Before Amelia (34 page)

Ruth was horrified, but the Dodger fans roared at another example of Dodger daffiness. Robinson flattened by a grapefruit was as funny as three of his runners occupying third base at the same time—which happened on occasion.

Ruth met a variety of people, generally wealthy enough to winter in Florida. Not all were ready to accept the new vehicle of travel. John D. Rockefeller declined an invitation, saying, “I'll wait until my wings grow.” Surprisingly, men were less eager to go up than women, who apparently enjoyed a change from the sameness of resort life.
Aero and Hydro
reported in March that the “capable Wright pilot” made a long flight with Dr. H. F. Bigger of twenty-one miles in twenty-seven minutes, flying at eighteen hundred feet. If true, that was good flying for the time.

One hotel guest who insisted on going up begged to be taken down when scarcely ten feet off the ground, then wanted Ruth to put on the certificate that they had flown at a thousand feet. She refused, but he bragged to one and all that he had been up a thousand feet, which was all that interested him. As the Florida season ended, America's newest pilot was reported to have fifty thousand dollars' worth of contracts for the coming season.

That news may have been for advertising purposes, but the schedule of appearances for 1913 was impressive: the Easton Home Week Celebration in Allentown, Pennsylvania; Newport, Rhode Island, for the midsummer season; Hempstead, Long Island, carrying passengers and making a record flight at Garden City; the Mount Holly Fair Grounds in New Jersey; the Fall Meet at Oakwood Heights, Staten Island, where a flight lasted twenty minutes in bright moonlight; and in December, flights at Hackensack, New Jersey. Then it was time to head south for the winter season. Ruth's aerial jaunts with passengers from the Clarendon gradually lengthened, but the news that Pégoud had looped in France had yet to influence her.

On May 30, 1914, Ruth began a week's engagement at Oakwood Heights, Staten Island, and later in June she was flying again at Newport, thrilling the resort guests with a moonlight fight. In August she teamed with Rodman for a brother-sister act in Salem, New Hampshire. She piloted, and Rodman made a parachute jump. Appearances in the Midwest followed, until it was time to return to Florida. Exhibition flying had taken on a different look; spectators, no longer content with graceful turns and up-and-down maneuvers, expected thrills for their entrance fee. Ruth continued to carry passengers at exhibitions and to try for altitude records, but her flying was less exciting than that of some of the men. Of course, she was still flying the Wright biplane, which was unsuited for acrobatic feats. The Wright Company disapproved of stunting and did not build that kind of machine.

In April 1915, Ruth appeared at Louisville, Kentucky; in June she flew for the local Auto Club in Cincinnati and was featured on the cover of
The Billboard.
In July she substituted for Katherine Stinson at the Letter Carriers' Convention in Dayton. The site of this performance was a small racetrack, its infield full of trees, smack in the center of the city, with buildings and high wires to complicate flying. Ruth thought it “probably the worst field that I have ever attempted to fly from.” Apparently Orville Wright had doubts about it, too. No one had ever tried to fly from that field.

Ruth took the aeroplane up, performed, and landed safely. After her flight, she chatted with Orville, who congratulated her on the flight, on being able to do it there. He wasn't much for publicity, Ruth thought, but he was curious to see whether the flight could be done or not from that site.

Next, she flew for a week at the Kentucky State Fair with George Mayland, a parachute jumper. Ruth flew the aeroplane, and Mayland jumped out; the point was to land him in front of the racetrack grandstand, which took considerable practice. Always, there was the wind to consider—its strength, its direction. Usually parachute jumpers landed miles away. Here, the pilot guaranteed to land the jumper in center field, “right where people could see it.” The act was a big hit and started Ruth thinking of bigger thrills. The sameness of performance was beginning to pall. She completed her contract in Shreveport, Louisiana, in October, and decided it was time for a change.

She sold her faithful biplane, bought a Curtiss pusher with a one hundred–horsepower motor that could do loops, and had it outfitted with the Wright levers she was partial to. As she had done before, she spent time in the shop learning the intricacies of the new machine, taking the motor apart and reassembling it to her satisfaction. When she felt acquainted with it, the Curtiss was crated and shipped to Florida, where the wide beach provided a great practice site.

For ten days or more, she tried all kinds of rolls and vertical dives but no loops until her husband admonished, “You don't really have to do this. You don't have to try to loop, if you don't want to.” That did it. On the next ascent, at a height of about fifteen hundred feet, she dipped the aeroplane back and pulled back the elevator. The machine went straight up, “and the plane went over like a bird.” It was easy! She did another loop to be sure she could and landed, to great excitement, on the beach. Charles said, “You didn't have to do it the second time!” but Ruth felt otherwise. At that time, fliers didn't know if a particular machine would go over or not—“everything was new, everything was trial and error then,” she recounted years later. She was a stickler for finding out a machine's capability.

On January 17, 1916, she gave a public exhibition of looping and acrobatic flying at Daytona Beach, which was a sensation. The new aviation season was about to begin, and Ruth's new acrobatic routine would be a sure crowd pleaser. At Hammondsport, New York, she showed her stuff in an exhibition that kept all eyes on her. In May, at the Military and Naval Tournament at Sheepshead Bay, she won second place in the altitude competition with a height of 11,200 feet, a new women's record recognized by the Aero Club of America. Competing against male aviators, Ruth placed second in bomb dropping and third in the speed race.

Ruth decided to try for the altitude record because she wanted to do something somebody else hadn't done. The sun was shining when she took off late in the afternoon, and it continued to shine the higher she went. With an eye on the registering barometer, she tried to coax the aeroplane higher—she could still see sunlight. To her amazement, it was dark when she returned to the field, where her anxious husband waited. The record was fine, but he lectured her for staying up so long.

The summer season brought appearances in Chicago, for the Conference of Associated Advertising Clubs, and elsewhere in the Midwest— Downs, Kansas; Fargo, North Dakota; and fairs in Mason City and Des Moines, Iowa, and Rochester, Minnesota. Mason City provided one of those incidents that aviators prefer not to have: Leveling off at fifteen hundred feet before starting a loop in a night flight, Ruth's aeroplane suddenly dropped from fifteen hundred feet to five hundred before stopping. Ruth landed immediately to investigate. The aeroplane was fine—all parts worked—but the nervous manager wouldn't let her go up again to loop. The next morning, pilot and crew met to consider what had happened. Ruth realized after looking around the area that she had flown over the top of a blast furnace shooting hot air skyward. In the dark she couldn't see it, and she had not had time to check the area carefully on arrival in town. Apparently when she passed through a blast of hot air, there was no resistance, and the machine fell. Fortunately, it stopped at five hundred feet.

Flying at the Iowa State Fair, the prize of the summer season, she had another near disaster. Her contract called for performing directly in front of the grandstand for day and evening stints. Before beginning her appearance, Ruth had fixed a tiny gasoline cup to the bottom of the carburetor; for the few seconds needed to loop, the motor would run upside down and gas would be fed by gravity. But the motor sputtered and refused to work properly while Ruth warmed up the machine for the first exhibition. Someone had been working on the special carburetor, and it needed the services of a factory expert to restore it. Ruth attached a stock carburetor to the motor and made a hurried takeoff before the waiting crowd.

Once in the air, everything worked well until she started the third loop. Upside down, over the small center field of the fairgrounds track, the motor quit. She was about five hundred feet in the air with little choice—somehow she had to land in the center field, where poles and other equipment were in place for the evening fireworks. She calmed her panic, searched the ground, and saw a narrow pathway that just might do. Leveling off, she brought the aeroplane down and, as the wheels touched the earth, the heavy claw brake on the rear of the undercarriage dug into the ground. Another brake on the front wheel dug in, and the machine came to a stop, right side up, at the fence separating the field and the racetrack. On the track, a twenty-five-mile automobile race was in progress when Ruth made her emergency landing. The spectators held their breath, waiting to see if the machine would crash through the fence into the racers. Once again, luck was on her side.

From then on, Ruth had a carburetor made that could not be tampered with, and decided “never to fly an airplane unless the pilot's seat was out in front and the landing gear equipped with three wheels that would prevent a nose-dive or ground loop, no matter how rough the landing field might happen to be.” Tractor machines were already in use, but Ruth stuck with her pusher, convinced that it had many advantages over other small aeroplanes.

She was maturing as a flier. In an article for the
Brooklyn Eagle,
Ruth wrote: “The more I fly, the more careful I become. I know I took many chances when I first began driving my plane.... It takes time to teach you the full dangers you run. . . . It takes a skillful flyer to avoid risks.”

In October, Ruth appeared at the International Wheat Show at Wichita, Kansas, then stopped to consider her next move. She wrote years later that she had been flying for the amusement of other people and had become a bit fed up with it. She would make one flight for her own pleasure—if possible, a nonstop flight from Chicago to New York City. Victor Carlstrom, a pilot for the Curtiss group, had attempted a similar flight on November 2. At Erie, Pennsylvania, a distance of 432 miles, a leak in the gasoline pipe brought him down, but it was a distance record for the United States.

Ruth asked Glenn Curtiss for the loan of a fast aeroplane with a two-hundred-horsepower motor, like Carlstrom's, to try to break the nonstop flight record, but was turned down. “Mr. Curtiss was afraid that I would break my neck instead.” Her own looping model, with a few changes, would have to do. Auxiliary gas tanks were added to boost the fuel load to fifty-three gallons, rubber hose was used for gas lines, every connection was wrapped with bicycle tape, and an aluminum shield attached in front of her feet gave some protection from the cold. Every nonessential piece, including lights, was removed to make the load lighter. With these changes, Ruth hoped “the collapsible plane would not shake apart on the longest flight it had ever attempted.”

Ruth had gone into training for the trip, sleeping in a tent on the roof of Chicago's Morrison Hotel to get used to the cold and taking a rigorous course of exercise. Satisfied that machine and pilot were in good shape, takeoff was scheduled for early Sunday, November 19. Arriving at Grant Park at 6
A.M.
, precious time was lost because the engine wouldn't start due to the cold temperature—the air and gas wouldn't mix together in the carburetor. Finally, at 7:25, central time, with James S. Stephens, an Aero Club representative observing, she rose into the air.

Sitting exposed in front of the wings, she was thankful for the layers of silk, chamois, and wool under her leather jacket, her wool and leather face mask, and helmet and goggles. The rolled map in the case strapped to her leg allowed her to check the route plotted with Lieutenant J. A. McAlser, of the Hydrographic Survey Office; the cuff of her glove carried compass notations for the cities and towns along the route as she flew steadily east, ticking off the landmarks below, with an eye on the compass. The brisk fifty-six-mile-an-hour wind promised her in Chicago died out; there was no push from behind. Flying between three thousand and five thousand feet, she followed the compass directions sewed to her glove. Over Cleveland, it was snowing and bitterly cold; as she passed Erie, she was confident of making a new record. The question was, How much farther could she go?

Ruth Law, the “Queen of the Air,” carrying her map box and gear for her long-distance flight from Chicago to New York in 1916. During this flight, she set a new American record for the farthest nonstop flight (590 miles from Chicago to Hornell, New York).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Ten miles west of Hornell, New York, the motor began to sputter, a sign that the gas supply was going; two miles from the town, the tanks empty, she turned the motor off and glided down onto the racetrack outside of Hornell, where it seemed the whole town was waiting to welcome her. Hornell was a planned stop for refueling the machine; it was also a timely stop for its hungry pilot. The official landing time was 2:10, eastern time, just five hours, forty-five minutes after takeoff. She had flown an incredible 590 miles, a new American record for men and women.