Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Pancho smiled as she paused in the foyer of her mansion, where the morning newspaper was neatly folded on a Louis XV credenza. The race was in the headlines again.
“Cliff Henderson Organizes First Female Air Derby!”
Beneath the bold letters of the headline, the article went on to talk about the National Exchange Club’s radical decision to include women aviators in their yearly derby.
Pancho really detested the double standard.
Aviation was dangerous for both genders.
She also ground her teeth together over the author’s use of words like scandalous and socially irresponsible to describe the decision.
Yeah, but paperboys were out selling copies of every edition that covered the upcoming race, proving there was one thing the owners of the newspaper liked even more than their antique ideas concerning women’s roles: profit.
She was always happy to climb into the cockpit, but this derby filled her with a different sort of excitement.
She practically had butterflies in her belly—an altogether new sensation for her.
There were only seventy-five licensed female aviators in the world, and only forty of them met the qualifications to participate in the race that she and the race organizers had hammered out in Cleveland over the summer.
Each woman racer had to be a licensed pilot and have completed one hundred hours of solo flying time and at least twenty-five hours of cross-country flying time.
The derby was bringing almost all of them together, more than any other event ever had before.
In one place.
At one time.
Pancho was about to meet in person a bunch of other women who’d answered the call to fly.
Women in the social circles she moved in were concerned mainly about how wealthy their spouses were and how fast they could spend their spouses’ money.
Some of them put effort into being mothers, and a few of them even seemed to put effort into their marriages.
But none of them flew airplanes. In a world where she often felt alone, she was about to have real living and breathing compatriots.
Sisters. All of the women she admired, and who shared her passion for flying.
It was no small thing. This race was going to create memories she would hold tightly for the rest of her life. There would never be anything like the derby again. Without a doubt, it was going to be a life-changing event.
Cliff Henderson, the race’s chief organizer and head promoter, had tried her patience when he changed the rules again and again. To be fair, it wasn’t all his doing. Plenty of people had big opinions about women being in the cockpit.
The latest rules flap was over how powerful an engine a woman could handle.
While that sounded simple, it was anything but.
Most of the top women pilots barnstormed or flew passengers commercially to finance their flying, which meant they owned the biggest, fastest planes they could afford.
Very few of their personal airplanes met the limitations on engine power output that the race committee had imposed.
This meant all the women had spent the summer scrambling to find sponsors to build them smaller planes or someone to lend them a plane, or trying to outfit their own planes with smaller engines.
Personally, she was convinced the people yelling loudest over women not being able to handle powerful planes were those panicked that the women might make it to Cleveland faster than the men, who were flying a more northerly route from California to Ohio at the same time the women were.
Heaven forbid that a female pilot be faster than the boys.
She rolled her eyes and headed out the front door to where her groundskeeper was just pulling up with her car for her.
Pancho was lucky. Her airplane happened to squeak in just under the maximum engine power limits.
She would hate to have to fly a plane she was completely unfamiliar with on such a long and difficult race.
She felt bad for the women who’d had to wait all summer for new planes to be built for them.
They’d had barely enough time to fly the planes around the traffic patterns at the manufacturing plants before they headed for California.
The way she heard it, Louise Thaden had run into serious trouble with her brand spanking new Beech Travel Air on the way out to the West Coast. Something to do with carbon monoxide building up in her cockpit and nearly passing out over Texas.
Apparently, Louise had barely made it to the ground and collapsed as she climbed out of her plane.
Pancho shook her head as she slid behind the wheel of her car.
It was unsafe to ask women to fly untested airplanes all the way across the country.
She’d argued and argued with Cliff over it.
But he’d buckled to the demands of various sponsors and race officials every time one of them complained or made a demand.
Heck, the race was in two days, and the rules still weren’t settled.
Elizabeth McQueen had called her last night to warn her that someone was pressuring Henderson to limit all the competitors to flying even lower-powered airplanes.
If that happened, Pancho’s plane wouldn’t qualify, and there was no time for her to find a replacement plane.
And Elizabeth had warned her of an even bigger problem.
In the quest for publicity and profits, movie studio heads had convinced Cliff in July that it was a great idea to put actresses in the cockpits.
Pancho had been quick to point out that only two actresses in all of Hollywood had legitimate pilot licenses—Blanche Noyes and Ruth Elder—and both were entered in the race.
But Cliff made all his decisions with his pocketbook, and he’d declared that pretty girls would make for better interviews and newsreels.
She’d retorted that they would make terrible newsreels on fire inside their airplanes.
Cliff hadn’t been happy about that remark, but it was the truth, darn it.
Flying was no joke, and everyone knew darn good and well that none of the starlets had a hundred hours of solo flying time or any cross-country flying experience.
A few weeks ago, the movie heads had proposed a compromise.
Their starlets would fly with male mechanics in their planes with them.
Pancho recognized the names of some of the male stunt pilots she flew with in the list of “mechanics.” The studios and Cliff planned to turn this race into a sham, flown by men, with women there merely as window dressing.
Yesterday, he’d apparently reiterated his intention of including the starlets and their mechanics in the race.
And folks said she was the one behaving irrationally . . .
Pancho snorted. She had over four hundred flight hours logged.
Knew her plane from propeller to tail fin.
She knew how to navigate from the air and how to handle a variety of emergencies, and she could take off and land in all kinds of weather and flying conditions.
She also knew full well all the things that could go wrong in the sky.
She had a lot of nerve, but she shuddered to think of how ignorant those starlets were of the dangers lurking inside an airplane. Just thinking about how rich men were manipulating naive young women and endangering their lives made her temper sizzle.
Well, it wasn’t going to happen. Not while she had breath in her lungs.
Pancho took a deep breath and eased her foot off the accelerator.
Driving at a more sedate pace now that she was entering the city, she headed for a well-known bakery not far from Clover Field in Santa Monica, where the race would commence.
Even better known, but unspoken, was the speakeasy beneath the street-level establishment.
She’d called a meeting of the top women pilots in the upcoming race but wasn’t sure anyone would show up.
Confidence came to her rescue, kicking her doubts to the curb. They would come because they were all just like her. Aviators. The derby was going to give them a shot at flying while the entire nation watched. Not that it was about ego. No, sir. It was about showing everyone what they could do.
Pancho went into the bakery and headed for the secret door in the back.
She paused at the top of the dark staircase.
Rising up from the room below, she caught the lyrics to “Spread a Little Happiness” from Mr. Cinders.
The musical was brand-new, featuring a role reversal of the Cinderella story.
Instead of a girl dreaming of being rescued by a prince, the princess transformed into a confident young woman who forged her own path.
As far as music went for marching down the steps into a meeting of women pilots, it was perfect.
CLEVELAND, OHIO
“Gentlemen,” Elizabeth McQueen addressed the board of the National Exchange Club, “I urge you to return to the very principal idea of what your organization stands for. Quality innovation!”
Elizabeth lifted her chin and made eye contact with each member of the board before she continued.
“The example we set must always be of the highest quality. This annual derby will host many of the finest aviators. I personally invited only the most qualified of pilots. When it comes to quality, both genders can embody that ideal, and both certainly should. When you cast your vote, think of the future of the National Exchange Club. Does it stand for true achievement, or is it to become nothing but another fiction film playing at the movie house? Consider carefully the message you are sending to young women. Should they not seek to be truly skilled in everything they do, as opposed to becoming actresses performing a show?”
Behind her, members of the Women’s International Association of Aeronautics applauded softly. Their gloved hands offered a refined sound.