Walking on Air (23 page)

It was Wright's contention that government support was needed to expand the private flying sector, in the form of airport development, improved airways and navigational systems, and subsidies for aircraft manufacturers.
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Congress was not receptive to these advances, however. Despite Wright's personal interest in private aviation, the CAA's primary obligation would increasingly be to commercial and military users. As the World War evolved into the Cold War, federal funding focused on those aspects of aviation that had potential value for national defense. The CAA began research, for example, on how transport planes could be adopted to military needs in an emergency, finding ways to standardize commercial and military communications and navigation infrastructure and protocols, and designing airways for maximum efficiency in the event of war.
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In May 1947, Phoebe took a six-month leave without pay. She later extended the leave by three months and then another three months.
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She wrote a memo (with no indicated recipient) concerning questionable activities at the CAA and her concerns about investigations of communist influence in Congress and the agency. The stress of working there, she maintained, affected her health to the extent that her doctor suggested she take a leave.
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In August, she underwent what the press called “a major operation.”
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Since she had been suffering with ovarian cysts for many years, it is likely to have been some sort of female surgery. Ladies in the 1940s did not talk about such things, even euphemistically as “female troubles,” except to their closest friends.
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Phoebe spent some time recuperating at the home of her old flying friend Janette Rex in Cleveland and told the press that she had taken a leave to write her memoirs.
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She enlisted an old friend, Swanee Taylor, to help her get started writing. Taylor had been a wing-walker with the Gates Flying Circus in the 1920s and a participant in a number of cross-country air races. He had most recently worked as a script-writer for CAA training films in Washington. Together they produced about 135 pages of manuscript, covering the first five years of her aviation career, before her leave expired.
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When she returned to work in mid-1948, Phoebe resumed her former position as research liaison officer in the Administrative Office for Research. After being gone so long, the changes in the agency had become even more apparent. In the interim, many of its functions, like pilot certifications, ground schools, and repair stations, were being decentralized and some divisions cut. What remained was increasingly unsympathetic to civil aviation, those “little guys” Phoebe had championed her whole career. In the interests of safety, the CAA was tightening restrictions on the private flier,
requiring expensive electronic equipment for navigation and communication in private planes. To Phoebe, these were efforts to stifle and regulate private flying right out of business. Even more disturbing to her was the direction the country appeared to be heading. The Truman administration seemed to be riddled with corruption and communism. Like others who worked in the government, she was now required to sign an oath of loyalty and list all organizations with which she was affiliated.
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Her work assignments had shifted away from direct involvement in aviation projects to designing and formulating cooperative efforts between the federal government and the states for search and rescue operations in times of emergency. Her job entailed investigating all the standard practices and legislative responsibilities of the agencies and the governments of the various states to ensure a more uniform effort could be made to save life and property in time of disaster. While this was undoubtedly worthy work, it was not the kind of work she found satisfying and was only peripherally about aviation.
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Once that study was completed, she was transferred to the Office of Aviation Development, a catch-all division devoted to the needs of private aviation, created after a major reorganization by the new director, Delos W. Rentzel, a former communications officer with American Airlines. Rentzel was decidedly airline oriented, and several administrators sympathetic to private aviation resigned in protest.
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Phoebe remained, but there seemed to be little for her to do here. She was briefly loaned to the Civil Defense Administration to assist in formulating plans for using civil aircraft in civil defense. These were later codified in a uniform state plan for Civil Aviation Mobilization and Civil Defense.
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In the increasingly tense atmosphere following the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, the CAA was engaged in planning mobilization of all aviation in the event of a major conflict. One component of this effort was a press for a single military-civilian standard measurement for speed and distance used in air navigation. In August 1950, the CAA announced that after 1 July 1952, knots and nautical miles would be the standard for all aircraft, thus imposing a single standard for civil and military aviation and one that would conform to the practice of other nations. The air force and navy had already adopted the system. The CAA anticipated that the nearly two years' advance notice would be sufficient for pilot education and instrument modification.
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But they met with considerable resistance among private pilots, represented by the Airplane Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), who vowed to resist the expensive change that was being “jammed down our throats.”
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For Phoebe, it was the last straw. She was now convinced that her agency was no longer supporting private aviation, but was in fact actively working against it. On 21 January 1952 she sent a letter of resignation to commerce secretary Charles Sawyer, effective 1 April.
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She told the press:

I'm resigning from CAA because—after devoting 31 years of my life to aviation—I can no longer willingly sit by and watch the Truman administration socialize civil aviation in the United States. The present trend in CAA policy committees can lead only to the liquidation of America's aviation industry, forcing it into Government ownership. For some time now I have sat in planning discussions controlled mostly by bureaucrats who have no actual experience in civil aviation, and watched them agree to regulations and taxing policy that must eventually force civil aviation to the wall.
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Phoebe was fifty years old; she was now retired. She left Washington, severing her connections with all those who remained.

Almost as soon as she touched down in Memphis, Phoebe joined the staff of Free Enterprises, Inc., an organization dedicated to saving “this country from socialism and communism.”
She was put in charge of a television “Freedom Series,” a Sunday afternoon talk show. “It was a real thrill,” she told the press, “to come back home and find that our people here have not been unaware of the dangers confronting them … I am instilled with the old spirit and am now joining the fight to help in any way I can to re-establish constitutional government in this country.”
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At present I am not committing myself as to what I think should be done, but one thing I am certain of, and that is that there must be drastic changes made in our Government if we are to keep our way of life. I have always been a great believer in States Rights. To me that has always been the balance wheel that has protected this country from the entanglements that have caused the rest of the world to be in such constant turmoil. Personally, I am a Democrat. I have always been a Democrat but my country will always come first before party and before any kind of world government.
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In October, she undertook a three-day tour of twenty mid-South towns distributing 100,000 invitations to attend presidential candidate Dwight
Eisenhower's riverfront speech in Memphis.
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She was soon disillusioned with Eisenhower as president, however, for not reversing the course of what she saw as socialism.
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Over the next few years, she flirted with a variety of right-wing groups as she became increasingly concerned with the direction of the country.

During her first summer home, Phoebe fulfilled a dream she and Vernon had long shared of retirement to a farm. She bought 427 acres in Panola County, Mississippi, near the small town of Como, investing her $22,000 savings and assuming a $47,000 mortgage.
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She christened her new home Rancho Fairom, combining the first few letters of her maiden and her husband's name.
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The property of rolling grassy hills sprinkled with small ponds included a ranch-style home. She stocked her ranch with cattle and settled in. The place was lovely, but lonely. Since she was less than fifty miles from Memphis, Phoebe returned frequently, leaving the day-to-day operations of the cattle ranch in the hands of a foreman.
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Things did not go well for Phoebe in Mississippi. She had problems seeking honest and reliable help; her cattle business foundered as unpaid bills mounted. She decided to try something else. Five years after she bought her ranch in Como, she traded her property to Mrs. J. L. “Flossie” Koger for a hotel and cafe in Lambert, Mississippi, another small community about forty miles to the southwest.
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The business, located on a trapezoidal lot beside the railroad tracks, included the twenty-one-bed Lambert Hotel and the City Café, located in the same building, with seating for thirty and a vintage jukebox. She borrowed $5,000 from the Bank of Lambert to help establish her business.
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Just over a year later, a tornado scored a direct hit on Lambert. The twister, according to the local newspaper,

picked up a Negro house believed vacant and smashed it against the home of J. L. Koger, a white man who lived in a brick house across the street. Koger was bruised by bricks sent flying by the impact … the winds ripped out the back part of the post office and pulled down the awnings in front of the building before skipping three blocks and knocking a tree into another house. It also threw a small shed into a field and demolished it … debris littered most of the town and many stores and many buildings suffered minor damage to windows and doors.
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While the extent of damage to the Lambert Hotel and City Café is unclear, Phoebe's business apparently never reopened. She wrote to friends that “a tornado wrecked everything.”
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In 1960, she disposed of what was left of the
property and its contents for the sum of $2,339 and the assumption of her indebtedness to the Bank of Lambert and Union Planters National Bank in Memphis.
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After eight years in Mississippi, Phoebe's original investment of $22,000 had been reduced by 90 percent. She was fifty-eight years old. She was broke. She returned to Memphis and began living with friends. She made a few public appearances, some speeches to service clubs, and was the subject of a handful of retrospective articles in local newspapers. These sometimes mentioned her desperate circumstances but more often recounted her illustrious public life. Though most of the attention looked to her past, she was passionately interested in the future. In a speech to the Whitehaven Kiwanis Club in May 1962, which was reprinted by her congressman, Clifford Davis, in the
Congressional Record
, Phoebe described her recommendations for moving the country forward. The key, she said, would be increased trade with Latin America so that America could stimulate her economy and train the nation's young people to seize the opportunities of free enterprise. Such trade would require a commitment to developing those impoverished countries with whom we wished to trade, and training our own people to take advantage of those opportunities. She expressed her concern with America's declining educational system, saying that too much emphasis was focused on a college education. Those seeking most of the jobs that would be available in the manufacturing sector would be better served through vocational training. Train young people to work with both their hands and their minds, she argued, then free their entrepreneurial spirits to move into Latin America and help build the infrastructure and the trading opportunities, “directing their abilities toward pioneering the underdeveloped areas of the world.”
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The American economy, she observed, always prospered in times of war. Now America should make a commitment to “develop and train for peace like we develop and train for war.” Vocational education was a bargain and a very sound investment. “Industrial colleges could be established to cover subjects that deal with manufacturing, sales and services, construction and languages, especially Spanish and Portuguese to enhance the value of the Alliance for Progress program.” This kind of government-funded training had precedents in the civilian pilot training program and the aviation ground servicemen's training program, she said, both of which put well-trained people to work in meaningful and productive jobs. “If we concentrate on planning for our goal, full employment, and use training methods for peace like we do for war, peace will come.”
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Phoebe's last press interview in Memphis was with Eldon Roark in February 1962. After the requisite recap of her aviation career, he said that she was “living quietly” in Memphis, flying only occasionally with friends in their private planes. As she looked back upon her career, Phoebe took the most pride, Roark wrote, in the vocational training program she established in 1938. “Her great dream now is to see Memphis develop an international airport and become a great air export-import center. She would like to have a part of it, for aviation will always be her life.”
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Phoebe was clearly still interested in having a public forum for her ideas, but it is difficult to tell if anyone was listening. She was no longer a celebrity with a platform. When her old friend Louise Thaden visited in mid-1963, Phoebe was pessimistic and frustrated. Louise and her daughter Pat flew into Memphis on their first leg of the Amelia Earhart Stamp Lift. Phoebe met them at the airport; they attended a luncheon with the mayor of Memphis where the Thadens presented him with a First Day cover of the memorial stamp. The date, 24 July 1963, would have been Amelia's sixty-sixth birthday, and was twenty-six years since the famed flier vanished in the Pacific. After the banquet, Louise told her daughter that it broke her heart to see her friend in such despair. Phoebe was in dire financial circumstances, and she was very discouraged by her inability to get support for her important ideas and projects. Still, Phoebe remained fiercely independent and refused all offered assistance.
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