May 11: “In a moment I was in the air…”

Do you know who this is?
-She designed her own aviator clothing.
-She was the first woman to fly across the English Channel
-She was the screenwriter on five romantic movies, all directed by the legendary D.W. Griffith.

She was the first women to receive a pilot license in the United States, became the first woman to fly across the English Channel, and was a world-traveling journalist.

Harriet Quimby was born on May 11, 1875, in a farmhouse three miles outside of the northern Michigan town of Arcadia. Her parents were William Quimby, an American Civil War veteran, and Ursula Quimby. They homesteaded 160 acres during the 1860s and developed a small, self sufficient farm.

Not a lot is known about Harriet during her childhood. She lived and worked on her parents farm, where neighbors were scarce, winters were harsh, and farm life was hard. The nearest school in this rural community was just over two miles away, and Harriet proved herself to be a bright and capable student in the one-room school that served her farm community.

In 1887, when she was twelve years old, her father mortgaged their home and farm, and went to San Francisco, California, with his family. It was in California that Harriet discovered a passion for acting that would influence her life. She wanted to become an actress – and is listed as one in the 1900 census. However, while her passion was acting, her skill was in journalism, and it was through journalism that she would start her public career.

Harriet would move to New York City in 1902 at the age of 27. Upon arrival, she would change her birth date to 1885, subtracting ten years from her age – a fact that was not realized until after her untimely death in 1912. In New York she worked for Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly as an editor, writer, and photographer, traveling extensively traveling and writing from spots around the world. She also used her knowledge and love of acting to report on the theater in New York City.

Her writing focused on activities that were exciting to herself, and to her readers. She wrote about travel, the theater, racecars, and airplanes. In 1906, after riding in a car that sped along at 100 m.p.h., she not only told her readers of the experience, she would buy her own car – a rarity for women in the era. In 1910 she covered the International Aviation Tournament, and was attracted to the adventure, the attention, and the danger of flight.

By 1911, heavier than air powered flight was not even a decade old, and the aircraft were truly of basic design. Learning to fly became a goal in her life – appealing both to her journalistic sense and her theatric passions. She met and became friends with John Moisant and his sister Matilde, and in 1911 enrolled in his flying school. She attended the Moisant Flight School, on Long Island, New York, where she and Matilde Moisant would become the first American female aviators. While a few other women had flown, none had received a license.

With a flair for the dramatic, Harriet finally had her world stage: flight. While other women wore men’s flight gear, she designed her own – a satin jacket with a hood, high laced boots, and satin riding pants – all in purple material. She became famous as a female pilot, and capitalized on the fact by writing articles for Leslie’s and providing flying demonstrations. In September 1911, she became the first woman to make a nighttime flight – to the awe of 15,000 spectators on Staten Island, New York who watched during the moonlight night. In November 1911, she and Matilde toured Mexico, becoming the first women to fly over Mexico.

She gained international renown by becoming the first woman to fly across the English Channel. While the flight was only 22 miles, it was a dangerous flight because of the unpredictable Channel weather. She flew in a 50-horsepower Bleriot monoplane, landing on a beach in France. Unfortunately for Harriet, she would not get the headlines she deserved for her accomplishment. Headlines were dedicated to the sinking of the Titanic.

She would write in an article titled: An American Girl's Daring Exploit, May 16, 1912:

“…the [borrowed Bleriot monoplane] machine was shipped very secretly to the aerodrome on Dover Heights, …a fine smooth ground from which to make a good start. The famous Dover Castle stands on the cliffs, overlooking the channel. It points the way to Calais. I saw at once I only had to rise in my machine, fix my eyes upon the castle, fly over it and speed directly across to the French coast. It seemed so easy that it looked like a cross-country flight. I am glad I thought so and felt so, otherwise I might have had more hesitation about flying in the fog with an untried compass, in a new and untried machine, knowing that the treacherous North Sea stood ready to receive me if I drifted only five miles too far out of my course…

…It was a cold five-thirty a.m. when my machine got off the ground…the motor began to make its twelve hundred revolutions a minute, and I put up my hand to give the signal of release. Then I was off. The noise of the motor drowned the shouts and cheers of friends below. In a moment I was in the air, climbing steadily in a long circle. I was up fifteen hundred feet within thirty seconds. From this high point of vantage my eyes lit at once on Dover Castle…In an instant I was beyond the cliffs and over the channel…the thickening fog obscured my view. Calais was out of sight…There was only one thing for me to do and that was to keep my eyes fixed on the compass…

…The distance straight across from Dover to Calais is only twenty-two miles, and I knew that land must be in sight if I could only get below the fog and see it. So, I dropped from an altitude of about two thousand feet until I was half that height. The sunlight struck upon my face and my eyes lit upon the white and sandy shores of France. I felt happy…rather than tear up the farmers' fields [below] I decided to drop down on the hard and sandy beach…A crowd of fishermen…came rushing from all directions toward me. They were congratulating themselves that the first woman to cross in an aeroplane had landed on their fishing beach…It was now nearly seven o'clock and I felt like eating breakfast…”

She returned to America, and on July 1, 1912 – when future aviators Amelia Earhart was 9 and Charles Lindbergh was in his teens – Harriet flew her last flight. At an air show near Boston her plane suddenly lurched, throwing her passenger – William Willard, the event’s organizer – and herself from the plane. They fell to their deaths while the empty plane glided in, landed, and flipped over in the mud.

Harriet Quimby had only flown for a year, but had made a mark on aviation. Her actions would inspire other women to conquer the world of flight.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

Marissa Moss, Brave Harriet : the First Woman to Fly the English Channel, Juvenile collection.

Jacqueline Kolosov, Women with Wings, Juvenile collection.

WEB RESOURCES:

Converse College

Engines of our Ingenuity

Harriet Quimby

U.S. Centennial of Flight

Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. 1902 Portrait: Converse College

02. Harriet readying for her first flying lesson: Converse College

03. Harriet’s First Solo, 1911: Converse College

04. Harriet in her flying suit: Converse College

05. Harriet in her Bleriot Monoplane, 1911: Library of Congress, Digital ID: cph 3a35973

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For Jan. 26th: “The air is the only place free from prejudices”

Do you know who this is?
-She was known as “Queen Bess” and “Brave Bessie”
-She was the first African American woman pilot to receive a pilot’s license
-Every year on the anniversary of her death pilots put flowers on her grave

Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman was born in Atlanta, Texas, on January 26th, 1892, as the tenth of thirteen children. Her parents – George and Susan Coleman – were sharecroppers. Her father was a Native American, and her mother was an African American. They later moved to Waxahachie, Texas, where she and her family picked cotton, and she helped with laundry for her mother’s customers.

Beginning at the age of six, Bessie would attend a one-room segregated rural school, walking four miles a day in order to attend. She excelled in math, loved to read, and would complete all eight grades of the one-room school. She often borrowed books from a travelling library to read and enlarge her world.

In 1901 her father – tiring of the racism of early 20th Century America, decided to return to the Cherokee Indian reservation in Oklahoma. His wife decided to stay in Waxahachie, and the family was split up. Bessie stayed with her mother and siblings in Waxahachie.

Bessie would enroll in the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University, Langston, Oklahoma) when she was 18, but quit attending after her first term there because of lack of money to finance her continued education. She moved to back to Waxahachie, then in 1915 she moved to Chicago, Illinois, living with two of her brothers and securing a job as a manicurist at the White Sox Barber Shop.

Bessie would find her role in life as she listened to pilots returning from World War I relating their experiences and reliving the excitement of flying through their stories. Her dream to fly was also fueled by a challenge from her brother John, a World War I veteran, who told her that French women were better than American women because they could fly airplanes. She tried to receive training in the US, but was turned down because she was Black and she was a woman. So Bessie, with the backing of some influential Black businessmen in Chicago, went to France, where she arrived on Nov. 20, 1920. In France, Bessie attended the well-known Caudron Brothers' School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France, learning the skills of being a pilot on a French Nieuport 82 trainer aircraft. Within seven months she was successful in becoming the first African American woman in the world to receive an international pilot’s license. She continued to improve her skills with private lessons from a French ace, finally sailing for America in September 1921.

Bessie had two major goals after achieving her pilot’s license: To make a living flying and to establish the first African American flight school. The reason for the second goal was because:

“I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced, so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly.”

Commercial pilots did not exist in 1921, so the only way that Bessie could make money by flying was to perform exhibition flying - which was a dangerous, stunt filled, acrobatic style of flying known as barnstorming. Despite her international pilot’s license, she still could not get anyone in the United States to give her training in this area, so she returned to Europe for more extensive training in February, 1922. Returning later that year, she would participate in her first air show on September 23, 1922, at Glenn Curtis Field in New York.

She soon became a flying sensation and media favorite. She was soon billed as “the world’s greatest woman pilot”, and was travelling the nation. She most often flew the Curtis “Jenny” biplane as well as surplus World War I aircraft, and it was a stalled engine on a Jenny that would cause Bessie’s first accident – a crash which broke her leg and some ribs, and took her a year to fully recover from.

Bessie began performing again full time in 1925, touring a number of cities, including the town she grew up in, Waxahachie, Texas. Here she performed with one condition: while there was segregated seating, she insisted that there be only one gate where both Blacks and whites would enter into the airfield. Her condition was met – a small victory in the early battle against segregation.

Her aviation career would end tragically on April 30 1926, while preparing for a show in Jacksonville, Florida. She was riding in the passenger seat of her “Jenny” airplane while her mechanic William Willis piloted the aircraft. She was not wearing her seat belt at the time so she could lean over the edge of the cockpit and scout potential parachute landing spots for the parachute jump she was planning on performing the next day. The Jenny was put into a planned dive, then suddenly dropped into a steep nosedive and flipped over, catapulting her to her death after a 500-foot fall. Willis – strapped in to his seat – died when the plane crashed in a nearby field. After the accident, investigators discovered that Willis had lost control of the airplane because of a loose wrench which had jammed the plane’s instruments.

5000 mourners would attend her memorial service on May 2nd, 1926 – honoring the aviation pioneer before her body was shipped to Chicago for burial in Lincoln Cemetary.

Bessie’s career in the public eye what short, but spectacular. She would overcome the challenges of race and gender discrimination to become the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license, fighting segregation when she could by using her celebrity status to try to affect change, and having a dream – which she could never completely fulfill herself – of establishing a flight school for African Americans.

Her legacy and her dream continued after her death. She heightened interest in flying by showing both African Americans and women that difficulties could be overcome. As she once said, “I refused to take no for an answer.”

Many since Bessie have adopted that motto.

Local Library Resources:
Nikki Grimes: Talkin' 'bout Bessie: the Story of Aviator Bessie Coleman
Louise Borden: Fly High!: the Story of Bessie Coleman (Juvenile)

Reeve Lindbergh: Nobody Owns the Sky: the Story of "Brave Bessie" Coleman (Juvenile)

Web Resources:
Centennial of Flight essay
PBS American Experience “Flygirls”
Smithsonian
Wikipedia