Blanche Scott Pioneer Pilot

By Suzanne Norquist

Imagine women brave enough to fly the newly-invented airplane in 1910. Blanche Stuart Scott was one such woman. At age twenty-six, she became the first woman in the United States to fly a plane solo. The short flight took place by accident during training. Soon, she became an “aviatrix,” performing daredevil stunts high above the ground.

The choice to fly shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Blanche’s family. As a pre-teen, she became a champion ice skater. By age twelve, she amazed her friends by performing tricks on a bicycle. At age fourteen, her father bought her a car, a one-cylinder Cadillac (yes, her family was wealthy). There was no minimum driving age, and no license required.

In 1910, she became the second woman to drive an automobile across the country, from New York to San Francisco. The Willys-Overland car company sponsored the trip. They sent a female reporter with her to record the entire event. While on a stop in Dayton, Ohio, she saw two planes flying over a field. She later recalled thinking, “Anybody who’d do that was crazy as a loon.” Of course, she wanted to fly.

Because of her notoriety, she was taught by none other than Glenn Curtiss, founder of the U.S. aircraft industry. The plane had a thirty-three-horsepower motor and room for one person to sit out front. Mr. Curtiss had to run along beside the wing, giving verbal instructions as she practiced “grass cutting” (taxiing the plane).

Blanche’s skirt kept blowing into her face so that she couldn’t see where she was going. Finally, one of the mechanics gave her bicycle clips to attach the bottom of the skirt around her ankles.

Mr. Curtiss had placed a block behind the throttle to keep the plane from reaching the speed required for take-off. On one of her “grass cutting” practices, the block slipped. She flew forty feet into the air for a brief time, making her the first woman in the United States to fly a plane.

It wasn't long before she was flying in exhibition air shows and earned the nickname “Tomboy of the Air.” She was known for stunts like flying upside down and performing “death dives” from four thousand feet to two hundred feet in seconds.

Since, at the time, women didn’t wear pants, Blanche wore specially made bloomers filled with three petticoats. A Fifth Avenue designer created her brown satin flying suit.

She took a break from flying for a brief marriage to the press agent from her cross-country automobile tour. However, the life of bridge playing, telephoning, and social visiting didn’t suit her. Soon, she was divorced and flying exhibitions again. She also worked as the first female test pilot in America.

Accidents and fatalities were common, and Blanche had her share (of accidents, not fatalities).

In 1913, a wing cable snapped during a performance, causing the airplane to crash into a swamp. She suffered a shoulder injury  which kept her from flying for almost a year. She flew some after that but gave up her wings in 1916 at age thirty-two.

She was bothered by the public’s “morbid interest in crashes” and their “disappointment at air meets where no one was killed or injured.”

Blanche moved into another cutting-edge industry—film. She wrote scripts and acted in a few silent movies. Of course, some of them involved airplanes, like The Aviator and the Autoist Race for a Bride in 1912.

For fourteen years, she wrote scripts for some of Hollywood’s largest studios. She hosted radio programs. During World War II, she worked in a factory making batteries.

For every aviation first, she was invited to ride along. She helped to preserve the history of aviation until she passed away in 1970 at age eighty-four. In 1980, she was honored with a postage stamp.

Blanche Scott was the prime example of living life to its fullest.

***

”Mending Sarah’s Heart” in the Thimbles and Threads Collection
Four historical romances celebrating the arts of sewing and quilting.
Mending Sarah’s Heart by Suzanne Norquist

Rockledge, Colorado, 1884
Sarah seeks a quiet life as a seamstress. She doesn’t need anyone, especially her dead husband’s partner. If only the Emporium of Fashion would stop stealing her customers, and the local hoodlums would leave her sons alone. When she rejects her husband’s share of the mine, his partner Jack seeks to serve her through other means. But will his efforts only push her further away?
For a Free Preview, click here: http://a.co/1ZtSRkK

Suzanne Norquist is the author of two novellas, “A Song for Rose” in A Bouquet of Brides Collection and “Mending Sarah’s Heart” in the Thimbles and Threads Collection. Everything fascinates her. She has worked as a chemist, professor, financial analyst and even earned a doctorate in economics. Research feeds her curiosity, and she shares the adventure with her readers. She lives in New Mexico with her mining engineer husband and has two grown children. When not writing, she explores the mountains, hikes, and attends kickboxing class.

She authors a blog entitled, Ponderings of a BBQ Ph.D.

Amelia Earhart

The Rest of the Story
by Martha Rogers

After all her accomplishments, Amelia looked forward to her dream of flying around the world.


She carefully planned the trip with her crew to make sure they had the best route.

Her first attempt began on March 17, 1937, Fred Noonan, Harry Manning and Mantz (who was acting as Earhart's technical advisor) were on board, but they encountered problems which forced them to stop in Hawaii for servicing. An accident on take-off three days later severely damaged the aircraft, so the flight was cancelled.

With the Electra now grounded for repairs, Earhart needed additional funds for a second attempt. With Putnam, she was able to secure the funds and prepared for the next flight. Instead of flying east to west, they reversed their pattern to fly west to east most likely as the result of changes in global wind and weather patterns along the first route.

With repairs competed and funds available, the second flight began in Miami, Florida where she announced her plans to circumnavigate the globe with Fred Noonan as her only crew member. 

Earhart and Noonan

They departed on June 1 and traveled to South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. They arrived at Lae, New Guinea on June 19, 1937 thus completing 22,000 miles of the journey. The last 7000 miles would be over the Pacific.

The last transmission indicated Earhart and Noonan were flying near Howland, but then all transmission was lost. Attempts to make contact with both voice and Morse code failed. One hour after the last transmission, the USCGC Itasca undertook an unsuccessful search. 

Several bearings taken by Pan American Airways stations and the captain of the USS Colorado were sporadic for four or five days and added to the confusion of where the plane could be. Four days after the last verified transmission, the battleship Colorado was ordered to take over search efforts.

Officials abandoned search efforts after a few months, but researchers never stopped looking for clues. G. P. Putman, her husband, was one of those who undertook a search in the Phoenix Group and other islands in the area. Many theories grew from that research and from other observations. The most pre-dominant one being the plane crashed and burned in the ocean. They may have ditched the plane after running out of fuel and crashing, but perished at sea.

Another theory has them captured and imprisoned by the Japanese and later executed. A different version of that theory has the Japanese shooting the plane down over the ocean. The research became enough to convince some of her relatives that the Japanese were somehow involved.

Among other myths and legends that sprang up through the years included Amelia becoming a spy, she landed on an island and assumed a new identity, she and Noonan turned back and crashed somewhere else entirely, and one even suggests she was forced to make propaganda broadcasts with Tokyo Rose.

Men and women have written numerous books about the disappearance, and the show Unsolved Mysteries did a story as well as the National Geographic Channel on its Undiscovered History series. Others have attempted to duplicate the flight in honor of Amelia. The home where she was born is now the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum.

This is one of the museum rooms

More recently, forensic anthropologists believe bones found decades ago may those of Earhart. The journal states that a bone measurement of bones found on Nikumaroro in 1940 may well be those of Earhart. No matter what is proven with the discovery, some aficionados of the mystery of where she may be will continue with their speculations. 

Have you ever heard tales and stories about Amelia Earhart? 

Start your reading for Christmas with Love Blooms at Christmas, a delightful story of a professor at a Bible college and the daughter of a philanthropist whose love blooms as they work together on a children's Christmas play in the early 20th century.

Martha Rogers is a multi-published author and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston, Texas where they are active members of First Baptist Church. They are the parents of three sons and grandparents to eleven grandchildren and great-grandparents to four, soon to be five. Martha is a retired teacher with twenty-eight years teaching Home Economics and English at the secondary level and eight years at the college level supervising student teachers and teaching freshman English. She is the Director of the Texas Christian Writers Conference held in Houston in August each year, a member of ACFW, ACFW WOTS chapter in Houston, and a member of the writers’ group, Inspirational Writers Alive.


Find Martha at: www.marthawrogers.com

www.hhhistory.com

Twitter: @martharogers2 

Facebook: Martha Rogers Author

Amelia Earhart

Woman in Flight

By Martha Rogers

Amelia Earhart is a woman who proved that women could excel in whatever field they chose, her choice being aviation. She excelled as a female pilot in a world dominated by men at the time.

Born in Atchison Kansas on July 24, 1897, she began going against traditional gender roles 

at an early age by playing basketball and taking auto repair classes in school. During WWI she became a Red Cross nurse’s aid in Toronto, Canada. While there, she began spending time watching the pilots who flew and trained with Royal Flying Corps at a local airfield in Toronto.

After the war, she returned to the

United States to enroll at Columbia University where she began as a pre-med student. However, she stayed in school only a year because her heart and ambitions took her elsewhere.

In 1920, she and her father were at an airfield in Long Beach when a pilot, Frank Hawks gave her a plane ride that would forever change her life. It didn’t take long after they were airborne for her to decide she had to fly. With money she saved and her father’s help, she took her first lesson at Kinner Field with teacher Anita Snook who was a pioneer female aviator in 1921.

In order to pay for the lessons, she worked at the Los Angeles Telephone Company as a filing clerk. While there she began saving money for her own plane. Her first airplane was a secondhand Kinner Airster she nicknamed Canary because of its yellow color. Below she is with Snook and the plane.

  

Hard work and poor conditions accompanied those early training days. She chose a leather jacket to wear but had to sleep in it several nights to give it a “worn” look. She also cropped her
hair short. She loved flying and was determined to stay with it.

Amelia in her flight gear

She set a world’s record for women when she flew to an altitude of 14,000 feet in “The Canary” in 1922. In 1923, she became the 16th woman to be issued a pilot’s license.

She was engaged for a time to Samuel Chapman, a chemical engineer from Boston but broke it off in 1928. Later, in 1931, she married George P. Putnam, a publisher, but she retained her maiden name for her cross-country tours and flying exhibitions.

Between 1930 and 1935, Earhart set a number of women’s speed and distance aviation records. One of those was from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland with the intent to fly to Paris, France in her single engine Lockheed Vega 5B (pictured here) in an attempt to emulate Charles Lindbergh’s flight. Due to weather conditions and

mechanical problems, she had to land at Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland.

As the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic, she received the Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress and several other honors for the feat.

During this time, she also set seven speed and distance records for women in aviation. With her new desire to fly around the world “as near the waistline as could be,” she then began to realize her red Vega was too limited for long distance flying over the ocean.

For a brief time, she and pilot Paul Mantz operated the Earhart-Mantz Flying school located in Burbank Airport in California. She later used the airport to hangar her Lockheed Electra 10E. It included extensive modifications to the fuselage to incorporate additional fuel tanks.

The Electra was widely publicized as “Flying laboratory,” but little useful scientific information was planned. Her plans were to circumnavigate the globe and gather information for her next book. Captain Harry Manning was signed on as her navigator who was also a skilled radio operator who knew Morse code. Then Fred Noonan was chosen as a second navigator because of his vast experience in both marine and flight navigation. She is pictured with Fred before their flight.

Next month I will tell more about that flight around the world, her disappearance, speculations about what happened and the disappearance has spawned many myths and legends about the legendary Amelia Earhart.

Have you ever flown a plane or wanted to be a pilot?

Martha Rogers is a multi-published author and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston, Texas where they are active members of First Baptist Church. They are the parents of three sons and grandparents to eleven grandchildren and great-grandparents to five. Martha is a retired teacher with twenty-eight years teaching Home Economics and English at the secondary level and eight years at the college level supervising student teachers and teaching freshman English. She is the Director of the Texas Christian Writers Conference held in Houston in August each year, a member of ACFW, ACFW WOTS chapter in Houston, and a member of the writers’ group, Inspirational Writers Alive.

Find Martha at: www.marthawrogers.com,

Twitter: @martharogers2

Facebook: Martha Rogers Author Page

The Roaring '20's

Gabrielle Here:

The word that best describe the 1920's to me is change. After World War I, society changed overnight. The confines of culture fell away and freedom reigned. Women cut off their hair, shortened their dresses, and took off their corsets. Electrical appliance transformed the domestic life and lightened the load on the house wife. Hollywood began to transform the nation through motion pictures. Technology made it possible to spread news across the globe in a matter of minutes. Continents were connected through aviation. And women finally had the right to vote.

Ironically, in this time of freedom and relief from the confines of societal pressures, prohibition held fast. But the very law that made alcohol illegal also made crime and corruption rampant.

The year 1927 holds special interest to me, because it was the year my hometown hero, Charles A. Lindbergh, made his historic non-stop, trans-Atlantic flight in his monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis. When I researched our local daily newspaper in the summer of 1927, many interesting tidbits of life jump out at me.

1. Aviation Ruled. On May 21st, 1927, a small airplane, carrying a young, unknown man from Minnesota, landed in Le Bourget, France, just 33 1/2 hours after it left New York. Charles A. Lindbergh instantly became the most famous man in the world. Six men died attempting the same flight in the weeks before Lindbergh successfully flew the Atlantic. The world held its breath until he landed safely, and then he became the first Super Star in history. The cameras loved this handsome Midwesterner. He captivated the world with his good looks and his daring accomplishment.

But one town on the planet was especially proud:. Little Falls, Minnesota, Lindy's hometown (and mine).

Photo courtesy of the Morrison County Historical Society

Our little, inconspicuous town was now talked about in the New York Times and known around the world. Can you imagine?

He came home to Little Falls in August of 1927 on his Goodwill Tour. Between July 1927 and October 1927 he flew to all 48 states in the Union, and it's estimated that 1 in every 4 Americans went out to see him on the tour. Our town put on quite a celebration in honor of Lindbergh!

Every day, without fail, our local newspaper covered an aviation story. After Lindbergh made his trans-Atlantic flight, others followed in his footsteps. Flights were made from California to Hawaii, New York to Paris, across the United States, and on and on. One editor put it quite well:

Photo courtesy of the Morrison County Historical Society

2. Beauty Pageants Enthralled. One of the other interesting items I'm noticing in the newspaper is the sheer volume of beauty pageants and contests held in the 1920s. The daily paper has pictures of women from all across the US winning different pageants and contests. It's an interesting cultural element that I'll be studying more.

3. Hollywood Influenced. I'm amazed at how much the daily newspaper mentioned Hollywood--and not all of it was good. One of the main themes I've noticed, especially in the editorial pieces, is the influence Hollywood had on divorce. It seems that one divorce or another is mentioned almost every day. The editor makes many comments on how flippant actors and actresses were about marriage. It seems some things never change...

Photo courtesy of the Morrison
County Historical Society

Many other fun things were going on in the summer of 1927. President Coolidge was visiting the Black Hill of South Dakota, a young maid in a wealthy mansion in Canada fell in love with the heir and was having a grand wedding in the "wilderness," women were beginning to challenge the protocol for courting (by pursuing men!), and motoring on the weekends was becoming a popular past time.

1927 is a fun year to research. The whole decade is a fascinating look at the rapid change in American culture.

Your Turn: What word would you use to describe the 1920s? What intrigues you about this decade?

Gabrielle Meyer lives in central Minnesota on the banks of the Mississippi River with her husband and four children. As an employee of the Minnesota Historical Society, she fell in love with the rich history of her state and enjoys writing fictional stories inspired by real people and events. 

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Amelia Earhart - Pioneering Woman in Aviation

by Tamera Lynn Kraft

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”  Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart, the pioneer woman in aviation is known as much for her final flight as she is for her aviation career. She set out in 1937 to be the first person to fly around the world and was never heard from again.

During World War I, Amelia became a nurse for in a soldier’s convalescence home. There she learned from the pilots what it was like to fly a plane. After the war, her father paid for her flying lessons. She worked odd jobs to buy her first plane. She painted it yellow and called it “Canary”.

In 1928, GP Putnam, a famous author and biographer, approached her about becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean by GP Putnam. She married him two years later. In 1929, she started an international women’s flight organization called the Tuscon Ninety Nines formed in Long Island, New York. She was the first president of the organization that began with ninety-nine members.

In 1932, she became the first woman to ever fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and the first woman to receive the Airforce Distinguished Flying Cross. Only a few women have been able to receive the same honor.

Amelia wore her hair cropped and had a tomboy appearance. While most women of her day wore dresses and didn't cut their hair, she was usually always pictured in a leather flight jacket around an airplane or on a runway. She said it kept her warm during flights in her small aircraft.

On March 17, 1937, Earhart’s first attempt to circumnavigate the world did not get far. After traveling from California to Hawaii, her plane experienced mechanical problems and was grounded. The plane ended up severely damaged and had to be transported back to California for repairs.

Earhart made her final attempt two months later on July 2, 1937. She experienced technical difficulties on the Howland Island approach. There are several theories about what happened ranging from a damaged antenna to confusion on Earhart’s part. There is no way to know for certain. Whatever happened, Earhart and Noonan missed the island and began to run low on fuel. 

The plane crashed.

Amelia Earhart tried to inform rescuers of her location. Transmissions continued for a few days after they ditched, but rescuers couldn't figure out where she was. The U.S. Navy joined the search, but turned up nothing. There was evidence of a crash on Gardner Island, but since the island was uninhabited, it was discounted. Instead, the navy focused on the open ocean. After the official search ended, Earhart’s husband, George Putnam, continued the search on his own. Eventually, he gave up and had her declared dead in 1939.

Following her disappearance, several conspiracy theories emerged. Some claimed Earhart and Noonan were American spies captured and executed by the Japanese. Others believe the Japanese captured the aviators and murdered them, but they were not spies. One bizarre theory claims she returned to America and lived under an assumed name. Whatever happened, she is still a considered a role model for young women everywhere.

Tamera Lynn Kraft has always loved adventures and writes Christian historical fiction set in America because there are so many adventures in American history. She has received 2^nd place in the NOCW contest, 3^rd place TARA writer’s contest, and was a finalist in the Frasier Writing Contest. Her novel Alice’s Notions and novellas Resurrection of Hope and A Christmas Promise are available on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble.