Bridge Over Roaring Waters

Would you work 14 hours, seven days a week, for 30 to 60 cents an hour, all the while hanging over a 1,000-foot granite gorge?

In 1929, you might have. Eighty men in Fremont County, Colorado, answered such a call for construction crews needed for the world’s highest suspension* bridge. The span would cross the Arkansas River’s nine-mile, sheer-granite gorge near Cañon City. It wasn’t the safest job in town, but with the Roaring Twenties fading to a whimper, Wall Street’s foundations crumbling, and the Great Depression creeping in, it was a paying job.

Photo of the Royal Gorge Bridge and canyon by Timothy Brown.

Once known as the Grand Canyon of the Rockies, the gorge bottlenecks the Arkansas River between 1,000-foot granite cliffs that close in to as little as 30 feet across. It was impassable to explorers like Lt. Zebulon Pike in 1806 as he followed the river into the massive canyon just west of a park-like rendezvous area later known as Cañon City. Others were also hindered by the shoreless river section, including Major Stephen Long in 1820 and John C. Fremont in the 1840s.

Long before, Mountain Utes wintered in the area as did occasional Spanish missionaries in the 1640s, fur trappers and mountain men of the 1700s and 1800s, and settlers in the 1850s-60s.

One hundred years after Pike’s account of the great canyon, President Theodore Roosevelt recognized the geological phenomenon and signed a congressional grant ceding what was by then recognized as the Royal Gorge plus 5,120 wildland acres to the city of Cañon City.

Twenty-three years later, bridge-building financier Lon P. Piper of San Antonio, Texas, and Chief Engineer George E. Cole of Houston, began the seemingly impossible project of spanning the gorge. O.F. Copes and Fred Rice served as construction superintendents on either side.

A Cañon City Daily Record article by Peggy Gair from May 17, 2013, recounts the construction, beginning with trenches dug on each rim of the gorge and two 150-foot fabricated-steel towers set into the granite. Two half-inch steel cables were lowered on either side and joined at the bottom of the gorge. The cable was pulled back up to the rim, and from this, workers pulled additional cables across the expanse – 4,200 galvanized No. 9 steel wires, Gair said, one at a time. 

“Twenty-one hundred strands of this wire made up one giant cable for each side that holds up the deck of the bridge,” Gair wrote.

View of the cables from the North Rim as author drives across the bridge in 2011.

Collars were clamped around each massive cable prior to securing steel girders on the bridge deck. Wire fencing was attached to railings and 1,292 planks were laid. The bridge was roughly a quarter mile long (1,260 feet) and 18 feet wide. It still is.
Construction began on June 5, 1929 and was completed that November. An engineering feat in any decade. 

According to historical records, there were no major accidents or fatal injuries during the bridge’s six-month construction period, despite its remarkable height. The bridge opened to the public on Dec. 8, 1929 with a toll of 75 cents per person. Cost of completion: $350,000, reportedly $100,000 over budget.

Old meets new at the North Rim reconstruction site following the 2013 wildfire.
The bridge is seen intact and unharmed in the background. Photo by author.

In June 2013, a wildfire tore through 3,000 acres in the area, including the 360-acre parkland hugging each end of the bridge that forms the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park. All but two buildings were destroyed when the fire leaped from the south rim of the canyon to the north. However, the bridge itself sustained only minor damage to a few wooden planks. The park and its exhibits were rebuilt over the next two years and officially re-opened in May 2015.

Look closely to see the hanging bridge holding
the railroad a thousand feet below. Photo by author.

Thanks to the construction of the famous hanging bridge that was anchored into the granite walls just above the same river section in 1879, a railroad travels the once impassable stretch. Serving as a passenger route in the 1880s and 90s, the railway later succumbed to alternate routes through the Rocky Mountains. The passenger line was discontinued in 1967, but the Royal Gorge Route Railway currently provides scenic trips through the gorge year-round.

Ninety years after the span was conquered, the Arkansas River still roars, and the bridge still stands. Mountain runoff during summer-rafting months sends category-4 and -5 rapids through the gorge, clearly audible from the bridge 1,000 feet above.

*The Royal Gorge bridge maintained its status as the World’s Highest Bridge for 70 years until the construction of the Liuguanghe Bridge in China in 2001. It remained the World’s Highest Suspension Bridge until the 2003 completion of the Beipan River Guanxing Highway Bridge in China.

~

Davalynn Spencer can’t stop #lovingthecowboy. As the wife and mother of professional rodeo bullfighters, she writes romance for those who enjoy a Western tale with a rugged hero, both historical and contemporary. She holds the Will Rogers Gold Medallion for Inspirational Western Fiction, teaches writing workshops, and plays the keyboard on her church worship team. When she’s not writing, teaching, or playing, she’s wrangling Blue the Cowdog and mouse detectors Annie and Oakley. Learn more about Davalynn and her books at www.davalynnspencer.com.

Stutz Bearcat ~ America's First Sports Car

by Ramona K. Cecil

My husband loves cars, especially vintage cars. I can’t tell you how many hours this past summer and fall we’ve spent perusing car shows. Some of his favorite models among the vintage cars are sports cars. While he doesn’t own one himself, he knows a lot about them and loves looking at them. What he might not know is that the vehicle considered “America’s first sports car” was built in our own home state of Indiana.

The Bearcat, originally “Bear Cat,” made its debut in 1912. A high performance roadster built by the Stutz Motor Company of Indianapolis, Indiana—formerly the Ideal Motor Car Company—the Bearcat was designed to appeal to the wealthy client with a “need for speed.”

1912 Stutz Bearcat - Notice small "monocle" windshield 

A century ago, the Stutz Motor Company was among the most prestigious of car companies, their automobiles highly sought by the rich and famous. Several innovations by company engineers earned Stutz a reputation for building fast, durable, safe, and stylish cars, and made the name synonymous with automotive excellence. The groundbreaking innovations included the most powerful and quietest V-8 engine on the market, the first under-slung chassis, dual overhead cam engine, and the first use of safety glass.

Stutz Wisconsin Engine design

The first car to bear the Stutz name was build in five weeks and then immediately entered in the 1911 Indianapolis 500 race where it finished in eleventh-place, earning the moniker “The car that made good in a day.”

Number 8 Stutz car lined up for a race

A year later the company rolled out the Bear Cat; America’s first sports car. In its debut year, the Bear Cat was entered in thirty automobile races and won twenty-five of them.

1912 Stutz Bear Cat

                       

In 1915 driver Cannonball Baker—for whom the Cannonball Run car rally is named—broke speed records when he drove a Stutz Bearcat from San Diego, California to New York in 11 days, 7 hours, and 15 minutes.

Edwin George "Cannon Ball" Baker in Stutz Bearcat

The Stutz Bearcat put the “roar” into the Roaring Twenties. Along with flappers, gangsters, speakeasies, and raccoon-skin coats, the Bearcat became an iconic symbol of the era. 

Hollywood movie featuring a Stutz Bearcat

1923 Stutz Bearcat

Hollywood fell in love with the Stutz automobiles, but seemed to have a special affinity for the sporty Bearcat, which became a status symbol. In 1923 a Stutz Bearcat cost $2,765.00; almost $48,000.00 in today’s money. Famous owners of the Bearcat included illustrious names like actor Gary Cooper, author F. Scott Fitzgerald, and gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Jay Leno numbers among the current celebrity owners of a Stutz Bearcat sports car.

Jay Leno with his 1918 Stutz Bearcat

Made for speed and beauty, the Bearcat somewhat lacked in comfort. The exceedingly stiff clutch gave rise to the rumor that it was purposely engineered that way to discourage women from driving what was considered a “man’s” sports car.

Despite all the time my husband has spent admiring Stutz Bearcats at car shows while doubtless dreaming of driving one, I don’t see a Stutz Bearcat in our future. But should our fortunes change and my husband find himself behind the wheel of one, I wouldn’t decline an offer to climb in beside him and take a spin around town in America’s first sports car—one of Indiana’s own. 

Ramona K. Cecil is a poet and award-winning author of historical fiction for the Christian market. A proud Hoosier, she often sets her stories in her home state of Indiana.

Check out her website at www.ramonakcecil.com 

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First National Women's Air Race

Hello from Carla Stewart!

The Roaring Twenties saw many new innovations and interests across America. Aviation was quickly gaining the attention of the public as a novelty that was here to stay and would change the way people traveled forever. Women, too, were coming into their own during that decade and were as fascinated with flight as much as their male counterparts, although they weren't as widely accepted. They were even scoffed at by many who felt they weren't capable and should remain at home where women belonged. 

Many women, though, were determined and took to the skies in endless competitions for altitude, endurance, and speed records. Early in 1929 there were 75 licensed women pilots in the US, and they had become better acquainted through various competitions. Elizabeth McQueen of the National Women's Aeronautical Association proposed having a National Women's Air Derby similar to the one where men competed. She met with Cliff Harrison in May who was instrumental in founding the race. The National Exchange Club, along with the Cleveland Air Races, organized and sponsored the event that took place in August of 1929. 

To qualify, the women had to be licensed, have 100 hours of solo flying experience, 25 hours of which had to be in cross-country flight. Twenty women, including Amelia Earhart, accepted the challenge and gathered in Santa Monica, CA for a race that would last nine days with 17 stops and culminate in Cleveland, OH. There were two classes. One for heavyweight planes; another for the lighter weight ones. 

Some of the female aviators who competed in the first women’s transcontinental air derby which began in Santa Monica on August 18, 1929. Amelia Earhart is fourth from the right. Louise Thaden, who won the race, is fifth from the right. Photo courtesy of Saint Louis University Libraries.

A large and festive crowd, including many notable Hollywood stars, gathered for the start of the race which was a gunshot in Cleveland transmitted by radio to Clover Field in Santa Monica. Will Rogers was on hand as a reporter and quipped that since he'd seen so many pilots powdering their noses, the race ought to be called the Powder Puff Derby. It was a name that stuck. 

Starting shot of the Women's Air Race - from http://www.air-racing-history.com/

Will Rogers - dubbed the race the Powder Puff Derby - Photo credit: Wiki Commons

The first leg of the the race was short, only to San Bernardino, but trouble was already brewing that first night when oil was discovered in the gas tanks of two planes. Sabotage was suspected but the next day the race continued. Other acts of presumed sabotage occurred early in the race. The wires between the wings of one entrant's plane broke and it was discovered acid had been poured on them. Another pilot's plane malfunctioned and garbage was found in the carburetor. Some thought an investigation was in order, but the women who by now had developed a strong bond, refused. Led by the colorful and passionate contestant Pancho Barnes, they banded together. If someone was trying to sabotage the race, it would likely be stopped, and the saboteurs would win. All the women agreed they wanted to continue.

Pancho Barnes - Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

Amelia Earhart - Photo Credit: Air and Space Museum. Smithsonian Institute

Banquets were held each evening at the the over-night stops. The women jokingly said they were on the "rubber chicken" circuit because of the unwavering menu. Dressed in flight gear by day, the women donned evening gowns each evening to greet and promote women's aviation on their trek across the country.  

Blanche Noyes, one of the women in the 1929 race. Photo credit: The Cleveland Memory Project

At the Phoenix stop, one woman was unaccounted for. Marvel Crosson, a cheerful young aviatrix from Alaska who'd quickly become a favorite of the other women, never arrived. The next day her plane was discovered crashed in the mountains of Arizona. Marvel didn't survive. 

Marvel Crosson

It was a sobering moment for the women who were more determined than ever to finish. 

In El Paso, Texas, the race was temporarily halted due to stormy weather, and the women enjoyed a much-welcomed relaxing evening in the cantinas just across the border in Mexico. While they were there, though, oil magnate, Mr. Halliburton called for the race to stop. ""Women have conclusively proven they cannot fly. Women have been dependent on men for guidance for so long, when they are put to their own resources, they are handicapped." 

The women and the organizers were outraged and sent out a quick rebuttal. "We officially thumb out noses at Mr. Halliburton." The race continued, but not without mishaps. Pancho Barnes crashed her plane, the damage irreparable. One women had to drop out when she came down with typhoid fever. Another got lost and landed in a cow pasture somewhere in Oklahoma. She gained her bearings and continued.   

Ruth Nichols, one of the race contenders. Photo credit: Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institute

Their efforts were not going unnoticed. 20,000 people met them in Ft. Worth and swarmed the field to get a glimpse of these brave women. By the time they reached Cleveland, a mob had gathered to greet and congratulate the women. Louise Thaden, flying in a heavyweight Travel Air was declared the winner and a shawl of roses placed on her shoulders. Phoebe Omlie won in the lightweight class. That evening more than 5000 people attended a celebratory banquet in a hangar in Cleveland. Some of the world's top aviators and politicians heralded the women for a great race. It was a new era in aeronautical history. Women had taken their place beside men, proven their skills, and demonstrated courage. 

Louise Thaden, Gladys O’Connell and Ruth Nichols, pioneer female aviators during the first women’s transcontinental air derby in 1929. Thaden won the race. Photo courtesy of Saint Louis University Libraries.

The first National Women's Air Race at a glance: 

• Dubbed the "Powder Puff Derby" by Will Rogers
• Twenty entrants 
• Course from Santa Monica, CA to Cleveland, OH - a 2800 mile race
• 17 stops in 9 days
• One fatality - Marvel Crosson of Alaska
• Fourteen women finished race
• Winners: Louis Thaden (heavyweight class) and Phoebe Omlie (lightweight)
• $8000 in total prizes 

By November of 1929, there were 117 licensed women pilots in the US. All were invited to an organizational meeting for the promotion of women in aviation. 99 women attended and became charter members of "The Ninety-Nines". They are still active today. 

I included the National Women's Air Race in my most recent release A Flying Affair. Weaving historical facts into fiction has become a passion that has proved to be both challenging and exhilarating. For more information about the Women's Air Race, I recommend you watch Heather A Taylor's award-winning documentary Breaking Through The Clouds. 

Blue Skies! 

Carla Stewart is the award-winning author of six novels. With a passion for times gone by, it is her desire to take readers back to that warm, familiar place in their hearts called “home.” Her 2014 release, The Hatmaker's Heart, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Selah Award. Her newest release is A Flying Affair. Daredevil Mittie Humphreys navigates her heart as well as the skies in this beguiling adventure of grit and determination during the rollicking Roaring Twenties. Learn more about Carla at www.carlastewart.com

 

Women Pioneers in Aviation Plus a GIVEAWAY of A FLYING AFFAIR

Greetings from Carla Stewart in Oklahoma! 

As I alluded to in my post on Charles Lindbergh last month, I'm expanding the conversation about pioneers in aviation, notably women pilots in the infancy of aviation. The Great War was the first time that airplanes were used so extensively, and when it ended in 1918, manufacturers and the government were left with a surplus of planes no longer needed in the war effort. Since the beginning of time, though, people have yearned to fly so the public was more than ready to buy up the surplus and take to the skies themselves. And surprisingly, a number of women strapped on leather helmets and goggles and climbed into the open cockpits of those early planes. Most were single engine bi-wing planes (Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" being the most common) with few controls and virtually no regulations in the early days on qualifications for flying them. 

Amelia Earhart, Courtesy Wiki Commons

Amelia Earhart is probably the most well-known of those early women aviatrixes. She hailed from Kansas where she grew up on a farm riding horses but at age twenty she had her first airplane ride. Before the plane was two hundred feet off the ground, she knew she had to fly. This intense burning inside to conquer the skies is a common denominator for many of the women who flew in those early years. Amelia got her first plane in 1921 and a few months later set a new altitude record of 14,000 feet in her first competition. She went on to place third in the inaugural National Women's Air Derby (Powder Puff Derby) in 1929. In 1932, she became the first women and the second person in history to fly solo across the Atlantic. Her feat came five years to the day after Lindbergh's historic flight. 

She continued to scale new heights and was an advocate and supporter of other women in aviation. In 1935, she became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to California, and in 1937, set her sights on becoming the first woman to fly around the world, a journey of 29,000 miles. With only 7000 miles left, contact was lost with the Coast Guard who was monitoring her flight. Amelia's plane simply disappeared over the South Pacific. Rescue efforts were unsuccessful and eventually called off, but her legacy remains. She would have been 40 years old two weeks after she disappeared. 

Bessie Coleman, Courtesy Wiki Commons

Many other women also hold esteemed places as pioneers in aviation. Bessie Coleman, an African-American women born to sharecropper parents, attended one year of college in Oklahoma before moving to Chicago. While working as a manicurist, she heard the stories of pilots returning from WWI and longed to fly herself. No American flight schools would accept her because she was a woman and black. She studied French and went to Paris where she became the first American woman to receive an international pilot's license. She did stunt flying as a means of making a living, but her dream was to open an aviation school for black women. Her dream was never realized. She died when she was thrown from a plane the day before she planned to participate in a parachute demonstration in Florida, but she's been honored as one who gave a voice and hope to African-American women. 

Pancho Barnes - Courtesy Wiki Commons

Florence Lowe (Pancho) Barnes was one of the most colorful and passionate of the female aviation pioneers. Born to a wealthy family in California, she was known for flaunting unexpected conventions by often wearing men's clothing, smoking cigars, and peppering her conversations with foul language. Still, she was a larger than life personality with a generous heart for helping her fellow aviatrixes and was popular in their ranks. She was a barnstormer and stunt pilot and flew in the first National Women's Air Derby in 1929. Her plane crashed, but she came back to win the following year where she broke Amelia Earhart's air speed record by flying at 196 mph. In the early thirties, she worked as a Hollywood stunt pilot and established the Associated Motion Picture Pilots' Union. She's been the subject of both films and books over the years and started the Happy Bottom Riding Club, a fly-in dude ranch in California. 

Louise Thaden (on right) with friend Frances Marsalis - Courtesy Wiki Commons

Another major pioneer figure in women's aviation was Louise Thaden. She hailed from Arkansas, but while working in an office in Wichita, Kansas, she caught the eye of Walter Beech, an airplane manufacturer who asked her to be a sales rep for his company, if she would move to San Francisco. Part of her salary was flying lessons. While in California, she married an Army Signal Corps pilot and got her own pilot's license. She won the first National Women's Air Derby in 1929 in a plane built by the company she worked for. She participated in many competitions for altitude, speed, and endurance and broke records time and again. The first year that women were allowed to compete with men for the Bendix Trophy Race (New York to Los Angeles), she not only won, but also set a new world's record of 14 hours, 55 minutes. She retired from competing in 1938 and worked with the Bureau of Air Commerce to promote the creation of airfields. 

Marvel Crosson, a young pilot from Alaska, also competed in the National Air Derby of 1929. Immensely popular with the other women in the race, it was a sobering moment when Marvel's plane crashed in the Arizona desert, throwing her from the plane and killing her. It was the only fatality in the race. 

Flying was a dangerous calling, but one for which the women who answered the call, would not be thwarted. They were smart, courageous, and leaders on the frontier of aviation. In the words of Amelia Earhart, 

"After midnight, the moon set, and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the esthetic appeal of flying."

That appeal is part of what inspired me to write A Flying Affair, the story of a high-spirited young woman in the Roaring Twenties where adventure and romance collide in the skies. The book releases in June, but for you, dear readers, I have an early copy that I'm giving away here. 

GIVEAWAY: Please leave a comment below telling me the most adventurous thing you've ever done. Or better yet, have you flown a plane yourself or jumped out of one? I can't wait to hear your answers! 

Blue skies!!

Carla Stewart is the award-winning author of six novels. With a passion for times gone by, it is her desire to take readers back to that warm, familiar place in their hearts called “home.” Her 2014 release, The Hatmaker's Heart, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and is a current Selah Award finalist. A Flying Affair releases June 2, 2015 . Daredevil Mittie Humphreys navigates her heart as well as the skies in this beguiling adventure of grit and determination during the rollicking Roaring Twenties. Learn more about Carla at www.carlastewart.com

Lucky Lindy - A Legendary Life

by Carla Stewart

In 1927, two men of humble beginnings rose to fame that surpassed even that of an American President. One was Babe Ruth, New York Yankees slugger, who led his team to seven lifetime American League Championships and four World Series Championships. In 1927, he hit a career-high 60 home runs and is still considered by many as the greatest baseball player in history. 

Earlier that year, though, another man rose to the forefront in a different arena - the world of aviation. Charles A. Lindbergh was born in Minnesota, a shy and rather dreamy boy with an uneventful childhood. An only child, he grew up in a comfortable household but one that lacked warmth and affection. In college, he was on the fringe of most everything and classmates were hard-pressed to recall any anecdotes about him when later he became the most talked-about man in America. 

America was in a state of flux following the Great War, but aviation was an area that showed great promise on the changing face of society. Formal training was not required to be a pilot and war-surplus planes (Curtiss Jennies in particular) could be purchased for two hundred dollars or less. Barnstorming with aerial stunts such as wing-walking were a great past-time that captured people's fancy in small towns across the country, and especially in the mid-West. Lindbergh was one of those who was smitten from his first flight in 1922 at a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska. He obtained a plane and began barnstorming. Two years later he took a job as an airmail pilot flying long hours on the Chicago to St. Louis route. It was then he began to dream of being the first man to fly across the Atlantic. A New York businessman had offered the $25,000 Orteig prize in 1919, and as yet no one had claimed it, but a growing number of contenders were hoping to be the first. Lindbergh knew he had to at least try.

Charles Lindbergh - Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons

Even so, at age twenty-five, Lindbergh wasn't considered a front runner for the coveted feat and indeed, several men before him perished while trying to make the dangerous crossing. Lindbergh, though, persuaded a group of businessmen to build him a plane. The Spirit of St. Louis was built to Lindbergh's specifications but a lot of it was guesswork. The wood and tubular steel frame was covered in pima cotton painted with six coats of aluminum-pigmented dope (a type of varnish that made the cotton shrink to fit tight over the frame). Once completed, it was little more than a flying gas tank. 

Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons

Storms and flooding across America in the spring of 1927 made people question whether it was a good idea to attempt the flight at all with the unusual weather patterns, but on May 20, a determined Lindbergh took off from Long Island while onlookers held their breaths as the Spirit of St. Louis rose shakily, then came back to earth with a bump. It rose and fell again, and with scarcely five hundred feet left of the runway, the plane still hugged the earth. On the third try, it lifted. Very few spectators that day thought there was a chance that Lindbergh would make it to Paris. 

Much has been made of the flight itself, and I've always loved the Jimmy Stewart movie The Spirit of St. Louis that shows the agony that Lindbergh went through as he charted his course, alone above a dark and swirling sea, lost much of the time. The thoughts that must have swarmed through his mind boggle mine, but miraculously, thirty three and one-half hours later, the Spirit of St. Louis landed at Le Bourget Field in Paris. Lindbergh's obscure life would never be the same after this monumental achievement. 

A replica of The Spirit of St. Louis - Missouri History Museum

Fast facts about the flight: 

• The plane was built in a mere two months and tested for less than a month before the triumphal flight. 
• A slight drizzle fell from the sky during the night before take-off and the runway was a muddy mess.
• The Spirit of St. Louis was sighted over Nova Scotia a few hours after take-off and not seen again until it arrived in Paris.
• 450 gallons of fuel were burned during the flight.
• The length of the flight was 3,600 miles. 
• The only items Lindbergh carried with him were five sandwiches, water, and his charts and maps. He didn't even have a change of clothes for when he arrived in France. 
• A crowd of 150,000 people met him at Le Bourget Field in Paris

Ticker-tape parades and thousands, if not millions of people welcomed him on his return to the States and on his Victory/Goodwill tour to cities across the country. He was the most sought-after man in America, if not the world, Newspapermen dubbed him "Lucky Lindy", a name he despised. He visited many cities in the following months all the while maintaining a reserve that was like the shy, bashful portrait of his childhood days. When asked why he attempted such a hazardous endeavor, Lindbergh said, "Life without risks is not worth living."

Medal of Honor bestowed on Lindbergh for his accomplishment. Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Much has been written about Lindbergh and his eventful but sometimes tumultuous life after that glorious day in 1927. Two books that I enjoyed were One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson and The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin. Both were books which aided me in research for my own upcoming book, A Flying Affair, which begins a few weeks after Lindbergh's famous flight. I'll be talking more about that on this blog over the next few months and giving you a glimpse of this aviation pioneering time in history. 

Thanks for joining me today. I'd welcome your comments about your flying experiences or fascination with a particular era in history. What is the longest flight you've ever gone on? What risks have you taken in your life? Please share. 

Carla Stewart is the award-winning author of five novels. With a passion for times gone by, it is her desire to take readers back to that warm, familiar place in their hearts called “home.” Her newest release is The Hatmaker's Heart. In New York City’s Jazz Age, a naïve, but talented young hat designer must weigh the cost of success when the rekindled love with her childhood sweetheart is lost and her integrity in the cutthroat fashion world is tested. A Flying Affair releases this June. Daredevil Mittie Humphreys navigates her heart as well as the skies in this beguiling adventure of grit and determination during the rollicking Roaring Twenties. Learn more about Carla at www.carlastewart.com