plane over the ocean, alone in those cultural headwinds but of the time amelia was flying, other women were flying with. each of them was brave, each was bold. some of them arguably objectively or perhaps more talented in the cockpit than amelia. today we've forgotten almost everything. their battles and losses, their friendship and rivalries, what they fought for, how hard they fought we've forgotten that possible victory over them and in 1930. ...

intended to keep them in their place. and also confident in the knowledge of who they were. i want to be very clear here, this is not intended to be a comprehensive history of women in aviation in the 1920s and '30s. the soda center textbook hy where each woman gets her own chapter. this is not that kind of book at all. if you want to write that kind of textbook history of women in aviation at that time you would you would need 25 or 30 chapters. my story story is a narrative about the group of friends, amelia erhardt and her friend. i'd like to introduce you to them now. ruth elder was 24 in the summer of 1927, already on her second

marriage and with it in lakeland florida where she was answering phones at the dentists office. it was not the life that she had imagined for herself growing up in alabama. she was obviously a beautiful woman but she also had an electric personality, a certain charisma about her and to be frank, she was bored in the dentists office. so in some of 1927 ruth elder crafted a bold plan. she knew how to fly a plane and she decided she wanted to be the first woman to ever fly across the atlantic ocean. she was inspired of course by charles lindbergh. that spring may 1927 lindbergh had flown the ocean arriving in his now famous spirit of st. louis on long island at roosevelt field that may. and i want to be clear that lindbergh was a flying exactly

for the pioneering spirit of it all. he was fly for a jackpot of money. $25,000, about a, about a quarter of nine dollars in today's money had been put up for the first man, and it was believed it would be a man, who would fly nonstop from new york to paris, to paris to new york. many men had tried to win that prize and failed in spectacular fashion the four lindbergh arrived in new york that may. these men crashed on runways in planes loaded down with too much fuel. they burned up in an fern is right there on the airfield or the disappeared over the ocean never to be found or heard from again. lindbergh himself nearly crashed on takeoff in may 1927. it had rained all night in long island. his fellow competitors were also trying to win this prize decided

not to fly that day. lindbergh plane which was quite small, say into the clay runway as it eased up on to it that morning. they set up a flag about three-quarters of the way down and told lindbergh if he wasn't off the ground by the time he reached that flag he needed to abort. lindbergh reached that flag still on the ground and kept going flying straight into a crowd of about 500 people who inexplicably had gathered at the end of the runway. he barely gets off the ground just before he reaches them. he's so low to the ground at that moment that the people who were standing there could see his face through the cockpit glass and would tell the "new york times" the next day that this young man was suddenly aged by worry. lindbergh was worried because he is flying directly into a wall of trees, which he narrowly

missed sort of flitting through an open hole in the canopy and then disappearing into the morning mist, not to be heard from again for 331 half hours, which is how long it took to fly across the ocean in 1927 in a single engine airplane. i don't think i'm going to ruin the story for you by telling you, lindbergh will make it. he will. and when he does he's going to win that $25,000 prize. he's going to win a book deal and all the famous comes with it. he's going to fly back to america and then take that spirit of st. louis around the country that summer and fall, 92 cities in all, a goodwill tour that stretched across america. and it was in this moment, this moment of the post lindbergh after below that error fever was born in america. that's what they called at the

time, error fever. and it had a surprising side effect or at least one that male aviation officials had not expected. women now wanted to fly across the ocean, and unlike lindbergh and the men they were willing to do it for free. ruth elder will leave five months later in this plane right here. in october 1927. it was a red plane, bright red with yellow lettering down the side and a cursive script you can sort of make out. the plane is aptly called the american girl. this plane was 32 feet from nose to tail, 46 feet across the wing. obviously a single engine airplane with a top speed of 10. just for reference, when you're barreling down the runway at takeoff at reagan these days to take a flight, you already going

105 miles an hour. and this plane had no radio, no way for ruth elder to contact the outside world. for this flight in october she would earn headlines on two continents and become by the end of 1927 arguably the most famous woman in the world. before this flight with her copilot here george halderman, ruth elder would also pay a really awful personal price. amelia erhardt is a social worker from boston who comes next. in our quest remember her or solve the mystery of how she disappeared, we seem to have forgotten almost everything about how she actually lived. the fact of the matter is, in 1927 and 1928, amelia erhardt wasn't a famous pilot. she was a licensed pilot. but. but by her own admission she

wasn't doing much flying anymore. she was working at a settlement house in boston, what people in boston now call chinatown. she was helping new immigrants to this country learn how to speak english, learn how to get a job. it was here that the settlement house in 1928, six months after ruth elder. the businessman would discover her including her future husband george putnam, of putnam publishing. and they would put amelia erhart on a seaplane sitting in boston harbor flown by men, a plane that was going to be going across the atlantic. on this first flight, amelia had no job to sit behind the two men who were at the controls and take notes. for a book that she would write for george putnam, if they made it, if they survived.

of course they do. the seaplane land safely and ward water off the coast of wales in june 1928. by the time to open the door of that plane and amelia steps out, she is already become one of the most famous women in the world. but to her enduring credit, amelia new that which it done on that flight was really nothing. she would say that summer, i was just the sack of potatoes on that plane. i was cargo. she was then the rest of what would be a very short life just nine years in the spotlight making bold flights in answer to her critics. ruth nichols was a daughter of wall street wealth born on the upper east side in new york and raised in tony,

westchester county. and more than any other woman really, it's ruth nichols who will challenge amelia earhart for the title of most accomplished female aviator in this time in the 1920s and 30. and for ruth, it's it's a it's a journey that really begins when she's just a young girl. not much older really than the students right here on the campus at mary, washington. you know when she graduates from high school in 1918 her parents want her to get married? and they want her to marry well. so that the story of her marriage might appear in the new york times. but the first bold decision that ruth nichols makes for herself is that she's not going to do that. she defies her parents' wishes and instead she goes to college. this is a ruth nichols graduation photograph 1924 at

college in massachusetts. school for women that of course still exists today? and it was here at wellesley the root nichols decided not only did she want to choose her own path. not only did she want to live her own life. she wanted to fly planes. and in 1930 she would acquire this plane here. this was a lockheed vega. undeniably the fastest most modern plane of its time. she named it the akita. and had borrowed it from a businessman that some of you may recognize his name was powell crosley the owner of the cincinnati reds. and within a matter of months ruth nichols was flying this plane into the record books. she quickly had the altitude record. the transcontinental speed record the short land speed record and in june 1931 she will attempt to fly this plane right

here. over the ocean trying to be the first woman all alone at the controls of an aircraft flying over the atlantic. it's worth pointing out. this is one year a full year before amelia earhart would ever dare to make such a flight. and you know were it not for happenstance and bad luck? the kind of happens dance in bad luck that dogged flyers in these days. ruth nichols might have made it. and if she had it maybe she who we remember today. and not amelia. florence klingensmith who i mentioned before with the daughter of a farmer in northern minnesota raised on a plot of land just across the river from fargo, north dakota. and just like ruth elder in 1927 florence was not satisfied with her lot in life.

she wasn't doing anything exciting. she was working at a dry cleaners in downtown fargo starching and pressing shirts. what she really wanted to do was fly planes. but like a lot of us in life, she had no clear and obvious path to her dreams. her parents had no money. no connections in this nascent world of aviation. and so florence did the only thing she could do. she enrolled at mechanic school at what is now modern day hector field the airport and fargo for those of you who have been there. she was one woman at a 400 men learning to build and fix airplane engines. and it was here at hector field that a young florence began to press her case to connected businessmen in fargo. she wanted one of them to help her learn how to fly and help her by her own plane. finally one man relented and he

said if you're willing to risk your neck. i'm willing to risk my money. and he gave her $3,000 to buy a plane that florence 2 was quickly flying into the record books. you know she her special skill was air racing. that act of whipping a plane around pylons placed on a course in a city or at an airfield. it was an incredibly difficult thing to do. a skill that would require the use of both your left and your right hand. you're left and your right foot as you work the throttle and the flaps to get yourself around those pylons at a high rate of speed. and and the reason why she was invited to race the men in chicago at labor day 1933 is that she had proven herself to be one of the most talented air racers in america both men or or woman. and and for her flight day in chicago it would really change

life for women both in the air and on the ground. and finally, there's louise stadium. you know louise to me is is the rarest kind of flyer in these days. she wasn't just a woman who flew and race planes louise was a mother. she had her first child. a son in 1930 and her second child a daughter in 1933. and at a time when culture and society and indeed many husbands expected their wives to stay home and raise children. louise did a very modern thing. she wanted to have it all. you know, she believed she could juggle her responsibilities at home and her love for her children. with her personal goals and ambitions and it really is only

because of the sacrifices that louise made in this little window of time that we wrongly erased her from this picture. and this story so now that i've introduced you to them individually, i want to say a few things about them collectively. and then i'll be happy to take any questions you might have. i want to talk to you about. who they were? what they overcame? and why they still matter today? because they do. you simply cannot overstate. how dominated aviation was by men in particular white men in the 1920s and 30s? planes were built by men for men. these planes were often too large for most women. in fact many of my characters in

my book would have to modify the cockpits with padding and pillows just so that they could reach the pedals or the controls. and and when these women flew across the country transcontinental as they all did and stop to refuel in wichita or saint louis or kansas city. they would walk inside these primitive airfield buildings and find. there was only one kind of restroom. it was a men's room. and when the modern air races began in the summer of 1928 the women were not invited to compete. those first air races were put on by this man here. his name was cliff henderson. he was an incredible salesman a car salesman in los angeles. and he decided to stage the first modern national air races that summer in this bean and barley field just south of

downtown, la. by the way, we know this bean and barley field today by three letters. that is lax. and you know for these air races cliff anderson wanted amelia earhart to come and louise stayed in to come and the others and indeed amelia and louise were there. but they were not invited to race. they were not invited to compete. indeed the only job for women at those first national air races was to hand out the trophies to the men if they so chose to do that. probably wouldn't surprise you to know that these conditions didn't sit well with the female aviators of this era. in particular these three here, you know amelia earhart and ruth nichols and louise thaden. they were really the triumvirate of this time. and and they quickly realized that they could compete against

one another in the sky. they could try to fight one another across the ocean indeed amelia and ruth nichols lied to one another about their transatlantic plans. both of them didn't want the other one to know what they were hoping to do each of them understood that the first woman to cross the ocean and solo in a plane would have that key to the room of immortality. but on the ground they recognized right away that they had to stick together. and indeed they would become good friends. because who could understand ruth nichols better? then amelia earhart. or or louise hayden better than ruth nichols. you know i've often thought about louise. in the early 1930s and what it would have been like to drop your kids off at kindergarten and preschool.

how little she would have had in common? with the other mothers there. and so they did become really close. and i found a lot of evidence of that in my research. you know in 1932 amelia of course will fly the atlantic solo and in 1935. she wants to add the match set to that record. she wants to fly the pacific solo flying from honolulu to oakland, california. now this is a flight some of you might have made of course a very common flight today. but at the time flying a single engine plane all alone across that stretch of ocean was very dangerous indeed many men had gone missing over that stretch never to be found again. and aviation officials gave amelia about a 50/50 chance of making it. she does of course, you know and and when she lands at oakland

10,000 people are waiting at the airfield having waited all night not knowing when she might arrive. not knowing, you know her timeline or her itinerary. no one was live tweeting anything at the time. and when she does land amelia receives accolades from around the world. but not from her friend louise stadium. that week louise who's back home in arkansas. writes amelia a letter and and louise had a very specific kind of way of speaking a sort of folksy charm about her. and and spoke with a little of a country twang. and she told a million this letter and i'm quoting here. she said dawn your hide i could spank your pants. someday, you have to tell me why you do things. this in this letter louise goes on to tell her friend amelia that she wished amelia would rest on her laurels.

and then very prophetically louise tells her you're worth more alive than dead. this is of course two and a half years before amelia will go missing in another very dangerous ocean flight. and you know the same was true of amelia and ruth nichols. they had a bit more complicated friendship. maybe each of us has had this kind of friendship in our lives. where we understand someone and we appreciate them, but we're also sort of competing against them all the time. that was ruth and amelia. and yet, you know, i found evidence of their closeness, too. that summer 1935 after amelia has flown the pacific ocean. ruth nichols has a terrible crash in upstate, new york. not on an air race. not in anything fantastic just

on a flight. kind of like that went down in those days. and in the next day's papers across the country front page news says that ruth nichols is in critical critical condition and might not survive. at that time amelia really is at the peak of her fame. and her husband then george putnam is keeping her out on the speaking trail day after day after day. and when ruth crashes amelia is on the road in, michigan. but she took time away from whatever speaking engagement. she had that day. amelia did and she went down to the western union office and she wrote ruth nichols a telegram. and it's not really. what she says in the telegram, but how she says it. for starters amelia doesn't refer to ruth by her name she calls her by her nickname. she calls her rufus. she says dear rufus. we can't bear to have you on the

sidelines for long. get well soon. ae and it clearly meant a lot to ruth nichols. because she saved it her entire life. until i found that telegram in a windowless cinder block storage room filled with old dusty air race trophies at a regional airport in cleveland, ohio where that letter and all of ruth nichols papers had been sitting unnoticed for decades. so they overcome much. they are good friends. and they really will change the world. you know some of you have probably heard of the women's air service pilots. the wasps those 1,000 women who flew airplanes during world war two for the military not in

combat, but from factory to basis. the wasps from time to time are in the news these days because the last of them sadly are dying off. were it not for these women here the wasps never come to be? if these women had accepted the rules that were stacked against them. if they had accepted their law in life if they had listened to what the men wanted them to do. there would have been no platform for which the women could have argued to fly in the military during world war two. and i really do believe that every female pilot that comes after really stands on their shoulders. and yet there are still challenges in great deficits today. you know in america today just seven percent of licensed. pilots are women. and when you go to airlines

major airlines that number gets even lower it's just 2% in fact, some airlines have even fewer than that. now we could have a long conversation about why that might be. i do think there are many factors at play. but one undeniable factor. is the entrenched discrimination that women faced in aviation? not just in the 20s and 30s? but for the bulk of the 20th century. you know at the time my story takes place the first woman was hired at an airline. to fly as a pilot her name was helen ritchie. she was from mckeesport, pennsylvania. and it did not go well for helen. this airline now defunct was called central air. and and by rule, it's central air. you had to be a union pilot in order to fly.

but the all men in that union would not admit her. so helen, ritchie is hired at central air. to do a job. because she's good at doing a job. and then told she can't do that job. and after about 10 months she quit. because she wasn't doing anything. and as a as a journalist and as an author as a historian, you're always asking yourself questions. and one of the questions i had when i learned the story of helen ritchie was when was the next woman hired as a pilot at an airline? and i was stunned to learn that it would be 39 more years. 1973 until women were hired at an airline again. that summer 1973 frontier air

hired a woman. it was still a very small regional airline at that time. and american airlines hired this woman. she was 24 years old. and from florida a pilot's daughter. she had been struggling for years to get hired at any kind of flying outfit cargo or passenger. and she had failed. some airlines still in existence today denied her and told her don't bother applying again. we don't hire women. but she persistent. and in the summer of 1973 american airlines hired her to be a pilot and a grand ceremony that august the president of american airlines pinned the wings on the lapel of that jacket right there the first ever airline pilot jacket tailored specifically for a woman.

and still she faced adversity. snide remarks from her colleagues insulting remarks from passengers at times in the 1970s when a man would get on a plane and see a woman in the cockpit he would refuse to fly. and instead of removing the male passenger from the plane the airlines sometimes removed the female pilot from the cockpit. and perhaps most surprising at least to me is she faced snide and insulting remarks from the press? the same press that at times had dogged my flyers back in the 1920s and 30s. you know, i mentioned that ceremony that summer where the president of american airlines pin the wings on the lapel of that jacket, you know american airlines made a big deal out of that event as they should have. they invited all the national media to come.

and that weekend the los angeles times. the los angeles times one of our most prestigious papers both then and now ran a little feature story about this woman. and it ran under a very unfortunate headline. you know when i was told about this headline. i thought it couldn't be real. it had to be one of those things that had been embellished and exaggerated over time. that's the beautiful thing about microfilm. newspaper microfilm never goes away. and because i knew when the woman had been hired. and because i knew when the ceremony had taken place it took me all of about five minutes to find this headline. it's a headline that's memorable

for all the wrong reasons. and you know who remembers it the most? the pilot herself for 20 years she flew at american. rising up the ranks of seniority year after year one pilot by one. until she was flying those coveted ocean routes that ruth nichols and amelia earhart had once long to fly. flying from new york to the bahamas, new york to paris her name is bonnie tiburzi caputo. still alive today? she's the grandmother and a mother in new york city. and i've obviously had the the pleasure and honor of meeting her since this book came out. indeed, you know, i've had the honor of meeting so many bold women and in fact pilots from the ages of nine to 92.

and and this book, you know, really still inspires me in many ways. and want to close with a few reasons why? for starters in a sort of a backwards kind of way. fly girls and this story inspired my next book which dr. crowley mentioned is coming out this april. it's called paradise falls. and it has nothing to do with aviation. you know as i came out of the fly girls project one thing that really bothered me. was that some of those women including louise stayed in? lived long lives into the 1970s some of them into the 1980s. and no one had found them. no writer. no author. no journalists attract them down. to talk to them about their days flying in the early moments of

aviation. it was really sort of crushing actually. to see that you know, there's a columbia university in new york. there's a very large trove of oral histories. it's an incredible resource for historians academics and others and there is a very large collection of aviation oral histories there. almost none of them were with the women who flew in this time. and and so as i came out of fly girls, i thought to myself. well, what are the stories that are around us right now? you know populated by people who had once done something great and are still with us, but may not be for so much longer and and that brought me in a roundabout way to a story some of you may remember the story of love canal. a chemical landfill in the city

of niagara falls around which an entire desirable lower middle-class neighborhood of starter homes have been built in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. this was a desirable place to live at the time. it had a school and a playground right in the heart of it. but as some of you know, the chemicals inside that old canal just underneath that school and playground began to seep out in the late 1970s ultimately alarming people in the neighborhood and leading to fundamental changes in our environmental policy in this country. you know in in this window of time between 1978 and 1980, you know, everything would change about how we thought about our own backyards how we thought about the environment how he thought about the modern chemicals that we used inside our houses. and it's really a story of

resistance primarily of ordinary everyday stay-at-home moms or or as they were were called at that time housewives. you know these women who were not act not really active or or radicalized in any way before this began to fight to escape their own homes. and in the matter of two years went from being ignored by the local officials in niagara falls to having the ear of jimmy carter and the white house and the national media. so that book is is coming out in april. i wrote it by the way in the thick of the lockdown pandemic with both of my kids inside my house. so it was of course the thing i've ever done. um and if you want, i'm sure you can pre-order it through the bookstore that's here this evening or through my website through any number of booksellers everywhere.

so so fly girls really did in a great way inspire this story. i've also been inspired by the fact that we've adapted the story of fly girls into a young readers book. taking this story condensed its and by about half. and and then i wrote it for kids roughly 8 to 12 years old. and you know when i talk about this people often ask me well. what do you think young girls should take away from fly girls? and my my first answer to that question is i hope it's not just young girls reading it. you know, i hope boys are reading it too. and i see that as the father of boys. you know boys also need to understand that a woman can be just as bold just as brave just as strong as they are if not more so and it's had an

incredible impact on kids that i've met, you know through the course of this book, you know kids turning their front sidewalks into chalk art for fly girls kids decorating their books with hearts, you know boys and girls reading it. and and once in the spring of 2019 in those gilded pre-pandemic days. i received an email from a mom in just outside of boston, massachusetts. and she had told me that she had a daughter who was a middle school girl. and her middle school like a lot of middle schools was doing a wax museum. where each child had to dress up as a real character from the past and write some kind of report about him or her. and you know, this is a very common activity at lots of middle schools and elementary schools. and usually there's a list of people that the kids can choose

from often categorized by sports or politics or you know revolutionary war and when you get to women in aviation, they usually only offer one woman. amelia earhart but this girl had read my book. and she informed her teachers that she didn't want to dress up as amelia earhart. she wanted to go as ruth nichols. and this mother was reaching out to say do you have any photos or artifacts or letters that you could share with my daughter sarah so that she could do her report? and so of course, i was very excited. i sent her what i could and you know, i asked her when this this wax museum was going to be and she told me the dates. and by total luck i was doing an event that very day at wellesley college. which was a mere 15 minute drive from this girl's school.

and so of course i had to i popped in just to say hello to the new ruth nichols. and i really do think about these women. a good bit actually and and always when i fly. and i think a lot about ruth nichols. you'll see here on her her pilots license from 1930. it's signed, of course by orville wright. um, and you know when this book first came out i was in new york for the launch. for the first day and i had a busy day, but that morning was unscheduled. and so i decided to do something that morning that i had never had a chance to do during the actual research for the book. and that is i left my hotel in manhattan. and i got on a train and i went

to the bronx to visit ruth nichols grave. she's buried in a place called woodlawn cemetery. which is a massive and important cemetery in new york city. you know if you were of money or a fame in the 19th or 20th centuries and you lived in new york. chances are you're buried at woodlawn? and so i took the train up there and i got off and i went into the to the front office there at woodlawn. because when you do go there you are supposed to check in. and i i told him who was there to see. and they gave me a map and on this map. they're a little icons for all the famous people who are buried at woodlawn. and i looked at it and i quickly realized there was no icon for ruth nichols. so i told him who i was looking for and with the help of the

associate there and an app that they had me download onto my phone. we triangulated where she was and off i went on foot on this hot summer morning into the cemetery. and when i got to the place where they told me ruth nichols grave would be it was clearly wrong. i couldn't find her. so using the app and the map i i sort of had to start over and walk 15 minutes in a different direction. and finally, i did find her grave. you know at woodlawn there are ornate tombs and mausoleums built by people who wanted us to know. they were important. but when i got to ruth nichols grave, it was just a simple tombstone. weighs high the kind of stone that maybe one day we might be buried under. and and there were just a few words on it. it had her date of birth.

her date of death and then down there at the bottom. there was just three words. it said beloved by all. and it and it really stopped me. because she was beloved by all. and they were all the love by all. and i do hope that they will be again. and i want to thank you so much for listening to me tonight. thank you for your attention. thank you for coming out into the real world. i'd be happy to take any questions you all might have. like thank you keith. so we'll take some questions from the audience if you have some i feel raise your hand kelly will seek you out and guess who has a question if it's not bill mock. now one of our regular bill good see you back. all the rest of you as well

bill. my question has to do with how the women aviators received support you entity. you had you had five over there 10 of them there. you said one lady? wanted to fly. and so she goes to this man who had money he gave her money by the airplane. so is that the way it worked for all the others did all the other women do that? go that to go to rich man to get money to do that and my question apart second part. what if they had been 24 or 36 or 48 women who wanted to fly would they have been able to receive support? so yeah. i mean almost everybody men and women who wanted to fly in the

1920s and 30s received support of some kind. remember, this is the great depression people couldn't just go down the street typically and and buy a plane some men built their planes themselves. in fact some of the great air racers of that time actually built their planes in their garage and then would fly them at 250 miles an hour. it was really the sort of the the wild west of aviation. and so yes every woman during this early time received some kind of support, you know, amelia received a ton of support. and starters from her husband george putnam, but also from many different investors who helped her by planes over the years louise thaden got her first break selling planes for for a man in in kansas by the name of beach beach craft and

and every plane that she ever flew in the air races was a beach made plane. and so yes, they all did receive some kind of support but really it was it's not all that different from a nascar driver today receiving support from his or her sponsors. it was just like it'd be incredibly difficult to purchase and have your own nascar vehicle. it was incredibly difficult and expensive to have your own airplane in 1932. well, there were i mean, like i said there were so in 1928 as i said, there were fewer than a dozen license pilots, but by the end of the 1930s, there were about a hundred and seventeen. sorry end of 1920s by 1930 with about 117 women. who were licensed in this country and at the end of that year december 1929? these women in my book many of

them louise and emilia included met on long island to discuss should they form some kind of group some kind of advocacy group for these 117 women. and they sent out letters to every single one of them across the country. and they received responses of yes from 99 of them. so they dubbed themselves the 99s and that organization for female flyers is still in existence today. other questions kelly back i was intrigued by your talking about finding the archive of one of the flyers in a small museum in ohio. so when you decide to write this book, did you have the five in mind at the beginning or did you say i want to write about female aviators in the early history of aviation and through your research find hey, these are the five that i was able to research and and get good information about so, how does the

information versus the topic? play out as you write the book. so i actually discovered this story in a very accidental way. in the spring of 2016 i was flying from from boston to pittsburgh for a story i was doing at the time for political magazine about the unlikely possibility of donald trump carrying the state of pennsylvania that fall and for the flight, i grabbed a book that had been sitting on my bedside stand for some time, which is where my to be read pile typically piles up and this is a book some of you may have heard of it's called the astronaut wives club by lily koppel. it's it's a nonfiction narrative of the wives of the mercury 7 astronauts. so john glenn's wife alan shepard's wife and you know. one of my favorite books of all time is tom wolfe's the right stuff, which is of course that

seminal work about the mercury 7. and so i wanted to read lily koppel's book to see how she had done it, which is actually a thing that authors do i wanted to see how she had taken this story which we all know. and and flipped it around in reverse and told the sort of from the opposite perspective. and so i'm reading this book very closely on the plane. and i'm very early in the book and it mentioned that one of the wives was a private pilot. who had longed fly in an all-female airplane race that had started in the 1920s 1920s and had once featured amelia earhart. and that's the line that just stopped me. because like most of you i had never heard of air racing. i had never heard of in all female air race. i'd never heard of amelia racing anything. i only knew that story that most of us knew she flew across the ocean. she was the first one to do it. and so because it was 2016 i was

able to open my computer get wi-fi off the plane and google it instantly. and i don't know what happens when you do that now, but in 2016 when you googled this race all i really found was a wikipedia page and it just listed the 20 women who had competed in that race. and as i glanced at the list, i quickly realized that i only knew two of the names. and as i glanced at the list i quickly realize i only knew two of the names. i knew amelia erhart of course and a new of pilot by the name of poncho barnes. because of some of you might remember poncho is actually character in the right stuff. she owns the bar by the late 1950s where the fly boys, the neo-armstrongs would go and have drinks after they flew planes out there in the desert. by the time i landed in pittsburgh i knew there was something here but i didn't really know much. for a little while i researched

it on the internet, and after a short time i started going to the library. i live in new hampshire in a university town where at least back in those times the library was open and tell about three in the morning. after my kids would go to sleep i would leave home and drive twe library and i would live in the microfilm from august 1929. when i'm looking for for a a or even a story idea, i'm looking for a few things. i'm looking for an interesting world. i'm looking for characters you can root for an root against, and then looking for some kind of arc, some kind of journey. it became pretty apparent to me even from those early nights in the library that there was an interesting world here, and at that point it was just incumbent upon me to figure out who were

those key characters, who did drive the story forward, and what was that are? that did take a little bit more time, but i do remember specifically being in the library in the middle of the night, no students if they are, just me at the microfilm machine. and i remember stumbling on to that story of florence klingensmith in chicago. i didn't find the exact new story for it at first. i found references to it and had to sort of figure out what had happened and go find what had happened. and when i found that story of florence in chicago and what happened that day and the ramifications of it, i knew what i had and i could really see that story at that moment, but it did take a few months. kelly, is that another question

back there? there's one up front. go ahead. >> thank you. i have really two questions. one is, did any of them have to leave their families, sacrifice their families for their vision? and their spouses must have been pretty special back then, to support them, because it was probably against whatever was going on back then. >> you hit on something pretty important here. interestingly, and maybe perhaps not surprisingly, based on what we discussed here tonight, many of these women never married. and those that did, like amelia, did not have children. and i think it's plain to me that these women would have been very intimidating to a man in the early 1930s. they could fly a plane, they

could fly at 225 miles an hour in a plane load to the ground. they could fly over the ocean. that would have that would've been very intimidating to most men. now, louise did mary, and her husband was named her and he was a plane builder, not really a pilot although he did fly. he built planes. i do think herb is a very interesting character because clearly he was very modern even allowing his wife louise to race in 1936 with two children under the age of six writer in her house in arkansas. but a lot of them never married and i did wonder about that, in particular with ruth nichols but was only after i stumbled onto her papers that i realized that she'd actually longed to get married for years and simply

could not find a man. >> wonderful talk. >> thank you. >> a friend of mine gave me your book about a year ago knowing that i was in research on my mom. she got her pilots license in 1937. we are from chicago. she went from chicago to new york city and back in for woman to that was amazing. she got her pilots license at flushing meadows. it was $1.60 a lesson. when she so loaded, made it sound like it's no big deal. we know it was. she flew for so long, my question is, she met my dad. she, prior to meeting my dad she interviewed with jacqueline cochran all female pilots. she was except to do that. she started within and then decided she really wanted to be overseas because jacqueline cochran was strictly on the u.s.

fly the men around from base to base. my question is, all these women came from all different parts. mom and from chicago. and i never understood what, nor did it ask until it was too late, to say what is it that drove you, gave you the backbone, gave you the nerve to go and get her pilots license? and be able to do things like we have said men certainly held women back that time. and yet she kept, all mom could say is because i wanted so each of these women, being from all over the united states, where did they get the word barnstorming in all these places? what was it that drove these women to have that love of the air? >> early on in my research before i had really gone deep down the rabbit hole and before it ever really written a word,

but after a new is going to do this book, i did try to answer that question for myself. what did unite them? because clearly demographics wasn't it, right? ruth nichols comes from money. florence klingensmith is a farmer's daughter. amelia comes from a broken home with an alcoholic father. everybody had a different kind of upbringing, but there were a couple of key things i think are important. the first is interestingly, in each of these women's cases their fathers supporting them in this endeavor from a young age. indeed, it was often their fathers who had bought them their first flight, you know, a five dollars flight at a state fair or a beach on a saturday,

or paid for the first flight lesson. so they had their fathers support, but i think more importantly, and to think more telling for parents and for me as a parent, and for all of us as a pair today, is a young age, and i mean from the time, these women were little girls, first grade, second grade, they knew at their core that they were different. you know, amelia wanted to wear her hair short, which was not allowed in her house, and not really acceptable in society in the early 1920s. and so she would sort of sneak it by cutting off her hair one inch at a time. louise mother was this proper southern woman, and she wanted to dress louise up in frilly

white dresses and indeed there are some photographs of louise as a young girl in these kind of dresses with a pearl necklace, the kind of photo that you would have paid good money for around 1914. but louise wanted to wear overalls and she liked to get dirty, and often when she left her house as a young girl in the dress that her mother had told her to wear, she would go to the barn behind her house, change into the clothes she had left there and then run off to play. for me as a parent now i just sort of think about my own kids, and kids in general, and look at them a little bit differently because these women didn't know when a were seven or eight or nine or ten years old that they wanted to fly planes exactly, but they did know they were different. they didn't know they were unlike the girls sitting next to bid in school, and that was

something that really drove them their whole lives. >> well, before the final, thank you to keith for this riveting presentation, another word of thanks to response tonight, the chancellors village. but for many thanks again to keith o'brien, a good night to everyone from great lives. thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> president biden addresses the country following the passage of the debt ceiling and federal spending agreement last night in the senate. live coverage from the oval office begins at 7 p.m. eastern on c-span. you can also watch online at c-span.org or with the free video out, c-span now.

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