1920
STAD LUCAS’S RIDING BOOTS
Tad Lucas picked up where Annie Oakley (see 1910 entry) left off. She was tiny, a fraction over five feet tall, and had the charisma of the born performer. But Lucas’s tool of choice was the horse, not the gun. During the golden age of rodeo in the 1920s and 1930s, she was the unquestioned first lady of the sport.
Born Barbara Inez Barnes in 1902 to a ranching family in western Nebraska, Lucas was breaking colts and riding calves by the time she was seven. By age 15 she was performing professional rodeo, and at 20 she was doing it full time, sometimes competing against men. She toured all over the United States and Mexico and also appeared in London and Sydney. Lucas was an accomplished bronc rider, relay racer, and snappy dresser (“best dressed” was an award category then and sometimes now). But she really made her name as a trick rider, winning the event eight straight times at the Cheyenne Frontier Days.1
The red leather boots shown here were made specifically for trick riding, and Lucas used them for years. The heels are flat, making it easier to stand in the saddle, and the rubber vamps are flexible to enable her to move in and out of the stirrups.
Her success was unmatched. Lucas won the allaround cowgirl championship at Madison Square Garden six times in seven years (the other year she was pregnant)2 and every major rodeo at least once. In the teeth of the Great Depression, she earned more than $10,000 a year.3
When the rodeo circuit dropped women’s events in the 1940s, Lucas continued to perform in trick-riding exhibitions. She would vault into the saddle, then go on to the “Cossack drag”—learned from an actual Cossack family she had befriended at a Wild West show—in which she would keep one foot in a stirrup, then hang upside down along the flank of the horse, trailing her fingers in the dirt. She would conclude by standing on the saddle, arms raised in farewell.
Lucas was one of the founders of the Girls’ Rodeo Association in 1948 to promote all-female rodeos. The GRA had seventy-four members at the start; now known as the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association, it has about 2,500,4 and the best can earn more than $300,000 a year.5
1925
STATISTICS FROM RED GRANGE’S NFL DEBUT
T
he numbers on the scorecard for this Thanksgiving Day game—6 first downs, 29 punts, 4 completions, zero points—describe a dull contest. Even so, this was one of the most important games in National Football League history, because it was the first time Harold “Red” Grange took the field as a pro.1 The NFL had much to be thankful for.
Nicknamed the “Galloping Ghost” for his elusive running style, Grange was a legend at the University of Illinois at a time when the college game ruled. His greatest performance took place when he was a junior, against Michigan on October 18, 1924. On the opening kickoff, Grange started up the middle, broke right, and cut back across the field and into the end zone 95 yards away.2 Then he made touchdown runs of 67, 56, and 45 yards. In the first 12 minutes, Grange scored as many touchdowns as the Wolverines had given up in their previous 20 games.3 Widely broadcast over radio and featured on newsreels, the game made Grange a national phenomenon. He joined the golden-age pantheon of sports stars, along with Ruth, Dempsey, Tilden, and Jones.
Two days after his last college game in 1925, Grange dropped out of college (he was well short of a degree)4 and signed with the NFL. The decision was controversial. To call the NFL fledgling5 in 1925 would be generous. Conceived in a car showroom in Canton, Ohio, five years earlier, the professional game was considered déclassé and more than a little disreputable, played by and for a rough element. Attendance ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand per game. “I’d have been more popular with the colleges,” Grange later said, “if I had joined Capone’s mob in Chicago.”6 His Illinois coach was so furious at his decision that the two didn’t speak for years.7
Part of the credit for getting Grange to the NFL altar goes to C. C. “Cash and Carry” Pyle, one of the first sports agents (see the 1926 entry on Helen Wills). The rest goes to George Halas, owner/coach/trainer/publicist of the Chicago Bears. A fellow Illinois alum, Halas thought Grange could take the NFL to the next level. He and Pyle negotiated a per-game salary (for at least 30 minutes of play) for Grange, plus half the gate.8 Grange made more money in 1925 than everyone he played against—combined. He was worth every cent.
The Ghost’s first game against the Chicago Cardinals drew 36,000 people; legend has it that Halas wept as he counted the receipts.9 The Bears played one more game that season, then embarked on a two-part, coast-to-coast tour over 66 days. The highlight was a game played before a record 70,000 people in the Polo Grounds that saved the New York Giants franchise from going under. “For the first time,” Halas wrote, pro football “took on true national stature.”10 As for Grange, he made more than $100,000. Off-field earnings—a doll, a brand of ginger ale, movies, sporting goods, an outboard motor, even a meatloaf11—boosted that figure nicely.12
It was not all glory; when Grange played poorly in Boston near the end of the first part of the tour, the crowd let him have it.13 At one point he played 10 games in 17 days. Still, the modest ice-hauler from Wheaton, Illinois, enjoyed the money and didn’t mind the fame. Sixty years later he recalled, “After I became a pro, if something I ordered didn’t cost $20, I didn’t want it.”14
Not everyone got caught up in the glow of Grange’s burgeoning celebrity. When Grange and Halas were introduced to Calvin Coolidge as being with the Chicago Bears, the president replied politely, “Glad to meet you fellows. I’ve always enjoyed animal acts.”15
A financial dispute kept Grange out of the NFL the following year; he and Pyle started a rival league that folded after one season. He rejoined the Bears, but after tearing a knee ligament in 1927, he was a ghost of his former galloping self, probably better on defense than with the ball. His greatest moment as a pro came in 1933, when he saved the first NFL title game with a last-second tackle. He retired the next year.
Red Grange did not make the NFL on his own. What he did was hasten the sport’s acceptance by introducing it to hundreds of thousands of Americans and pushing it onto the sports pages. His prime was short—but it was transcendent.
1926
HELEN WILLS’S LEATHER TRAVEL BAG
B
efore a boxing match at Madison Square Garden on February 15, 1926, the crowd bowed their heads for a moment of silence. They were being asked to send good thoughts over the ocean to Helen Wills, the 20-year-old American tennis star who would be playing the match of her life the next morning against France’s Suzanne Lenglen.1 Wills had been traveling the Riviera for weeks, lugging this bag and a dozen rackets, in the hope of playing Lenglen.
Now she would.
The consensus was that Wills would need all the positive thinking she could get. Lenglen had dominated tennis for years, and at 26 she was at her peak. Her breakthrough came in 1919, when she saved two match points to win a thrilling three-set Wimbledon final against Dorothea Douglass Chambers, 10–8, 4–6, 9–7. It was a passing of the generations. Chambers, a 40-year-old mother and seven-time champion, played in traditional attire: ankle-length skirt and long-sleeved buttoned-up top, with her long hair piled up.2 The bob-haired Lenglen looked practically naked by tennis standards, wearing a knee-length skirt and a loose, sleeveless blouse. If Lenglen had done nothing else, she would have done a great deal by liberating sportswomen from the fashion police.
Her style went well beyond her apparel. Lenglen was known to sip cognac and brandy between sets, and she favored an aesthetic of play that drew on the ballet. To imagine Lenglen is to see her in flight, her silk skirt swirling to form an abstract pattern—and then she would cream the ball. Lenglen played with a power and aggression never seen from a woman before. She treated all of tennis with imperious charm, and with occasional bolts of temper. Think of “Suzanne Lenglen” as French for diva, and that gets the idea across.
She got away with it because she was so good. From 1919 to 1926, Lenglen went 269–1 and lost just two sets.3 She never lost a singles match at Wimbledon,4 which she won six times. Even the male-dominated sports press couldn’t help but notice. Lenglen became the first internationally celebrated female athlete; in her prime, she might have been the most famous athlete in the world.5
Six thousand miles away, Helen Wills of California was building her own reputation. She won the US national championship in 1922, 1924, and 1925 and made the finals of Wimbledon in 1924. Unlike Lenglen, the drama queen, Wills was stoic on the court. Like Lenglen, she was fiercely competitive, dismissive of other players, and determined to be regarded as number 1.
She and Lenglen were by far the world’s best female tennis players, and when Wills decided to play the Riviera circuit in 1926, everyone looked forward to watching them play each other. But Lenglen played hard to get. The two women were rarely in the same place at the same time. With little other sporting action, a large number of sportswriters had the hellish duty of following Wills all over the Riviera. So the suspense grew.
By the time the two made their way to the final at the Carlton Club in Cannes, the match had become a full-blown sensation. Newspapers all over the world sent reporters; in California, where the match began at 2:00 a.m., there were all-night parties to listen to it.6 For the first time, a contest featuring women was top of the sports news.
Perhaps no match could have lived up to the hoopla, but this was an excellent one. Lenglen won 6–3, 8–6, her closest match in years, and the level of play was impressive.7 This mattered. A sluggish, error-filled contest would have brought scorn on women’s tennis, which didn’t get much respect. The little coverage there was tended to emphasize the players’ looks or clothes.
Helen Wills and Suzanne Lenglen were both beyond that. Individually and together, their game was so good that they were impossible to patronize. They may have been the first women to command respect as athletes. Six months after their match in Cannes, though, another emerged; Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel, besting the men’s mark by two hours. She came home to ticker-tape parades. These breakthroughs didn’t earn women’s sports consistent attention, but at least they began to get a little.
Wills credited Lenglen with being the better player on the day, which was true.8 But it was also true she had given the French goddess all she could handle. Many a knowledgeable spectator—including, perhaps, Lenglen—saw the younger American as a real threat to her hegemony. Jean Borotra, one of the famous “four musketeers” of French tennis, called it “a heartbreaking victory”9 for Lenglen.
The two never played each other again. Wills missed action for a few months due to medical issues, and then Lenglen turned professional. Under the rules of the era, not only did that bar her from all the national championships, but amateurs like Wills could not even play against her.
Wills picked up right where Lenglen left off. From 1927 until mid-1933, she didn’t lose a set. While the press praised Wills for her girl-next-door looks, her peers saw something else. “I regard her as the coldest, most self-centered, most ruthless champion ever known to tennis,” her fellow champion, Bill Tilden, remarked (see the 1930 entry on him).10 Wills might have been pleased with the description. While lacking Lenglen’s flamboyance, the economy of her style had its own appeal; Charlie Chaplin would say that the most beautiful thing he ever saw was “the movement of Helen Wills playing tennis.”11 By the time Wills concluded her career, she had won 19 singles majors (in 22 attempts), including eight at Wimbledon, a record that lasted until Martina Navratilova won her ninth in 1990.
Wills called the match against Lenglen the most important of her career because it showed her a level of play to which she could aspire.12 Not that she was going to emote over it. “No tennis match,” she wrote, “deserved the attention which this one received.”13
1929
AMELIA EARHART’S GOGGLES
I
n the years immediately before and after Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic crossing, flying was a sport and entertainment, as well as a form of transportation. Americans flocked to air shows to gawk at the sight of wing-walkers and loop-the-loops. Aviators were local heroes and national celebrities.
Among them were more than a few women. Just as they had done with the bicycle, women seized the chance to fly before it could be forbidden to them. Pancho Barnes, Jacqueline Cochran, Bessie Coleman, Ruth Elder, Amy Johnson, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Beryl Markham, Ruth Nichols, and Phoebe Omlie all wrote excellence in the sky. In 1928 Elinor Smith showed the kind of audacity pilots of all kinds appreciate, flying under four New York City bridges. She was 17.1 To be an aviatrix was considered the epitome of cool, modern womanhood—and Amelia Earhart was the most famous of this elite corps.
In 1929 air racing was a full-fledged sport, with big crowds, rules, and regular newspaper coverage. It was also for men only. Some of the more imaginative aviation leaders recognized that a women’s race could bolster public confidence. If the weaker sex could negotiate thousands of miles all by themselves, that would be an excellent advertisement for the industry. The women pilots loved the idea of testing themselves—and perhaps taking home as much as $3,600 in prize money.
That August, before 20,000 spectators, 19 women took off in the National Women’s Air Derby, a race from Santa Monica to Cleveland, with overnight stops along the way. Will Rogers called it the “Powder Puff Derby.”2 But the powder-puffs, Earhart among them, put women’s aviation on the front pages of newspapers all over the country for nine days. Not all the news was good: one pilot died, probably from carbon monoxide poisoning;3 another ventured into Mexico. One plane was totaled.
Critics cited these events as proof that women should not fly. But they didn’t have much of a case. One competitor put out a midair fire, then calmly landed her plane, proving that she certainly had the right stuff. Sixteen planes finished, a higher percentage than any similar race among men.4
Earhart finished third. She wore these goggles at the start of the race; they were lifted from her plane at an early stop.5
In the years after the Derby, Earhart set an altitude record, in 1931; became the first woman (and second person) to cross the Atlantic solo, in 1932; and was the first to fly solo from Hawaii to California.6 By 1935, women were competing against men on equal terms in some air races. Earhart was the first to do so, finishing fifth in a cross-country event.
Flying was high risk. The death rate for pilots was high, and engines conked out in midair on an alarmingly regular basis. So Earhart knew the danger when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, prepared for a west-to-east, around-the-world journey. The hazards multiplied in the vast expanse of the central Pacific, where they had to navigate from speck to speck. With three-quarters of the flight behind them, on July 2, 1937, they disappeared, leaving behind a haunting mystery: What happened?
Before she left on her final journey, Earhart wrote to her husband, George Putnam: “Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.” Her life, and death, bore witness to those words.
STAD LUCAS’S RIDING BOOTS
Tad Lucas picked up where Annie Oakley (see 1910 entry) left off. She was tiny, a fraction over five feet tall, and had the charisma of the born performer. But Lucas’s tool of choice was the horse, not the gun. During the golden age of rodeo in the 1920s and 1930s, she was the unquestioned first lady of the sport.
Born Barbara Inez Barnes in 1902 to a ranching family in western Nebraska, Lucas was breaking colts and riding calves by the time she was seven. By age 15 she was performing professional rodeo, and at 20 she was doing it full time, sometimes competing against men. She toured all over the United States and Mexico and also appeared in London and Sydney. Lucas was an accomplished bronc rider, relay racer, and snappy dresser (“best dressed” was an award category then and sometimes now). But she really made her name as a trick rider, winning the event eight straight times at the Cheyenne Frontier Days.1
The red leather boots shown here were made specifically for trick riding, and Lucas used them for years. The heels are flat, making it easier to stand in the saddle, and the rubber vamps are flexible to enable her to move in and out of the stirrups.
Her success was unmatched. Lucas won the allaround cowgirl championship at Madison Square Garden six times in seven years (the other year she was pregnant)2 and every major rodeo at least once. In the teeth of the Great Depression, she earned more than $10,000 a year.3
When the rodeo circuit dropped women’s events in the 1940s, Lucas continued to perform in trick-riding exhibitions. She would vault into the saddle, then go on to the “Cossack drag”—learned from an actual Cossack family she had befriended at a Wild West show—in which she would keep one foot in a stirrup, then hang upside down along the flank of the horse, trailing her fingers in the dirt. She would conclude by standing on the saddle, arms raised in farewell.
Lucas was one of the founders of the Girls’ Rodeo Association in 1948 to promote all-female rodeos. The GRA had seventy-four members at the start; now known as the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association, it has about 2,500,4 and the best can earn more than $300,000 a year.5
1925
STATISTICS FROM RED GRANGE’S NFL DEBUT
T
he numbers on the scorecard for this Thanksgiving Day game—6 first downs, 29 punts, 4 completions, zero points—describe a dull contest. Even so, this was one of the most important games in National Football League history, because it was the first time Harold “Red” Grange took the field as a pro.1 The NFL had much to be thankful for.
Nicknamed the “Galloping Ghost” for his elusive running style, Grange was a legend at the University of Illinois at a time when the college game ruled. His greatest performance took place when he was a junior, against Michigan on October 18, 1924. On the opening kickoff, Grange started up the middle, broke right, and cut back across the field and into the end zone 95 yards away.2 Then he made touchdown runs of 67, 56, and 45 yards. In the first 12 minutes, Grange scored as many touchdowns as the Wolverines had given up in their previous 20 games.3 Widely broadcast over radio and featured on newsreels, the game made Grange a national phenomenon. He joined the golden-age pantheon of sports stars, along with Ruth, Dempsey, Tilden, and Jones.
Two days after his last college game in 1925, Grange dropped out of college (he was well short of a degree)4 and signed with the NFL. The decision was controversial. To call the NFL fledgling5 in 1925 would be generous. Conceived in a car showroom in Canton, Ohio, five years earlier, the professional game was considered déclassé and more than a little disreputable, played by and for a rough element. Attendance ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand per game. “I’d have been more popular with the colleges,” Grange later said, “if I had joined Capone’s mob in Chicago.”6 His Illinois coach was so furious at his decision that the two didn’t speak for years.7
Part of the credit for getting Grange to the NFL altar goes to C. C. “Cash and Carry” Pyle, one of the first sports agents (see the 1926 entry on Helen Wills). The rest goes to George Halas, owner/coach/trainer/publicist of the Chicago Bears. A fellow Illinois alum, Halas thought Grange could take the NFL to the next level. He and Pyle negotiated a per-game salary (for at least 30 minutes of play) for Grange, plus half the gate.8 Grange made more money in 1925 than everyone he played against—combined. He was worth every cent.
The Ghost’s first game against the Chicago Cardinals drew 36,000 people; legend has it that Halas wept as he counted the receipts.9 The Bears played one more game that season, then embarked on a two-part, coast-to-coast tour over 66 days. The highlight was a game played before a record 70,000 people in the Polo Grounds that saved the New York Giants franchise from going under. “For the first time,” Halas wrote, pro football “took on true national stature.”10 As for Grange, he made more than $100,000. Off-field earnings—a doll, a brand of ginger ale, movies, sporting goods, an outboard motor, even a meatloaf11—boosted that figure nicely.12
It was not all glory; when Grange played poorly in Boston near the end of the first part of the tour, the crowd let him have it.13 At one point he played 10 games in 17 days. Still, the modest ice-hauler from Wheaton, Illinois, enjoyed the money and didn’t mind the fame. Sixty years later he recalled, “After I became a pro, if something I ordered didn’t cost $20, I didn’t want it.”14
Not everyone got caught up in the glow of Grange’s burgeoning celebrity. When Grange and Halas were introduced to Calvin Coolidge as being with the Chicago Bears, the president replied politely, “Glad to meet you fellows. I’ve always enjoyed animal acts.”15
A financial dispute kept Grange out of the NFL the following year; he and Pyle started a rival league that folded after one season. He rejoined the Bears, but after tearing a knee ligament in 1927, he was a ghost of his former galloping self, probably better on defense than with the ball. His greatest moment as a pro came in 1933, when he saved the first NFL title game with a last-second tackle. He retired the next year.
Red Grange did not make the NFL on his own. What he did was hasten the sport’s acceptance by introducing it to hundreds of thousands of Americans and pushing it onto the sports pages. His prime was short—but it was transcendent.
1926
HELEN WILLS’S LEATHER TRAVEL BAG
B
efore a boxing match at Madison Square Garden on February 15, 1926, the crowd bowed their heads for a moment of silence. They were being asked to send good thoughts over the ocean to Helen Wills, the 20-year-old American tennis star who would be playing the match of her life the next morning against France’s Suzanne Lenglen.1 Wills had been traveling the Riviera for weeks, lugging this bag and a dozen rackets, in the hope of playing Lenglen.
Now she would.
The consensus was that Wills would need all the positive thinking she could get. Lenglen had dominated tennis for years, and at 26 she was at her peak. Her breakthrough came in 1919, when she saved two match points to win a thrilling three-set Wimbledon final against Dorothea Douglass Chambers, 10–8, 4–6, 9–7. It was a passing of the generations. Chambers, a 40-year-old mother and seven-time champion, played in traditional attire: ankle-length skirt and long-sleeved buttoned-up top, with her long hair piled up.2 The bob-haired Lenglen looked practically naked by tennis standards, wearing a knee-length skirt and a loose, sleeveless blouse. If Lenglen had done nothing else, she would have done a great deal by liberating sportswomen from the fashion police.
Her style went well beyond her apparel. Lenglen was known to sip cognac and brandy between sets, and she favored an aesthetic of play that drew on the ballet. To imagine Lenglen is to see her in flight, her silk skirt swirling to form an abstract pattern—and then she would cream the ball. Lenglen played with a power and aggression never seen from a woman before. She treated all of tennis with imperious charm, and with occasional bolts of temper. Think of “Suzanne Lenglen” as French for diva, and that gets the idea across.
She got away with it because she was so good. From 1919 to 1926, Lenglen went 269–1 and lost just two sets.3 She never lost a singles match at Wimbledon,4 which she won six times. Even the male-dominated sports press couldn’t help but notice. Lenglen became the first internationally celebrated female athlete; in her prime, she might have been the most famous athlete in the world.5
Six thousand miles away, Helen Wills of California was building her own reputation. She won the US national championship in 1922, 1924, and 1925 and made the finals of Wimbledon in 1924. Unlike Lenglen, the drama queen, Wills was stoic on the court. Like Lenglen, she was fiercely competitive, dismissive of other players, and determined to be regarded as number 1.
She and Lenglen were by far the world’s best female tennis players, and when Wills decided to play the Riviera circuit in 1926, everyone looked forward to watching them play each other. But Lenglen played hard to get. The two women were rarely in the same place at the same time. With little other sporting action, a large number of sportswriters had the hellish duty of following Wills all over the Riviera. So the suspense grew.
By the time the two made their way to the final at the Carlton Club in Cannes, the match had become a full-blown sensation. Newspapers all over the world sent reporters; in California, where the match began at 2:00 a.m., there were all-night parties to listen to it.6 For the first time, a contest featuring women was top of the sports news.
Perhaps no match could have lived up to the hoopla, but this was an excellent one. Lenglen won 6–3, 8–6, her closest match in years, and the level of play was impressive.7 This mattered. A sluggish, error-filled contest would have brought scorn on women’s tennis, which didn’t get much respect. The little coverage there was tended to emphasize the players’ looks or clothes.
Helen Wills and Suzanne Lenglen were both beyond that. Individually and together, their game was so good that they were impossible to patronize. They may have been the first women to command respect as athletes. Six months after their match in Cannes, though, another emerged; Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel, besting the men’s mark by two hours. She came home to ticker-tape parades. These breakthroughs didn’t earn women’s sports consistent attention, but at least they began to get a little.
Wills credited Lenglen with being the better player on the day, which was true.8 But it was also true she had given the French goddess all she could handle. Many a knowledgeable spectator—including, perhaps, Lenglen—saw the younger American as a real threat to her hegemony. Jean Borotra, one of the famous “four musketeers” of French tennis, called it “a heartbreaking victory”9 for Lenglen.
The two never played each other again. Wills missed action for a few months due to medical issues, and then Lenglen turned professional. Under the rules of the era, not only did that bar her from all the national championships, but amateurs like Wills could not even play against her.
Wills picked up right where Lenglen left off. From 1927 until mid-1933, she didn’t lose a set. While the press praised Wills for her girl-next-door looks, her peers saw something else. “I regard her as the coldest, most self-centered, most ruthless champion ever known to tennis,” her fellow champion, Bill Tilden, remarked (see the 1930 entry on him).10 Wills might have been pleased with the description. While lacking Lenglen’s flamboyance, the economy of her style had its own appeal; Charlie Chaplin would say that the most beautiful thing he ever saw was “the movement of Helen Wills playing tennis.”11 By the time Wills concluded her career, she had won 19 singles majors (in 22 attempts), including eight at Wimbledon, a record that lasted until Martina Navratilova won her ninth in 1990.
Wills called the match against Lenglen the most important of her career because it showed her a level of play to which she could aspire.12 Not that she was going to emote over it. “No tennis match,” she wrote, “deserved the attention which this one received.”13
1929
AMELIA EARHART’S GOGGLES
I
n the years immediately before and after Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic crossing, flying was a sport and entertainment, as well as a form of transportation. Americans flocked to air shows to gawk at the sight of wing-walkers and loop-the-loops. Aviators were local heroes and national celebrities.
Among them were more than a few women. Just as they had done with the bicycle, women seized the chance to fly before it could be forbidden to them. Pancho Barnes, Jacqueline Cochran, Bessie Coleman, Ruth Elder, Amy Johnson, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Beryl Markham, Ruth Nichols, and Phoebe Omlie all wrote excellence in the sky. In 1928 Elinor Smith showed the kind of audacity pilots of all kinds appreciate, flying under four New York City bridges. She was 17.1 To be an aviatrix was considered the epitome of cool, modern womanhood—and Amelia Earhart was the most famous of this elite corps.
In 1929 air racing was a full-fledged sport, with big crowds, rules, and regular newspaper coverage. It was also for men only. Some of the more imaginative aviation leaders recognized that a women’s race could bolster public confidence. If the weaker sex could negotiate thousands of miles all by themselves, that would be an excellent advertisement for the industry. The women pilots loved the idea of testing themselves—and perhaps taking home as much as $3,600 in prize money.
That August, before 20,000 spectators, 19 women took off in the National Women’s Air Derby, a race from Santa Monica to Cleveland, with overnight stops along the way. Will Rogers called it the “Powder Puff Derby.”2 But the powder-puffs, Earhart among them, put women’s aviation on the front pages of newspapers all over the country for nine days. Not all the news was good: one pilot died, probably from carbon monoxide poisoning;3 another ventured into Mexico. One plane was totaled.
Critics cited these events as proof that women should not fly. But they didn’t have much of a case. One competitor put out a midair fire, then calmly landed her plane, proving that she certainly had the right stuff. Sixteen planes finished, a higher percentage than any similar race among men.4
Earhart finished third. She wore these goggles at the start of the race; they were lifted from her plane at an early stop.5
In the years after the Derby, Earhart set an altitude record, in 1931; became the first woman (and second person) to cross the Atlantic solo, in 1932; and was the first to fly solo from Hawaii to California.6 By 1935, women were competing against men on equal terms in some air races. Earhart was the first to do so, finishing fifth in a cross-country event.
Flying was high risk. The death rate for pilots was high, and engines conked out in midair on an alarmingly regular basis. So Earhart knew the danger when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, prepared for a west-to-east, around-the-world journey. The hazards multiplied in the vast expanse of the central Pacific, where they had to navigate from speck to speck. With three-quarters of the flight behind them, on July 2, 1937, they disappeared, leaving behind a haunting mystery: What happened?
Before she left on her final journey, Earhart wrote to her husband, George Putnam: “Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.” Her life, and death, bore witness to those words.
0 commentaires :
Enregistrer un commentaire