Walking on Air (25 page)

Phoebe designed the cover and guidelines for publication. She estimated the printing costs for her 150-page paperback, including mail solicitations and a royalty of six cents per volume, at forty-nine cents each. The cover price of $1.00 would result in a net profit for a million copies of $510,000.
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She repeatedly sent out the manuscript with her guidelines for publication to conservative publishing houses, beginning in 1968 and continuing through the mid-1970s, and was just as repeatedly rejected.
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Many rejected it without comment, but one who did offer a critique was managing editor Donald Graff of the Newspaper Enterprise Association in Cleveland.

The major problem, briefly, is that it comes through more as an expression of highly personal opinion, a lengthy letter to the editor, than as a
coherently organized and thoroughly documented expose, which is apparently what you are attempting … You have stated a case—or a number of cases, but not made one … A guarantee of a million sales would require quite a bit in the way of advance orders to make it convincing. Bibles and cookbooks sell in that range, but there are few, if any, other such sure things.
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When her efforts to lure a publisher were unavailing, she drew up a plan to form her own company, to be called Grass-Roots America Press, to publish and distribute her book. The press would be incorporated for $20,000, ten shares at $2,000 per share. Her plan called for mass mailings to school boards, PTA organizations, “dedicated teachers throughout the country,” the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and “many, many small groups of concerned citizens who have joined together to save the public schools from federal control.” She predicted “a conservative estimate for the first year's publication would be over a million copies if the above mentioned memberships were properly alerted.” There is no evidence she ever followed through on this plan.
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Despite the difficulties in doing so in the midst of her peripatetic life, Phoebe kept up a lively correspondence with a broad array of political figures, editors, aviation writers, and journalists, as well as with contemporaries like Louise Thaden, Pancho Barnes, Bobbi Trout, Jimmy Doolittle, Cliff Henderson, and Karl Voelter, who ran an air service in Miami.
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Many of them could not understand why she was spending all her energies on political issues at the expense of writing her memoirs. She responded that it was far more important to find a way to deter the infiltration of foreign ideology into the schools that could ultimately destroy the American system. She told Louise, in a typical retort, “This is, probably, the most crucial time in our history—whether we will sink into socialistic—bureaucratic—dictatorship or stay in the pattern laid down by our forefathers in the Constitution.”
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Louise Thaden was her most constant correspondent. They exchanged numerous letters about the “old days,” and Louise repeatedly urged Phoebe to write down all she knew before it was too late. To aid in this effort, she suggested Phoebe contact aviation writer Philip Wendell about assisting her with her writing. Phoebe relocated to Wendell's home in Burr Oak, Michigan, in mid-1970. When she insisted that she wanted to publish the
Silent Majority
book first, Wendell told her she had it backward. “We're going to need exposure to the Omlie tome to really sell the education tome,”
he told her, emphasizing that the autobiography must come first because it is “the springboard … For Crysakes, finish it!”
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Wendell also expressed his frustration to Buffington:

To the best of my knowledge, Phoebe has not attacked the manuscript one bit since she finished page 134 [with Swanee Taylor]. She simply won't let anything interfere with her pursuit of her first interest, the publication of a 10-year work on solving the nation's Education mess … Her autobiography is a solid, tender, commercial seller—so far. BUT she's covered only the first four flying years from 1920 to 1925. As she says, “That leaves 10,000 pages to go.” Her funds are low but her spirits aren't. I'd like to figure a way of getting her back up here in a warm cubicle for the winter, typing. It would call for a grant of some kind; I can't afford the pleasure and she won't listen to charity.
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Wendell was in poor health and exasperated with trying to work with Phoebe, who accused him of not listening to her.
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He suggested that Robert McComb, another early aviation pilot, then living in Fort Wayne, Indiana, might be a better writing companion. So Phoebe relocated once again. McComb later revealed what happened between them in a letter to another mutual friend and pilot, Bobbi Trout. He wrote that he thought that Phoebe had come to Fort Wayne to seek his help in shaping the final draft of her autobiography, but soon learned that she wanted his help in “promoting, underwriting, funding, finding a sponsor” for her
Silent Majority
manuscript. He found her to be “very guarded in her manner of revealing the subject-matter. She carefully weighed every word before and as she spoke.” After three weeks, she finally allowed him to read a few excerpts. From those, “I had gathered just enough information to realize the entire text was perhaps too controversial” for him to find anyone willing to underwrite the publication. He told her he knew “no one willing to stand beside her and share the brunt of any repercussion which might result.” McComb told Trout that “the best thing I could think to do to help Phoebe was to get her acquainted with my nephew who was in the state legislature at that time and possibly make some worthwhile connections—going that route—to further her quest toward getting published.”
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Phoebe moved to Indianapolis in April 1971 to be nearer the seat of power, hoping she could accomplish through the political system that which she cared so passionately about. She wrote to friends that she had come to the capitol and intended to “headquarter here for some time, as it is in the
middle of an area that is very important in helping solve the school situation.”
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She moved into the York Hotel, a fading downtown transient hotel, renting a room for $21 a week.
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Louise wrote plaintively to Phoebe, saying she hoped that her friend “won't get lost again,” adding that it was too bad she didn't settle in Burr Oak where people “are pulling for you with sincere interest …. Do you stay with itching feet or wouldn't putting down (even shallow) roots have merit?”
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Indianapolis had long been an incubator for conservative and libertarian politics. There Phoebe encountered a host of like-minded individuals and groups, including the American Conservative Union, whose then chairman was the editor of the
Indianapolis News
; the American Party of Indiana, an incipient ultraconservative third party; the Indiana chapter of Pro America, an anticommunist and antifeminist women's organization; the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative advocacy group founded in Indianapolis in the 1950s that equated communism with socialism and liberalism; the Taxpayer's Lobby of Indiana, whose agenda was clear in its name; and others. These groups were strongly anticommunist but also animated, as she was, by the issue of states' rights. They believed that the federal government had usurped the powers delegated to the states by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. Phoebe was actively supportive of the Liberty Amendment, which was designed to limit the powers of the federal government, restore power to the states and to the people, and to abolish all taxes.
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Pro America's literature, in their STOP ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) campaign, claimed a conspiracy between the feminists and the communists, with destruction of the family being one of the prerequisites of a communist takeover. Phoebe drew parallels with her earlier concerns, as she wrote Louise that “Both in the ERA and the school situation the main drive is geared to nationalizing and centralizing all power to the US Congress and the bureaucrats in Washington.”
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She wrote a number of letters to local and national representatives in opposition to the ERA. To her, it was yet another federal imposition on states' rights.
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She supported George Wallace as “the only national leader who would lay the cards on the table,” praised Spiro Agnew for “telling it like it is,” and deplored what she called the “Watergate Frame-Up.”
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Phoebe engaged with conservative groups in various capacities during her years in Indianapolis, collecting their literature, drafting supportive letters to friends, newspaper editors, state and national political figures, attending meetings and conventions, and sometimes serving on their boards. She was, for example, listed as a “Director at Large” on the letterhead of
the National Council Against Forced Busing.
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She proudly wrote to Louise that the Congress of Freedom had presented her with their annual “Liberty Award” for her work in “helping to save our schools from federal control.”
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Phoebe carried on these lively political activities in spite of her poverty and worsening health. Her rent consumed nearly half of her meager income, and she was beginning to feel the consequences of her lifelong smoking habit.
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While continuing to try to publish her manuscript, she also tried to seriously pursue writing her autobiography. She wrote numerous inquiries seeking assistance with the writing, contacting friends and old aviation acquaintances seeking confirmation for some of her own memories, and trying to recover lost documents and photographs that she had left here and there over the years as she moved.
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One major motivation for getting started was to correct what she saw as persistent misrepresentations about the history of early aviation and particularly that of the origins and development of the Ninety-Nines and the activities of their charter members. Her memoirs would be a way to correct these falsehoods and tell the true history of early aviation, particularly women's part in it.
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In her exchange of letters with Louise Thaden and with Glenn Buffington, Phoebe frequently complained about those who persisted in distorting the early history. She was, she said, on an “Aviation True History Crusade.” When either of them, however gently, disagreed with Phoebe, she would lash out. Indeed, her mostly cordial five-year correspondence with Buffington came to an abrupt halt in an angry exchange over his characterization of the genesis of the Ninety-Nines. She found his comments “asinine” and wrote, “It seems that you believe what you want to, and discredit that which you do not want to believe.” She closed with “As you know so little about all of this, let's call it ‘quits.'”
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By the same token, Louise endured Phoebe's complaints about false history, but admitted that sometimes Phoebe tried her patience. After Buffington told her of his altercation with their mutual friend, Louise responded: “Phoebe has always been an odd character and those of us who have known her for a long time let her opinions etc. slide off and forget it. However, her obsession with ‘the truth' over the past several years (blindly) and her rudeness to folks (I've not escaped either) is considerably accelerated, to the point it seems where all are out of step except herself. Regrettable.”
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Phoebe was hospitalized in 1973 for what was likely the beginning of her battle with lung cancer. Her doctor began radiation treatments in July, to which she seemed to be responding “quite well.”
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But a subsequent hospitalization a year later convinced her to prepare for her own demise. She
wrote a letter to Mr. and Mrs. John Bieschke, founder and president of the Pioneers of American Heritage in Indianapolis: “As you know, the trip to the hospital was rather sudden. If this is the final landing, please take over.” She instructed the manager of the York Hotel to release her things to them and suggested that they act “as manager of my auto-biography, try to find a writer that has some ‘feel' of the days that will be depicted in this story.” She enclosed a memo for a sample agreement with an author for her autobiography, adding that “Two volumes will be necessary to cover over fifty (50) years of the auto-biography.” Phoebe closed with: “Best of luck, and don't worry about me. I have lived a very full life and, more or less, done what I wanted to do.”
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After that scare, she apparently rebounded to write a more upbeat Christmas message to friends. She apologized for its late posting, which was caused by her two weeks “sojourn” in the hospital. “I have had a sore throat for six months and they can't find out the cause of it. The doctor even asked me if I ever had a broken neck.” The x-rays and the radiation treatments had made her weak but, she reported, she was feeling better now.
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She was, in fact, continuing to receive cobalt treatments on her throat. A few days later, she wrote Pancho that she had spent the last ten years trying to save the schools from federal control, “but since a recent physical check-up I realize that time is running out.” She asked her friend if she knew anyone who could help in editing her autobiography. “Do you know any writer who would be willing to work on a percentage, and who would not question the truth of the background of aviation's development?”
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A few months later, Phoebe made contact with author Jeanira Ratcliffe, an Indianapolis native who had recently published two books,
Will There Really Be a Morning
?, the ghostwritten autobiography of troubled actress Frances Farmer, and
The Kennedy Case (The Intimate Memoirs of the Head Nurse to Joseph P. Kennedy During the Last 8 Years of His Life)
written with Rita Dallas, R.N. Intrigued with the possibility of working on the aviator's story, Ratcliffe asked a friend's cousin, Della May Frazier, to pick Phoebe up at the York Hotel and bring her to Jean's home. Della May was dismayed by conditions she found at the York, a dilapidated structure next door to a burlesque theater. Phoebe lived in one small room with a hot-plate and kept her milk on the windowsill in winter. “I don't know what she did in the summertime,” Della May said.
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