergh dinner, he asked her if she would like to fly, and she immediately said yes, although she had never even seen an airplane close up before. The week after they met, Dewey drove Blanche to Bettis Field outside Pittsburgh and helped her into his WACO 9, an open-cockpit biplane built in Troy, Ohio. Once in the air, he showed Blanche his stuff, looping, spinning, and rolling the little plane.
Every time he rolled the plane, it seemed they were right over a cemetery. Blanche looked down at a gigantic monument and had visions of falling from the plane and being speared by it. Once on the ground, Dewey grinned and asked her how she felt. Blanche said she felt great. A courtship ensued, much of it spent in the air. A year from the day of her first plane ride, they married.
They set up housekeeping in Lakewood but spent most of their time in the sky or at the airfield that would become Cleveland Municipal Airport. Still a newlywed, Blanche was busy learning to cook. Dewey was late for dinner one night, and she was worried that the sausages she was frying would be ruined. He finally came home and casually asked her if she’d like to learn to fly. Distractedly, she acquiesced. The next day, Dewey came home and announced, “Honey, I’ve bought you an airplane.” It was a WACO 10, another open-cabin biplane. Suddenly, learning to fly took priority over learning to cook. Blanche wanted to please Dewey, and if flying was something he wanted to share with her, she wanted it too.
Blanche’s first lesson was with another instructor; Dewey didn’t think husbands should teach wives to fly. When she went up, Dewey advised her that if she felt uncomfortable at any time during the lesson, she should drop the controls and let the instructor take over. He understood that freezing up at the controls caused too many fatal crashes. She followed his advice, a little too much for her instructor. “Your wife is never going to learn to fly,” he told Dewey. “She’s too timid.” Word started going around the airfield that the daring mail pilot had a hesitant wife. But Dewey didn’t believe it. He started teaching Blanche, pushing her beyond her fear by showing her what she could do.
He told her that once she could make three good takeoffs and three good landings, she was going to solo. She didn’t sleep a wink the night before her first solo trip. All of Dewey’s cronies were at the airfield that day. They’d been asking her just when she was going to solo. Her takeoff was fine. She flew for a little while, soaring over a big brick schoolhouse. Then it was time to land. By herself. She imagined the men on the ground, watching her, laughing, saying, “They’ll have to get a gun to shoot her down.” Then Blanche did what she would do for the rest of her flying career, she thought about what Dewey had told her. “Dewey had tried to instill in me that I wasn’t just landing the plane, I was ‘kissing the earth,’” she recalled fifty years later. “That was the best landing I’ve ever made in my whole life.”
From then on, his goals for her increased exponentially. She would fly alone to Akron. “He said if I could fly from Cleveland to Akron, I could fly anywhere.” Next, it was a longer flight, to Mansfield. “For a long time, I thought I was flying to please Dewey,” Blanche told a reporter in 1976. Then, one day, she was hospitalized for pneumonia. She awoke one morning worrying about whether she would physically be able to fly. “From then on, I knew I was flying to please myself.”
At twenty-seven, Blanche had already experienced a fair amount of the world. She started acting soon after finishing school, getting roles in local repertory productions at first. She performed often at the Gordon Square Theater on the city’s west side. Several theaters developed in the district, as did Chronicle House, an acting school that drew fledgling actors from the region. Through the school, student thespians sometimes were able to act with professional actors from across the country.
Blanche was good enough that she started getting leads and playing opposite more experienced actors. She once listed Roger Pryor and George Brent as her leading men. Both men started with small, local theaters and moved up to touring stock companies, the type that frequently visited Cleveland.
Pryor made it to Broadway before the burgeoning movie industry beckoned. With his good looks and dark hair, he became known as “the poor man’s Clark Gable.” (Gable was from Cadiz, Ohio.) Pryor went on to romance Mae West in the racy film Belle of the Nineties in 1934. In real life, he married actress Ann Sothern.
George Brent was an Irishman who toured with stock theater companies for several years. By 1930, Brent was in Hollywood, appearing with one of the biggest stars of the day: Rin Tin Tin. He went on to many other films, eventually earning the unofficial title of Bette Davis’s favorite leading man. He appeared with Davis in eleven films, most notably the 1939 Dark Victory.
Brent was also a licensed pilot who flew in some scenes of 1941’s The Great Lie. Show business and flying were natural companions; the thrill and glamour of flying attracted actors who had the money and time to indulge themselves. There were plenty of places to fly in the wide-open spaces of the western United States, and some actors piloted their own planes to location shoots.
Famous flyers, like actors, were idolized and followed by the public. The two passions met most dynamically in one person: Howard Hughes. The young Texas tycoon began building and racing airplanes in the 1920s before turning to filmmaking. His epic Hell’s Angels introduced Jean Harlow to audiences, but its realistic air battles (which resulted in three deaths) stole the movie.
In August 1929, anyone who was interested in aviation, from the famous to the ordinary, headed to a ten-day event that promised to be spectacular. And it was happening in Blanche’s backyard, at Cleveland’s sprawling, new Hopkins Municipal Airport. Cleveland businessmen Louis W. Greve and Frederick C. Crawford knew the public loved to spend Sunday afternoons at the airport, watching planes take off and land. When pilots offered paid flights or performed aerobatics, the crowds swelled appreciatively. Los Angeles had hosted a large air show already, so shouldn’t the state where the first viable airplanes were invented do the same? Local government and industry and the military backed the plan that drew hundreds of flyers and thousands of spectators to the city and to Hopkins for the Cleveland National Air Races.
Blanche and Dewey would be able to watch aerobatic competitions featuring the top flyers, military aerobatics, parachute jumping contests, and the Thompson Trophy Race, an exciting closed-course flying competition. Best of all, they could talk with other pilots. For Blanche, this meant getting to know the small but highly visible band of women who were starting to fly aircraft nationally. Most of them were young, attractive, accomplished, and just as determined as the men. Amelia Earhart was a soft-spoken social worker from Kansas. Ruth Elder was a vivacious movie actress who hoped to be the female Charles Lindbergh. Louise Thaden, from a small town in Arkansas, was a wife and mother. Ruth Nichols was known as the Flying Debutante, due to her privileged background and Ivy League education. Flying was a new and risky endeavor that had captured the country’s imagination. Women in the cockpit were a novelty the press and public couldn’t get enough of. Most articles about the aviatrixes commented, at least briefly, on their demeanor, fashion, and marital status.
Aviation was not an inexpensive pursuit, so in the public’s mind there was an association between flying and wealth and status—although by no means were people like Blanche and Dewey well off. Still, the upper classes were being drawn to flight, and all the trappings followed. The Women’s Emergency Fund Committee of New York City put on an aviation fashion show in 1930, showing the latest ultra-smart fashions for flying a plane or for just traveling in one.
Publicly, most female flyers accepted the attention good-naturedly. They sometimes used it to their benefit. Earhart, for instance, went on speaking tours, addressing women’s clubs as a way of raising funds for future flights. But amid the general goodwill, animosity—and sometimes outright opposition—lurked in hangars and airfields across the country. The women were determined to prove their ability and right to fly alongside men, regardless of whether they were welcomed.
Men seemed to more easily accept many of the women who, like Blanche, learned to fly from their husbands. At the time the first Cleveland Air Races were being planned, Blanche had only held her pilot’s license for a short time. She had become the first licensed female flyer in Ohio in April 1929 and was the first woman to make her initial solo flight at Hopkins. She caught the attention of the local press that spring when she announced she was going to not only attend the air races but compete in an event.
That July, she passed the test to fly transport planes, becoming one of the first ten women in the country to do so. She and Dewey were preparing to travel to Los Angeles so they could fly a Lockheed Vega back to Cleveland, giving her more hours flying cross-country. By now, she had experienced many of the situations that either made or broke rookie pilots. A broken waterline had resulted in her first forced landing in a field, while flying to Wichita, Kansas, to pick up a new plane. Her first deadstick landing—setting the plane down safely after the motor conked out—happened in Oklahoma. Each time she faced a crisis in the air, she quickly thought back to Dewey’s advice.
But nothing could prepare her completely for what she experienced that summer during the first Women’s Air Derby. The event was one of several distance races included in the extravaganza; in each race, pilots began from different specific cities with Hopkins as their destination. Races were scheduled so that each event ended at Cleveland on a different day, thereby keeping up the public’s interest throughout the ten days.
The women would begin their race in Santa Monica, California, and head for the finish line in Cleveland. Humorist Will Rogers, an important aviation proponent, dubbed the race the Powder Puff Derby, but it was anything but frivolous or light-hearted. The men who ran major aviation events, including the Cleveland races, did not want women to participate with the men. Many men—and Dewey was among them—were concerned about the women’s safety in competing against men. The Women’s Derby was the compromise: an event that would—supposedly—keep them safer, in their own sphere. Halle Brothers, a Cleveland department store, was sponsoring Blanche in a new Travel Air, which she christened Miss Cleveland.
There were serious problems even before the race began. Breakdowns and crackups sidelined several of the original twenty participants. As the remaining flyers were being introduced to the crowds at Santa Monica, someone shoved a microphone into Blanche’s face. “Hello, Cleveland,” she blurted. “Here I come!” Privately, she wondered if she’d even get off the ground.
An exchange with a ground crew member just before she took off would haunt her later. The man who packed her baggage and, according to Blanche, “had a very beautiful lady in the race,” asked her if she had ever had to parachute out of a plane. She told him she had not, but would do so if she had a fire or structural failure while in the air. The man paused, wished her luck, and walked away.
Rumors of sabotage by ground crews and spectators were not uncommon during high-stake races, and such rumors persist about the first women’s derby. During the race, the wings of one woman’s plane were tampered with, resulting in a forced landing. Another flyer, who had to make an emergency landing when she unexpectedly ran out of gas, believed someone had partially drained her tank. Another participant returned from a race banquet to find every switch and throttle on her plane turned on. It was impossible to prove whether acts like these were deliberate sabotage, equipment malfunctions, or the interference of spectators. Regardless, the women soon began putting their planes in a wagon-train type circle at night and hired guards to watch them.
Even without sabotage, the women faced multiple obstacles. At each stop on the route, they were feted by the public and pursued by the press. The attention was more than a distraction for them; they were already exhausted by the demands of long-distance flying and a tight schedule. Now, sleep-deprived, they had difficulties dealing with bad weather conditions and the equipment problems inherent in a cross-country flight.
During a stop in El Paso, Texas, the women learned that Marvel Crosson, a young Alaskan who had set a women’s altitude record that spring, was killed when, due to causes that would remain forever unknown, her plane crashed in the Gila River territory, close to Phoenix. They were stunned by her death, and an argument ensued over whether or not to postpone the remainder of the race. Ever since the women entered Texas air space, dicey weather had dogged them—first a sandstorm, then a thunderstorm. Earhart led the contingent that wanted to keep flying. Ruth Elder, who had crash-landed in the Atlantic Ocean earlier that year, argued for a postponement.
While the debate continued, another pilot was facing death at three thousand feet. About thirty miles west of Pecos, Blanche was headed for a fueling stop, when she smelled smoke. Every pilot knew crackups could be fatal, but being burnt alive in a crash was the thing that gave them nightmares.
“Her first thought was to open her parachute and let the plane crash,” the Associated Press reported. But as she realized the fire was in the baggage compartment directly behind her head, she thought she could extinguish it. She tried to wrench the fire extinguisher from its bracket, but couldn’t budge it.
Landing immediately was crucial, but the mesquite-covered terrain was not safe. Nevertheless, she prepared to land. “Side slipping, she drifted her plane to the ground, crashing through mesquite bushes three feet high,” the story continued. Somehow, she landed safely, although her left wing was broken and a wheel was lost. On the ground, she reached into the plane’s compartment, burning her hand as she removed burning debris. A cigarette butt had caught one of her flying suits on fire. Blanche didn’t smoke. She suddenly had a flashback to the crewman who loaded her baggage, but she had no time to think about that. Knowing that the fire could lead to an explosion at any moment, she desperately grabbed handfuls of sand from the ground, throwing them onto the flames until they died.
A few locals who had seen the plane in peril arrived to investigate. Blanche ignored the serious burns on her face and hands and set about stitching up the broken wing with pieces of linen and a surgeon’s needle. A local blacksmith welded the landing gear together. Blanche was ready for takeoff, even as an area official urged her to abandon the plane. Nothing that the blacksmith welded had ever held, he told her, but she didn’t hesitate. She had begun this leg of the race in first place. Now, she knew she had probably fallen to last. If she didn’t at least finish, Halle Brothers stood to lose a $10,000 investment in her and the plane. Even worse, Dewey would be ashamed. She had never hand-cranked a plane before, but she mustered all the strength in her eighty-one-pound frame and cranked it now. The first miracle of the day had been landing safely in the mesquite. The second was being able to gain enough speed on that terrain to get back into the air. To the end of her career, Blanche couldn’t explain how she could do it.
At the Pecos airport, Louise Thaden saw Miss Cleveland circling the field in a plane that “looked like a wounded duck with a broken wing and badly crippled legs,” she recalled in a memoir. Certain that Blanche would crash, Thaden called for fire extinguishers and an ambulance. Amazingly, Blanche precisely landed the plane. It ground looped but remained intact. Shaking, she emerged to tell her story and arrange for further repairs of her plane. The race continued.
Blanche resumed flying and finished in fourth place with a “tremendous ovation from her Cleveland home folk,” Thaden wrote. Blanche did not investigate the cause of the fire, knowing it would be impossible to prove whether the burning cigarette had been intentional. Thaden won that first women’s derby in the heavier plane division, garnering a cash prize and a gigantic wreath of roses. Gladys O’Donnell, a Californian who ran a flying school with her husband, came in second; Earhart was third; and Ruth Elder, fifth. The race brought them unprecedented public acclaim. In the years to follow, these would be the female pilots to watch. Perhaps more important to the women themselves, the derby was the start of lifelong friendships.
Aviation was progressing at a tremendous rate. There were fortunes to be made and flying records to be set, and dozens of talented, daring people were eager to do both. On the day that Blanche’s accident was reported, page one of the St. Petersburg Times gave a glimpse of how consumed the world was with flight: it contained nine items related to aviation. Several stories were from abroad. The Hearst Graf zeppelin was in Japan, waiting to take off for Los Angeles as part of a round-the-world flight. In France, bad weather forced a well-known flyer who hoped to set some sort of international record to abandon his latest attempt. A Spanish designer was building a new type of autogyro in England. The Russians had sent off a new plane to attempt a Moscow to New York flight, just one week after their initial plane crashed.
In U.S. news, in addition to three stories about the air derby, the Department of Commerce announced new regulations that would allow transport pilots to only carry passengers in aircraft for which they had passed specific examinations. A pilot who was accustomed to flying only single-engine, open cockpit planes would not automatically be qualified to pilot a much larger tri-motored cabin craft, said Clarence M. Young, a company official. An emotional brief, reflecting flying’s attraction, noted that a dozen little blind girls had “got the thrill of their lives” when they took their first airplane ride in New York.
With America posed at the brink of the Great Depression, international economic woes straining stability, and China and Russia on the verge of war, aviation appeared a possible savior. It would provide jobs through manufacturing, transport, and leisure travel. The famous flyers of the day—and there seemed to be more of them all the time—were role models for the youth and a source of optimism and excitement for the general public. Although aircraft had been used extensively in the world war, aviation was not promoted widely for military use. It was seen as a dynamic, benevolent force that would improve people’s lives in innumerable ways. Female fliers intended to be part of that future.
A few months after the women’s derby, Blanche became a founding member of the Ninety-Nines, an organization of female fliers named for the original number of members, which included Earhart, Thaden, Phoebie Omlie, and all the leading female pilots of the day. Over the years, the Ninety-Nines has become an international fellowship of women who fly, both in the sky and in space.
While Blanche was becoming more involved in the national aviation scene, Dewey’s career also progressed. He became the chief pilot for the Standard Oil Company of Ohio when the company bought its first plane. During a 1930 visit at his home in New York State, the Noyeses convinced oil magnate John D. Rockefeller to take a flight. Rockefeller, a Cleveland native, was in his early nineties at the time. Blanche flew that day. It was Rockefeller’s first plane ride, and, although he said he thoroughly enjoyed it, it was his only flight. Blanche took a great deal of teasing from her fellow pilots.
In 1931, Blanche was working for the Great Lakes Aircraft Corporation, demonstrating planes. The Cleveland company manufactured navy dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and commercial light aircraft, including the Great Lakes Sport Trainer biplane. Impressed with her ability to fly varied craft for Great Lakes, in 1933 Standard Oil asked her to demonstrate the new Pitcairn model of the autogyro, the forerunner of the modern helicopter. The craft was still in the experimental stage, and Blanche was one of the first to pilot one; it was a measure of her ability that she was entrusted with demonstrating them.
Also in 1933, the Noyeses left Cleveland. Dewey, who had started flying for the fledgling American Airlines in 1932, accepted a job with the Ethyl Company, a New Jersey firm that made fuel and lubricant additives.
As Dewey’s career soared, so did Blanche’s. Blanche made the news again in 1934 when she won the Leeds Race Trophy, for a race leading up to the National Air Races. She worked constantly on her flying skills. Her flying time now equaled that of her good friend Amelia Earhart, a much more experienced flyer. And Dewey was teaching Blanche instrument flying, in which one navigates and flies by cockpit instruments rather than visually, by the environment. Few women were learning this difficult technique, but Blanche mastered it, becoming one of the first instrument-rated pilots in the country. She and Dewey told friends they planned to fly around the world. With her husband as her copilot, she would take off from Newfoundland and head for Alaska, the same route Wiley Post had attempted on his fatal 1935 flight.
But that dream ended when Dewey was killed in a plane crash on December 11, 1935, in New York State. Dewey was working for Ethyl Gas, flying a company official, Elwood M. Walter, to a business meeting that afternoon. Dense fog and a snowstorm caused the four-passenger cabin plane to crash into a clump of trees near the community of Nunda, fifty miles southwest of Rochester. Newspapers reported that Dewey and Walter were apparently killed instantly, their bodies thrown clear of the demolished plane. Blanche was devastated. Throughout the ordeal and funeral, her friends in the Ninety-Nines stood by her.
Dewey’s service was held in the Ninety-Nines’ hangar on Long Island. Earhart took a special interest in Blanche, inviting her to join her and her husband, G. P. Putnam, at their California home. Blanche also found solace in work. The Ninety-Nines asked her to visit major cities in Ohio and Michigan to drum up interest in an all-women’s derby as part of the National Air Races of 1936.
The following year, Blanche became involved in an aviation venture that gave her a new purpose in life. At the time, pilots were still relying primarily on compasses and roadmaps to navigate. Though major cities and airports were obvious and relatively easy to find in good weather, most of the country was still composed of small cities and smaller towns. Landing fields, often only known to local pilots, outnumbered full-fledged municipal or county airports. Flyers needed more visual ground guides—visible from ten thousand feet. Pilot Phoebe Omlie, who was working with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, came up with a plan. She had a wealth of practical experience: One of the early female pilots, she started flying in the South and Midwest in 1921. She was the nation’s first licensed transport pilot and one of the first female flight instructors. She was an excellent flier, setting many records and winning numerous air races.
Her plan was simple in design and ambitious in scope. She proposed a system of air markers be established across the country. These were to be painted on tops of large roofs in highly visible colors of black and orange or black and chrome yellow. In wide-open spaces where rooftops were nonexistent for hundreds of miles, markers would be made from white-painted rocks or compositions of bricks and concrete cobbled together. In towns with airports, the marker gave the town name, an airport symbol, an arrow with the number of miles next to it—pointing toward the airport, and a meridian (north) indicator. For towns without airports, the markers gave the name of the nearest town and of the town with the nearest airport, with directional arrows, a meridian marker, and an indication of the best route to follow in case of inclement weather.
The project started with a goal of sixteen thousand air markers, to be established at the cost of $1 million through the Works Progress Administration. Out-of-work men were hired to do the actual painting and constructing of markers. Three members of the Ninety-Nines, marshaled by Omlie, scouted site selections, oversaw installations, and made aerial checks of completed markers. The Bureau of Air Commerce in Washington was in charge of the project. In May 1936, Earhart wrote a letter to bureau director Gene Vidal asking if he could use another pilot. She told him about Dewey and Blanche. “She is pretty well shot to pieces losing Dewey, and it would be a godsend to her to have a job in the Department,” Earhart wrote. “She is a good flyer … has her own monocoupe, and is really serious about aviation.” Earhart vouched for Blanche’s integrity and offered to secretly pay her fare to Washington if Vidal decided to interview her.
Vidal hired Blanche soon after. By August, she was working with Louise Thaden in Texas when Olive Ann Beech of the Beechcraft airplane company offered to sponsor Thaden in that fall’s Bendix Transcontinental Race. Thaden immediately asked Blanche to be her navigator and copilot. Blanche had already turned down a copilot position from Earhart, but now she agreed to fly with Thaden.
The Bendix was one of the era’s most prestigious air races, won by superior fliers, including Roscoe Turner and Jimmy Doolittle. It did not welcome women. Industry leaders believed highly publicized crashes such as Marvel Crosson’s and that of a young female pilot in a Chicago race would lessen the public’s support of aviation. As a result, women were excluded from major races, including the Bendix and the National Air Races’ mens’ events. The women still wanted to race with the men, however, and in 1936 public sentiment dictated they be allowed to participate.
Beechcraft modified a plane for Thaden by removing the rear seat to make room for an extra fifty-six-gallon gas tank. An extra twelve-gallon oil tank was added, as was a pump fitted between the pilots’ seats for sending oil directly into the main oil tank. Space was so tight that seat-pack parachutes were removed; the women would still wear their personal parachutes. Thaden joked that if she weighed a half-pound more she couldn’t have fit into the plane.
Nonetheless, Thaden was thrilled with the G17R Staggerwing, which she described as “a trim blue princess of the air … as sleek and fast as a greyhound.” She and Blanche had no expectation of winning the race. As beautiful as the Beechcraft was, it wasn’t a racer, and the women didn’t have the competition experience that most of the men did. Thaden thought the race would be a pleasant distraction for the still-grieving widow. Blanche thought it would be “a swell way to get to the [national] races.”
Thaden was trying to keep her involvement low-key, but the fact was, she was a superb pilot. Before winning the 1929 Women’s Derby, she had set altitude and endurance records for female flyers. Unlike several pilots of her generation, Thaden didn’t have a history of crackups and forced landings. She was skilled, confident, and she loved being in the cockpit. Blanche couldn’t have chosen a better partner.
The night before the Bendix, the women discussed who would bail out first if they were in danger of crashing. Blanche insisted that Thaden would jump first, since she had two children. Sleep was elusive. Around 3:00 A.M. on September 5, they headed for Floyd Bennett Field in New York, the race’s starting point. Thaden was wearing a white suit with a blue blouse. Blanche was dressed more casually, in blue-green culottes and a green flannel shirt. Just before they took off, Thaden’s husband—also a pilot—remarked that they had a chance of placing in the race, if they didn’t get lost.
Weather became an issue almost immediately. Thick ground fog—potentially lethal to any pilot—obscured their course. Extreme static rendered their radio useless. Ninety minutes into the race, the best they could estimate was that they were somewhere over Ohio. Suddenly, Blanche spotted an air marker outside Circleville, one she and Thaden had installed weeks earlier, and it allowed them to get back on course.
As the Beechcraft sped across the heartland, thunderstorms and a strong cross headwind presented more challenges. But the radio was working again, and they made it to their scheduled refueling stop in Wichita, Kansas, in good shape. Within eight minutes, ground crews had replenished gasoline and oil and the pilots had studied weather reports. The women each drank a glass of water and were given soft drinks and sandwiches to sustain them on the rest of the flight. At no time did they leave their craft.
Walter Beech, head of Beechcraft, leaned in to give Blanche and Thaden some spirited advice in his distinctive high-pitched voice: “What the hell do you think you’re in, a potato race? Open this damn thing up!” Although the women promised Beech and his wife, Olive Ann, their best, they were determined to fly a safe race. But they almost didn’t make it off of the Wichita airfield. As they started to roll down the field, an Army Air Corps plane approached about a hundred feet to their left, preparing to land. Determined not to lose time, Thaden brazenly held to her course, rather than yield to the landing plane as she should have. The army pilot also held to his course, bringing the two craft perilously close together until Thaden took a sharp left turn, rising in the air and missing the other plane by just a few feet.
A head wind blowing at 60 miles per hour forced the Beechcraft to slow down over the desert. Although they had averaged 211 miles per hour hour on the first leg of the race, they had now decreased to 153 miles per hour. They worried about not being able to reach the Bendix’s conclusion at Los Angeles’s Mines Field by the 6:00 P.M. deadline, an embarrassment they were determined to avoid.
Skill and decent weather were with them the rest of the way, however; as they neared LA, Blanche searched for the oil derricks that in 1936 were close to the airport. As they increased air speed to 230 miles per hour, visibility worsened. Before they could slow down, they were upon the airport, and then they overshot it. Blanche directed Thaden back to the finish line near the grandstands. It was 5:10 P.M. They crossed the finish line from the wrong direction, but they had made it. They had finished the race in a stock plane, flying mostly at cruising speed, in fourteen hours, fifty-five minutes, and forty-six seconds, a record time for women flying cross-country.
Still thinking they were in the rear, Thaden taxied toward a line of parked planes far down the field, avoiding the grandstand where the winners would be greeted. Suddenly, Blanche noticed men running beside the Beechcraft, gesturing and shouting something she couldn’t quite hear. She asked Thaden to stop the plane. One of the men who had been running alongside the plane yanked the door open and ordered the women out. “We think you won the Bendix!” he said, to their shock. Thaden wrote in her autobiography that the male organizers of the race seemed a little disappointed she and Blanche had won. But that didn’t concern the women. An emotional Olive Ann Beech hugged Thaden, and then Thaden and Blanche were dragged to the grandstand, where sixty thousand spectators waited to see the women who had done the impossible.
The first place prize money totaled $7,000. Never dreaming that a woman could win, the organizers had come up with a consolation prize of $2,500 for the first woman across the finish line. Thaden and Blanche took both awards. Second place also went to a woman, Laura Ingalls, a socially prominent New Yorker who had excelled in many areas, ranging from ballet to nursing, before becoming a pilot. Lack of luck on the part of some other fliers played a part in the race. Well-known pilot Benny Howard, who had won the previous year, crashed during the race, as did another top male contender. Earhart and her copilot, Helen Richey, lost time while struggling to secure an emergency escape hatch that had opened in air. They finished fifth.
Luck had certainly been with the Beechcraft that day, but Thaden’s fearless flying and Blanche’s keen navigation were the primary factors in the win. Spotting the Circleville air marker may have decided the race. The hoopla over their win continued for months; Thaden and Blanche had earned a permanent spot in aviation history. At the same time, another female flier was also making history. Beryl Markham, a thirty-one-year-old English society beauty and mother, had just become the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic. To further her glory, Markham had flown what pilots considered the more hazardous route: east to west, from England to New York.
Courageous, talented, dazzling, these women seemed capable of anything. Many could be found on the society pages as well as the news pages. Some parlayed their flying skills into other careers, such as writing and film. Blanche “buckled down to serious work,” she wrote two years later, finding her calling with air marking. It wasn’t glamorous, but her position was fairly high profile for a female aviator. She was named head of the air-marking division of the Bureau of Air Commerce, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1937. For six years she worked out of Washington, D.C., supervising the installation of thousands of markers across the country. Air safety became her passion, no doubt fueled by the memory of Dewey’s fatal crash and the deaths of many friends over the years. During this time, she was said to be the only female pilot in America authorized to fly a military plane.
Then, Pearl Harbor changed everything. On that bright Sunday afternoon of December 7, 1941, Blanche was just completing talks with aviation officials about adding more safety markers across the wide open spaces of Texas. Now the vulnerability of America’s air space had been severely compromised. The Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) soon decided the air markers would be too helpful to the enemy and that they must be obscured or obliterated. All Blanche’s work would be gone.
“The war has changed the situation so completely that I don’t really mind it at all,” she told a New York Times reporter while discussing the situation in August 1942. Within twenty-six days, almost a thousand markers along the West Coast were removed. Blanche’s job was to locate all markers within a sixty-square-mile region and then contact the regional CAA officials, who removed the markers. Flying in a Cessna, Blanche retraced her course over each region, making sure that no markers remained.
“Once in a while I get a little jittery wondering if some particularly zealous airplane spotter might mistake me for an enemy ship and shoot me down and ask questions later,” Blanche told a New York Times reporter in August 1942, “for, of course, I’m flying constantly over restricted areas.”
After the war, Blanche continued to work for the CAA, making sure the thirteen thousand air markers that had been removed were now put back. More markers were added, with members of the Ninety-Nines volunteering to do the work. When federal funding for the program ended, Blanche became a fundraiser, seeking donations from local communities to keep markers current and in good shape.
Air safety was her mission, and she wrote numerous newspaper and magazine articles on the subject. She collected and shared accounts of pilots and passengers whose lives had been saved by air markers. One story she gave to the Associated Press after the war concerned navy commander John S. Hill, flying a jet fighter across Ohio when he ran into trouble. Hill was headed for Columbus when he realized he didn’t have enough fuel to get there. He saw the Greenville marker in Darke County and followed its arrow to the local airport. He crash-landed the jet but walked away with minor injuries, praising the air marker with saving his life.
Although she lived in Washington, Blanche’s Ohio connections remained strong. She came back to visit periodically and was always delighted to interact with any Ohioan interested in flying. In 1948, she wrote to Mrs. Elden Bayley of Springfield to pass along an article about air marking and to compliment her on her daughter Caro’s win in an aerobatics contest. “She flew beautifully, and her takeoffs and landings were as pretty as any I have ever seen,” Blanche wrote. “I know how proud you must be of her.”
Three years later, in the United States, Caro Bayley became the Women’s International Aerobatics champion. In France, Bayley was awarded the coveted Bleriot Medal for her flying from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale of France. Blanche undoubtedly knew of Bayley’s honors and cheered them. Encouraging female flyers—and especially girls—continued to be one of her passions. For years, she spoke to students whenever possible, even participating as a judge in a NASA–Plain Dealer Science Fair in Cleveland in 1962. She served as international president of the Ninety-Nines from 1948 through 1950 and attended regional meetings in Ohio whenever she could.
Blanche received so many accolades for her contributions to aviation over the years that she had to start keeping a list of them. The governments of France, Cuba, and Brazil each honored her. In 1963, she met President John F. Kennedy—twice. That January, she was one of six women presented with the Federal Woman’s Award for achievement in their field. That July, the Ninety-Nines chose her to fly a commemorative stamp honoring her old friend, Amelia Earhart, from Kansas to Washington, where she presented the first-day covers to Kennedy.
As much as Blanche enjoyed and appreciated all the honors, her real reward was simply getting to do what she loved every day. “I don’t think I would want to live if I couldn’t fly,” Blanche told a reporter in 1956 after becoming the first woman to receive a gold medal from the Department of Commerce for her work. She was still traveling around the country, checking air markings, sometimes climbing up on rooftops to check the work up close. By then, she had logged 11,075 solo flying hours doing air marking. “I’m pretty near to making my office in the air. I never seem to have time for a vacation,” she said happily.
Blanche was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in 1970. She continued working until she retired in 1972, at the age of seventy-one. But she never really stopped doing what she loved. While the sky had once been the limit for women, now all of space beckoned. Blanche served actively on the Women’s Advisory Committee on Aeronautics and continued to lecture and freelance as an aviation consultant.
Although she lived in the Watergate Apartment Building in Washington, she also maintained an apartment in Euclid. She came back to Ohio periodically to rest and recharge, sometimes attending meetings of the local Ninety-Nines. She never remarried.
“The Ninety-Nines tried to get her to write her memoirs,” said Helen Sammon, a flyer and trustee of the International Women’s Air and Space Museum (IWASM) in Cleveland. But Blanche couldn’t be persuaded. “She didn’t like to be in the limelight. She was just a modest person,” Sammon said.
When Blanche died in 1981, at age eighty-one, a brief notice in Time magazine noted the Bendix triumph and her friendships with Earhart and Rockefeller. But her real legacy is much deeper. Her work in air safety benefited the safety of many generations of flyers. Establishing a visible career in aviation made her a role model and inspiration for other female pilots.
Women of Blanche’s generation and the one before her were “a special breed,” said writer and historian Sarah Byrn Rickman of Kettering in 2013. They were, in many ways, bigger risk takers than the men, she added. They faced the same dangers in the sky, struggled with equipment and weather, and had to find the money to maintain their craft and travel. All fliers had to prove themselves, but the women especially.
They began flying under the public’s assumption that they innately weren’t as capable of performing as well as men. They had to be a novelty before they could just be pilots and, later, astronauts. “Blanche was a natural,” Rickman said. “She was solid, steady, and she stuck with it. She was working in aviation as a career when not many women were.”
Throughout her career, Blanche loved flying solo. As she told Dewey shortly after she started flying in 1929, she never felt alone in the air. Dewey’s voice was always in her mind, advising her, encouraging her. And, like many pilots, she felt close to God while flying. When she had her first forced landing in 1929, she found herself alone in a little hotel in the Midwest, thinking of Dewey at home at four o’clock in the morning.
She pulled out a Bible and started reading, then picked up a pen to write to Dewey. In what became known as the “Pilot’s Psalm,” she paraphrased Psalm 23 for flyers. “Thou preparest an airport before me in the homeland of eternity,” she wrote. “My plane flies gracefully, surely sunlight and starlight shall favor me on that last flight I take, and I’ll abide in the presence of God forever and ever.”
What better epitaph for the girl flyer from Cleveland.
