hit, i had no idea what to do. for the most part and are trying to accomplish something is like i can't do it, i can't do it. there's self-pity but then i would be like okay, what are you going to do? i even go work so i had a list in the yellow notepad. i was running for state senate, i could walk out the door and do something. here, what can i do? i can't advocate go away, i'm trying to exercise but i can't. i was lost. >> lost and broken sunday night it worked eastern on c-span q&a. you can listen watch video on

demand anytime online at c-span.org and points of interest, untimely tool that uses markers to guide you to interesting highlights of key coverage. use of online anytime at c-span.org. >> good evening and welcome. what a pleasure it is welcome those to this auditorium. >> streaming thelc progra tonight, it is a p plan this tie to change good or current plan offered remaining programs and

purpose and go to the website for updates. it'ss possible this program is one of our oldest who's been with us many years and we are grateful continuing generous support. this might be a good time to encourage those who feel inclined to make a contribution as the program defense of this individual corporate support and you do this by going to the website with information on how you make contribute. i think of this evening as subtitled how five daring women defy all odds and made aviation history. born in cincinnati and graduated northwestern university, right

up about the boston probe and as a newspaper reporter meritorious written with the new york times magazine, w politico and among others. he spoke in national public radio on programs such as npr and he's written two books, the aforementioned fly girls this april and the true story of environmental passage. widespread claim and assessments i will mention co-authors who have spoken previously and remember them, like the boys in

the boat, he will love fly girl. thisar story written irresistibe character and drama. a similarly flowing evaluation, it is more in history. cool prejudice and reads like a heart stopping novel. and we look forward to having

them for two years so it's a special pleasure tonight and welcome the great lives of david o'brien. [applause] >> you did have two years to work on it. the work here at the university, for two years trying to make this nightyo work. it was on and then off and recently for me i thought this event was going to be live streamed, who would not have crowd tonight and i was standing

behind his podium and a beautiful room by myself. learn how to adapt and roll with the punches. so i was willing to do whatever it took it was a little upset and coming here and i was going to be in this empty room and i said to my wife, should i even bring my shoes? should i plan to where hands of their? so it's really great to be here i'm going to speak tonight about

my book and excited to finally share with you but people get into that, i want to hurt with a confession of sorts.an i don't really like the way. i don't like the little sounds a plane makes and i don't like take off, the moment where you are barreling down the runway, as you take off you can feel the weight of the air and the plane on your chest as you move further and further from the ground, i don't like that feeling at all. i i do like to travel for please and i do travel for work so it's not an option for me. you will find me in the 29th

wrote ", white knuckling the armrest as if i am alone holding of the plane. a pilot comes on before you can take off and says folks, it'sig going to be bad. he was right. in the middle of the night, they were bouncing around in the sky and there i am trying to curl up into a ball resisting the urge to do that because i would be the same thing for a grown person to do on a plane and the woman next to me totally noticed and she turned to me and said honey, i think i can help you.

and someone like me researching and writing about things exponentially more dangerous than it is today. it had nothing to do with the plane. i was strong with the story is the story of an epic one. adversity after adversity. in the death of their friends until only to triumph over the

men in 1936 in the epic air races of the moment. story i would hope anyone coulds tell and anyone share with you tonight. whenever i am writing whether for magazine or radio, i like to think about my stories in terms of moments. identify early on one of the and buildtant moments aroundd that so thought i would begin with a moment. imagine september, 1933. the winning days of summer, labor day weekend in chicago. the city has been on the grips of great depression. rdrecord unemployment, deadline the street, clubhouse is as they

were known at the time so filled withho people you would sleep on your shoes someone else would not yield. that weekend, labor day weekend chicago 1933 is going to be different. city preparing for crush, 500,000 people streaming and by railcar and automobiles coming for the event. we need to forget what we know descriptive flying events with the world's most modern. in the 20s and 30s, this was real with winners and losers, enormous crowds and jackpots of money. in this little window of time, 19271936, one of the most

popular ones in america. it was baseball, boxing and horseracing. it was the most dangerous it was flying the heart rate lower to the ground it would crash. and they would sometimes die right in front. in order to make clear it wasn't just airng racing considered dangerous or dubious of the time, it was lying itself. for my book, research and spent news coverage from the 1920s and one of these stories it was an expose and what they termed

wildcat and these were in the chicagoland area 1927 where one could get a pilot license in a matter of 90 minutes and that summer in chicago, ran a series ofem stories and there was one line that jumped out at me and i wanted to share it with you now, such schools should furnish one or more with each diploma. this is 1927, this is how people felt about flying so because of these dangers, because of the crowds and money involved, because of the states, many men believed this was no place for a

woman. but at the time, women were dbanned from doing all sorts of things. and working in a fauci work night shift. on the east coast united states in theom late 1920s, women were banned from taxicabs every major american city. if you were a married woman, in particular a married schoolteacher, he was even harder for you. if you were a single female teacher in the late 1920s in america here in virginia, perhaps even fredericksburg and

you have the audacity to decide over the course of the school year to get married, at the end of the year the local school board oral superintendent almost always been, would force you to resign from your job because it was believed by these men a woman couldn't handle the rigors of teaching our children all day only to go home and raise her own. women are denied access to jobs, denied basic rights and denied other basic things, to. the late 1920s when my story began, there was a major tragedy in washington d.c., a collapse under the weight of a blizzard snowfall and it was national

news, real calamity, many people died including a young boy and the boy's mother sued the company for negligence but it was denied that right. only a father had the right to sue for wrongful death of a minor child and this boy's father was already dead meaning the mother in question had no husband, no child. women hoping to fly planes in 1920s face similar challenges in the presidential election of 1928, 29 million women were eligible to vote, 29 million women of voting age. out of that number, 29 million,

fewer than a dozen, fewer than 12 pilot license on file at the u.s. department of commerce which was a regulating agency, the faa and that made the few women who did biplanes real renegade to radical, the kind of radical most hard to imagine. in september, 1933, labor day weekend and chicago, one of those women did the most radical thing of all, is going to raise her plan against the men living it around pylon in a triangular course, she was 29 years old, this woman divorced and afraid of nothing. her plane that day on a tv was so fast, known to be dangerous

in this model killed many men before. she knew what she was doing, she knew how to fly it and the home island that labor day sundown, streaming in, to 20 miles an hour roughly 50 or 60 feet off the ground she sink it so hard and purposely around the tower, it stood up on a swing, just look at that girl, those were his words. just look at that girl. have you ever seen such a beautiful race? trailing two leaders but in third place, she was right there and then the home pylon, a problem. the right wing of her speedy began to disintegrate and it was

spruce and lemon and fall apart and flooded to the ground and with the wind whistling through the wings, the woman in the cockpit did exactly as she was supposed to. away from her fellow competitors south toward the city of chicago over lake avenue she was trying to save the people on the ground and the altitude to save herself. everyone now was watching her little red plane in the sky doing one of two things to happen. she was about to bail out from a dangerously low altitude. either way, it probably wasn't going to end well. cap woman's name lawrence, you

could see her here with amelia earhart one year earlier in 1932 after florence won the first ever all female air raid amelia earhart. you probably haven't heard, most people haven't. we think about women in aviation in the 20s and 30s, we think about one or two women, but to , the first black female mediator in this country and the only one who died in a plane crash in 1926 and of course amelia earhart. we think about amelia, we like to think of her all alone, alone in that plane, alone in those cultural headwinds but at the

time amelia was flying, other women were flying with. each of them was bold. some of them arguably objectively or perhaps more talented in the cockpit then amelia. today we've forgotten almost everything. their battles and losses, friendships and revelry, what they fought for, how hard they fought and we've forgotten that seemingly impossible event. withth this book, set out to change that reminding readers of this time and these characters, women who did up for themselves and eachan other again and agai. in the face of rules intended to keep them in their place and the knowledge of who they were. i want to be there, this was not

intended to be the company has a women of aviation, textbook history for each woman gives her own chapter, it's not that kind of book that all. want to write that textbook history of aviation at that time, you think 25 or 30. my story is narrative about a group of friends, amelia earhart and her friends. i like to introduce you to them now. bruce elder, 24 years old summer 1927 already on her second marriage to live in lakeland florida where she was at the dentist office. it was not the life ruth imagine forr herself, she was obviouslya beautiful woman but also had an

electric personality, a certain charisma about her. to be frank, she was bored so 1927, whose crafted a bold plan and knew how to fly a plane and decided she wanted to be the first woman across the atlantic ocean. inspired by charles that spring, may 1927, on the ocean arriving in a town near st. louis, long island, roosevelt field and i want to be clear he wasn't flying exactly pioneering at all, excess money. it's been put up for the first man and believed to be a man and

would fly nonstop new york to paris and paris to new york. many men tried to win and failed before lindberg arrived. these men crashed on runways planes got down with too much fuel and burned up there on the airfield or disappeared over the ocean never to be found or heard from again. lindberg himself nearly crashed in may 1920 and it rained all night in long island. competitors trying to win decided not to fly that day. lindberg sank into the clay runway as it eased up that morning and set up a flag three quarters of the way down and it

wasn't off the ground, he needs to abort. lindberg reached the flight on the ground and going flying into a crowd of about 500 people who gathered at the end of the runway. lindberg screaming for the crowd really hits the ground, she is so low to the ground the people standing there face to the cockpit and we tell the new york times the next day this young man was suddenly aged by worry. worry because he was flying directly into a wall of trees which he narrowly missed splitting the an open hole disappearing into morning mist not to be heard from again 433 and a half hours which is how

long it took to fly across the ocean. i don't think i will ruin the story by telling you lindberg will make it. he will and when he does, he will win the $25000 prize and a book deal and all the things that come with it and fly back to america and takes it around the country, 92 cities and all in the border stretches across america it was in this moment post lindberg low, air fever was born in america, that's what they call it and had surprising side effect or at least one aviation officials had not expected. women wanted to fly across the ocean and unlike lindberg and, they were willing to do it for

free. ruth elder believe five months later right here. october 1927, a bright red plane was yellow lettering down the side and could sort of make up their plane called the american girl. 32as feet 46 feet across in a single engine airplane with 105 miles an hour. for reference, barreling down the runway, you're already going 105 miles in the plane has no radio, no way for ruth to contact the outside world but in october she would earn headlines

and become by the end of 1927 arguably the most famous woman in the world. ruth elder would pay an awful line. amelia earhart is a social worker from boston. in our quest to remember earhart to solve the mystery of how she disappeared from a we seem to have forgotten how she actually lived. amelia earhart wasn't a famous pilot, she was a wife but by her own admission, she wasn't doing much buying anymore, she was working at a settlement house on tyler street in boston what people in boston -- she was helping new immigrants in the

country learn how to speak english and get a job. it was here in 1920, six months after the fight that connected and would discover including her future husband, george and they would put immediate earhart on a plane sitting in boston harbor owned by men claimed it would be going across the center so the first flight amelia had no job but to sit behind the two men at the controls and take note for a book she's right for george putnam if they needed, if they survive. the plane lands safely in the water off the coast in 1928 by the time they open the door and

amelia stepped out, she's already become one of the most famous women in the world but to her enduring credit, she knew what she'd done on the flight s was really nothing, she would say i was just a sack of petito's, pain and should spend the rest of what would be a short life nine years in the spotlight taking bold flights and an answer and surprised to think about it now amelia ehrhardt has critics. ruth nichols was the daughter of wall street both born on the upper east side in new york and raised in westchester county. more than any other woman really, challenge amelia ehrhardt, most accomplished female aviator in this time in

the 1920s. for ruth, it is a journey when she's just a young girl, not much t older than the students here on the campus. when she graduates from high school in 1918, her p parents wt her to get married and want her to marry well so the story of her heirs might appear in the new york times. the first decision she made for herself is she's not going to do that. she defies her parents wishes and says she goes to college. ruth nichols graduation photograph, 1924 in massachusetts and it still exist today. ruth nichols decided not only did she choose herve own path ad

want to liveo her own life, she wanted to fly planes and in 1930, she would acquire this, this was key, undeniably the most modern plane of the time and named it that the kia converted from a businessman some ofou you may recognize, the owner. within a matter of months, ruth nichols is flying the plane, she transcontinental and in june 1931 she will attempt to fly this plane here over the ocean trying to be the first woman all alone at the control of an aircraft flying over the atlantic.

this is one year, a full year before ameliaha ehrhardt would tear make such a flight. work it not for happenstance and about that, happenstance and bad luck that flyers can, ruth nichols might have made it and if she had, maybe she would be remembered today, not amelia. who i mentioned before, the daughter of former in northern minnesota in a plot of land across the river from north dakota. lawrence was not satisfied. she was working at a drycleaner in downtown fargo. what she really wanted to do was fly planes but like a lot of us

much she had c no clear obvious path to her dream, her parents have no money, no connection to make this world of aviation so lawrence did the only thing she could do, she enrolled in mechanic school of what is now modern-day hectic field and was one woman out of 400 men running to build and fix airplanes. it was here at hector field they began to do her case. she wanted one to help her learn how too fly and provide her own plane. one man relented and said if you are willing to risk your neck and unwilling to risk my money. he gave $3000 to buy a plane and

would quickly find to. her special skill was weeping of playing around pylon in a city orth airfield. it's a difficult thing to do, a skill that would y require both your left and the right hand, he worked the throttle and get yourself around those pylons and the reason she was invited labor day is that she had proven herself to be one of the most talented ones in america, both man or woman and for her flight that day, it would really change women both in the air and on the ground.. finally louise toomey is the

kind of flyer she wasn't just a one in plane, louise was mother. she had her first child, a son in 1930 and second child, a daughter. at a time when culture and society in many husbands expected their wives to stay home and raise them, louise did a very modern thing, she wanted to have it all. she believed she could juggle her responsibility as a home and left for her children with her personald goals and ambition and it really is only because of the sacrifice is made in this little window of time that we wrongly erased or.

>> i want to say a few things collectively and h then i will 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. we simply cannot overstate how dominated aviation was by men in particular, whiteman 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 with padding and pillows to reach the pillows. when they look across the

country and stop to refuel in st. louis, kansas city, they walked inside these buildings and it wasen only one kind. when they began in the summer on 1928, the women were not invited to compete. they were put on by this man here, an incredible salesman in los angeles and decided the first modern national air race that summer just south of downtown l.a. by the way, we know today by three letters, that is lax.

he wanted amelia ehrhardt to come in the otherss and they wee there but they were not invited to compete. indeed, the only job at the first national air races was to hand them out to the men if they so chose. would it surprise you to know key conditions didn't sit well with the aviators. in particular, these three here, amelia ehrhardt and louise. they quickly realized they could compete against one another and try to fight one another across the ocean and amelia and ruth nichols lied to one another

about their transatlantic plans, both didn't walk the other one to know what they were hoping to do, each understood the first woman to cross the ocean would have that key to the room but on the ground they recognize right away and indeed they would become good friends because could understand ruth nichols better than amelia ehrhardt? i often thought about the early 1930s, what it would have been like if you went off to kindergarten and preschool and how little she would have had in common with the other mothers. so they did become really close and i found a lot of evidence of that.

in 1932, amelia will fly the atlantic and 1935 ad, wanted to fly solo honolulu to oakland, california. it's a common flight today but at the time flying a single engine plane alone across that stretch of ocean was very dangerous and many men had gone to see over that stretch never to be found again. they gave amelia a 50/50 chance and she does of course. ... this

a luis had a folksy charm about her and spoke with a bit of a country twang and she told amelia in this letter and i'm quoting here she says darn your hide i can your hands. some day you have to tell me why you do things like this. in this letter luis goes on to tell her friend amelia that she wished amelia would rest on her laurels and then prophetically luis tells her you're worth more alive than dead. this is two and a half years before amelia will go missing

and another dangerous ocean trip. and you know the same is true of amelia. they had a bit more complicated friendship. maybe each of us has had this kind of friendship and in our lives where we understand someone and we appreciate them but we are also competing against them all the time and that was ruth and amelia. andd yet i found evidence of their closeness to. that summer in 1935 after amelia has flown over the pacific ocean ruth nichols has a crash in upstate new york not in an air raid, not in anything fantastic, just on a flight, the kind of flight that went down and the next day's papers across the country front page news says ruth nichols is in critical

condition and might not survive. at that time and amelia is at the peak of her fame and her husband george putnam is keeping her out on the trail day after day after day and when ruth on the roadlia is but she took time away from whatever speaking engagement she had and she went down to the office and she wrote ruth nichols a telegram. it's not what she said in a telegram but how she says it. her starters amelia doesn't refer to ruth by her name she calls her by her nickname. she calls her. she says dear rufus lee can't bear to have you on the sidelines for long. get well soon ae. and it clearly meant a lot to ruth because she saved it her

unentire life. until i found that telegram into windowless cinderblock storage room filled with old dusty air trophies at a regional airport in cleveland ohio where that letter and all was of ruth sittingpapers had been unnoticed for decades. so they overcome much and they are good friends and they really will change the world. some of you have probably heard of the women air service pilots the wasps. those 1000 women who flew airplanes during world war ii for the military not in combat but from the factory to the base and they are in the news from time to time because the lastt f them sadly are dying off. were it not for these women here

the wasps would never come to be. if these women had accepted the rules that were stacked against them, if they had accepted their lot in life, if they listen to what the man wanted them to do there would have been no platform for which the women could have argued during world war ii. and i really do believe that every female pilot stands on the shoulders. and yet there are still challenges and great deficits today. in america today just 7% of licensed pilots are women and when you go to airlines, major airlines that number is even lower. it's just 2%. in fact some airlines have even fewer than that. we getet out in a long

conversation about why that might be. i do think they arey. many facts but one undeniable factor is the entrenched discrimination that women face in aviation not just in the 20s and 30s but for the bulk of the 20th century. at the time i story takes place the first woman was hired at an airline to fly as a pilot. her name is helen richie. she was from shreveport pennsylvania and it did not go helen.ror the airline now defunct was called central air and by rule central air you had to be a union pilot in order to fly. all the men in that union could not admit her. so helen richie was hired at central air to do a job because she is good at doing a job and

then told she can't do that job. after about 10 months she quits because she wasn't doing anything. and as a journalist and as an author and in thisri story in yu always ask yourself questions in one of the questions ahead when i learned the story of helen richie was when was the next woman hired pilot on an airline and i learned he would be 39 more years, 1973 until women were hired at an airline again. that summer 1973 frontier air hired a woman at a small regional airline and american airlines hired this woman here. she was 24 years old and from

florida, a pilot's daughter. she was struggling for years to get hired at any kind of flying cargoo or passenger and she had failed. some airlines still in existence todayda tonight her and told thd don't bother flying again. we don't hire women. but she persisted. in the summer of 1973 american airlines hired her to be a pilot in a grand ceremony that august. the present 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 diversity. she tonight remarks from our colleagues insults and remarks from passengers and 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 mail passenger from the seats they airline sometimes removed the female pilot from the cockpit. perhaps most surprising it least to me is she faced this night and was remarks from press, the same press that at times had dogs my fires back in the 1920s and 30s. and i mentioned that ceremony that summer with the president of the american airlines penned the wing on that woman pilot. they invited all the national media to come in that weekend los angeles times "the los angeles times" one of our most prestigious papers zero then and now ran a little feature story about this woman and it ran

under a very unfortunate headline. 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. it never goes away and because i knew when the woman had been hired and because they knew when the ceremony had taken place it took me all of about five minutes to find it. it's a headline that's memorable for all the wrong reasons and do you know who remembers it the most? a pilot herself. for 20 years she flew at

american racing up the ranks and seniority year after year, one pilot by one until she was flying those coveted ocean realms that ruth nichols and amelia earhart had flown from new york to the bahamas in new york to paris. her name is bonnie okudah. she still alive today. she's a grandmother and a mother in new york city. i've obviously had the pleasuret and honor ofon meeting her since this book came out. i've had the honor of meeting so many a pilot from the ages of nine to 92. and this book you will feel -- it inspired me in many ways and i want to close with a few reasons why. for starters and a sort of kind

of play "fly girls" and the story inspired which dr. william crawley is coming out this april. it has nothing to do with aviation. as i came out with the "fly girls" project one thing that really bothered me was that some of those women including louise davis lived long lives into the 1970s and some of them into the 1980s and no one had found them. no writer, no author, no journalist tracked them down to talk to them about their days of 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 that has

a large trove of world history and an incredible resource for historian academics and there is a very large collection of aviation or histories there. almost none of them were for the women who flew in this time and so if they came out of "fly girls" i thought to myself what are the stories that are around us right now? populated by people who would once done something great and are still with us. may not be for so much longer. that brought me in a roundabout way to a story some of you may remember the story of love and now a chemical landfill in the city of niagara falls around which will lower middle class neighborhood of starter homes in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. it was a desirable place a

desirable place to live the time for school and a playground and 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 they made fundamental changes in our garments of policies in this country. this kind of timewe between 1978 and 1980 everything would change about how we thought about our own backyard how we thought about the environment, how we thought about the modern chemicals that we use inside of our house is and it's really a story of resisting ordinary every day stay-at-home moms were as they were called at that time housewives. these women who are not really

active are radicalized in any way who began to fight to save their own homes in a matter of two years went from being ignored by local officials in niagara falls to having the ear of jimmy carter and the white house. that book is coming out in april. i wrote it by the way in the of the locked down pandemic with both of my kids inside my house so was the course the hardest thing i've ever done. and if you want i'm sure you can pre-order it in a book ordered this evening or through my web site or any number of booksellers everywhere. so "fly girls" did in a great way to inspirere this story. i've also been inspired by the fact that we have adapted the story of "fly girls" into her young readers book.

taking the story and condensing it by about half and then i wrote it for kids roughly eight to 12 years old. you know when i talk about this, people often ask me well what do you think young girl should take away from "fly girls"? my first answer that question is i hope it's not just young girls reading it. i hope boys are reading it to and i say that as the father of boys. boys also need to understand that woman can be just as bold and just as brave and just as strong ason they are if not more so and it's has had an incredible impact on kids that i have met through the course of this book. kids turning their front sidewalks and chalk art for "fly

girls" and kids decorating their books with hearts, boys and girls and once in the spring of 2019 was gilded free pandemic days. i received an e-mail from a mom just outside of boston massachusetts and she told me that she had a daughter who was a schoolgirl and her middle school like a lot of m middle school, each child had to dress up as a real character from the past and write some kind off yor report about him or her. this is a common activity at lotsf of schools in elementary schools and usually there's a list of people that you can choose from often categorized or politics or revolutionary war and when you get to women in aviation it's usually only one woman, amelia earhart but but ts

girl had read my book and she informeder her teacher that she didn't want to dress up as amelia earhart, she wanted to go as ruth nichols and her mother was reaching out to say do you have any photos or artifacts or letters that you could share with my daughter sara so that she could do her report? so course i was very excited and i got her what i could and i asked her when the museum was going to be and she told me the day. 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. so course i had to. i popped in just to say hello to the new ruth nichols.

i really do think about these things a good bit actually and always when i fly. and i think a lot about ruth nichols. you'll see here and her pilots license from 1930s and find a course by orbital ride and when this book first came out i was in new york city for the launch for the first day and i had a busy day but that morning waso unscheduled so i decided to do something that morning that i had never had a chance to do during the actual research of the book and that is a left my hotel and i got onin a train ani went to bronx to visit ruth nichols grave. she's buried in a place called the woodlawn cemetery which is a

massive and important cemetery in new york city. if you are of money and fame in that time chances are you are buried at woodlawn so i took a train out there and i got off and went into the front office there at woodlawn. you go there as you are supposed to check and i told them who i was there to see and they gave me a map. on this map they are a little icons for all the famous people who are buried at woodlawn. i looked at it and i quickly realized there was no icon for ruth nichols so i told them who i was looking for and with the help of the associate their in an app they had me download on my phone we triangulated where she was an off i went on foot on this hot summer morning.

when i got to the place theywh told me ruth nichols grave would be it was clearly wrong. we couldn't find her so between the app and the map i had to start over in looked in a different direction and finally i did find her grave. at woodlawn there are ornate tombs and mausoleums bill pay people who wanted us to know they were important. when i got to ruth nichols grave it was just a simple tombstone waist-high, the kind of stone that one day we might be buried in and there were just a few words on it. it had her date of birth, her date of death and down at the bottom there were just three words beloved by all. and it really stopped me because

she was beloved by all and they were all for loved and they 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 and thank you coming out into the real world could i be happy to take any questions you all might have. [applause] >> thank you steve. we will take questions from the audience if you have h some. and guess who is a question is good to see you back and all the rest of you as well. bill. >> my question is to do with how

the women aviators receive support. you indicated you had five ofof them there and you said one lady wanted to fly and so she goes to this man who had money and he gave her money to buy the airplane. so is at the way it worked for all the other women? the dot the other women t do tht go to a rich man to get money to do that and the second part what about other women who wanted to fly. would they have been able to receive support? >> so yeah almost everybody men and women wanted to fly in the 1920s and 30s and receive support of somee kind. this was the great depression and people couldn't just go down the street typically hit by a plane. some men built their planes

themselves. in fact some of the great air racers at that time built their planes in their garage and would fly them at 250 miles an hour. it was really sort of a wild west of aviation. yes every woman during these early times would need some kind of support. you know amelia received starters from her husbandor geoe putnam but also from many different investors whoo helped her i planes over the years. luis got her first break selling planes for a man in kansas by the name of beach, beechcraft and every plane that she ever flew in the air racers was a beach made plain. so yes they all did receive some kind of support but it's not all

that different from a nascar driver today receiving support from his or her sponsors. just like it would be incredibly difficult to purchase and have your own nascar vehicle. it was incredibly difficult and expensive to have yourr own airplane. likeke i said in 1928 as i said there were fewer than a dozen licensed pilots. by the end of the 1930s there were 117, sorry the end of the 2020s who were licensed in this country and at the end of that year december 1929 these women in my book, many of them luis animalia included met on longer having to discuss should they form some kind of group, some kind of an advocacy group to support the 117 women said

sent out letters to every single one of them across the country and they receive responses of yes from 99 of them. they dubbed themselves the 99th in that organization is still in existence today. other questions? >> i was intrigued by your target about finding archives one of the flyers in ohio. when you decided to write this book did you have five in mind where you wanted to write aboutf female aviators and you did your research and you found these were the five so how did that play out as you wrote the book? >> i actually discovered the story in a very accidental way.

in the spring of 2015 i was flying from boston to pittsburgh for story i was doing at the time for politico magazine about the unlikely possibility of curing the state of pennsylvania before the flight f i grab a bok that have been sitting on my bed time stamp for some time which is where it typically piles up and this is the book some of you may of heard of called the astronauts wives club by willie koppel. it's a nonfiction narrative of the wives of the mercury seven astronauts. john glenn's wife alan shepard's wife. one of my favorite books of all time is the right stuff which is the course that work about those astronauts. i wanted to read lily koppel's book to see how she had done it. i wanted to see how she had taken t this story which we all

know and flipped it around and reverse and told it from the opposite perspective. so i'm reading this book very closely on the plane and very early in the book you mentioned that one of the wives was a private pilot who had longs to fly in an all-female airplane race with that started in 1920s and featured amelia earhart. that's the line that stopped me because like most of you i had never heard of air racing and an all-female air race. i had never heard of familiar racingng anything. i'd onlyy knew the story that most of this flu, she flew across the ocean so because it was 2015 and i was able to open my computer and get wi-fi on the plane and google it and i don't know what happens when you do that now but in 2015 when you

googled this race all i really found was a wikipedia page and that listed the 20 women who competed in that race. as i glanced at the list i quickly realized i only knew two of the names. a new amelia earhart of course and a pilot by the name of ponchoht barnes. some of you might remember poncho is a character in the right stuff. she owns the bar by the late 1950s where the flyboys neil armstrong would go and have a drink when they moved planes out there in the desert. by the time i landed in pittsburgh i knew there were something here but i didn't know much. for a little while i researched on the internet and after short time i started going to the library. i live in new l hampshire in a university town where lee's lease back in those times the libraryun was open until 3:00 in the morning. so after my kids would go to

sleep i would leave home and drive two miles and i would go library and i would live in the microfilm from august of 1929. what i'm looking for a book idea or 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 en route against kind oflooking for some arc, some kind of journeyan andt became apparent to me even from those early nights that there was an interesting world here. at that point it was incumbent upon me to figure out who were those key characters w into did drive the story forward and what was that arc and that did take a little bit more time. but i do remember specifically being in the library in the

middle of the night with no students there. just me at the microfilm machine. i remember stumbling onto that story of warren kling and ship inid chicago and i didn't find e exact story at first read i found references to it and i have had to sort of figure out what happened and go find what had happened. when i found that story in chicago and what happened that day and the ramifications of it i knew what i had and i could see that story at that moment but it did take a few moments. there's another question back front.n one of the c thank you. really interesting. i have a few questions h and one isir did anyone of them have to leave their families are sacrificed their families for

their vision and it was pretty special back then to support them because of whatever was going on back then. they make you hit on something important here. interestingly and maybe not surprisingly based on what we have discussed here tonight many of these women o never married d those that did like amelia did not have children. and i think it'sin plain to me these women would have been very intimidating to a man in the early 1930s. they could fly a plane. they could fly a 225 miles an hour inow a plane over the groud that they could fly over the ocean. that would have been very intimidating to most men. luis did mary and her husband

was a a plane builder and not really a pilot. he built planes and i do think hers is an interesting character because clearly he was very modern even allowing his wife luis raised in 1936 with two children under the age of six in their house. a lot of them never married and i did wonder about that in particularly with ruth nichols but it was only after i stumbled onto her papers that i realized she had longs to get married for years and simply could not find a man. >> hi. a wonderful book. enjoyed it so much. a friend of mine knowing i was

doing research on my mom got her pilot's license in 1937 from chicago. she went from chicago to new yorkrk city and back then for women to do that was amazing but she got her pilot license in flushing meadows. it was $1.60 ofed lesson. it sounded like he it was no big deal and we know it was. she flew for so long and my question is she interviewed all female pilots. she startedm with them and decided she wanted to -- my question is all these women came from different places. mom came from chicago and i

never understood nor did i ask until it was too late to ask whatga is it that drove you and gave you backbone and gave you the nerve to go and get your pilots license and be able to do things like we have said men certainly help women back and get mom would say because i wanted to. each of these women set their theme from all over the united states. where did they get the barnstorming in all these places and what was it that drove these women to have that love affair? >> so early on in my research before ahead gone deep down the rabbit hole and before i had written a word. after i knew i was going to write this book i did try to answer that question for myself. what did unite them because clearly demographics wasn't it.

ruth nichols comes from money in florence kling and smith 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 themes that i think are important. the first is interestingly in each of these women's cases their fathers supported them in this endeavor from a young age. indeed it was often their fathers who had bought them their first flight of 5-dollar flight at a state fair or a beach on a saturday or paid for their first flight lesson so they had theirir fathers support but i think more importantly and more telling for parents and for

me as a parent and for all of this is apparent today is from 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. amelia wanted to wear her hair short which was not allowed in her house and not really acceptable in society in the early 1920s. so she would it by cutting off her hair one inch at a time. luis' mother was this proper southern women -- woman and she wanted to dress luis up in frillylo dresses and indeed thee are photographs of luis as a young girl in these kinds of dresses with a pearl necklace, the kind of photo you would have. good money for around 1914.

luis wanted to wear overalls and she like to get and often when she left her house as a young girl in a dress that her mother had told her to wear she would go to the barn behind her houser change into the clothing that she hadd left their and then run off to play. for me as a parent now i think about my own kids and kids in general and look at them a little bit differently because these women didn't know when they were seven or eight or nine or 10 years old that they wanted to fly planes exactly but they did know theyy were different ad they were unlike the girl sitting next to them in school. that was something that drove them their whole lives. >> thank you for a riveting presentation.

and thankso to keith o'brien and everyone. c thank you, thank you. [applause]