Afterword #2
A few days before the race started, she organized a boycott by the most famous women pilots participating in the race.
It was this boycott that finally convinced the race organizers to accede to Pancho’s demand to exclude the unqualified starlets.
The pilots failed, however, to convince the committee to remove horsepower restrictions on their planes.
This forced most of the women to race in an assortment of aircraft they had little to no experience in.
At the last minute, the race committee decided to limit the race to twenty contestants, causing a scramble by the lesser-known pilots to race to Clover Field and snag one of the remaining slots left after the famous and top women pilots were guaranteed spots in the race.
(Although, it probably wasn’t nearly as exciting as the car race scene we wrote to represent that scramble.)
The kerfuffle over landing at Calexico happened pretty much as we wrote it.
The women revolted after the first night’s banquet, and Pancho typed out two petitions, which all the women signed, one to change the route and one to include Mary Haizlip in the race.
Cliff Henderson was woken up in Cleveland by a reporter knocking on his door in the middle of the night to demand information about the route change.
(And Henderson did, in fact, leave his phone off the hook that night.)
We didn’t spend much time on it in the story, but Lockheed built two identical Vegas for Amelia Earhart to choose from to fly in the race.
She and her mechanic each flew one of the brand-new, straight-off-the-assembly-line airplanes from the East Coast to California, working out bugs in the planes as they went.
She didn’t decide until the night before the race which of the two Vegas she would fly.
Her flight controls did inexplicably seize when she took off out of Santa Monica.
Ailerons are the flaps on the wings that turn a plane and make it climb and descend.
When Amelia managed to land her plane and examine her flight controls, the steel cables from the control stick to her ailerons were both bent at nearly ninety-degree angles just past the flight-control stick and under a floor panel.
Her mechanic replaced the cables, and she continued to San Bernardino the same day the race started.
The next night, Amelia’s mechanic took off from Santa Monica in the second Vega and inexplicably crashed shortly after takeoff, dying in the accident.
The wreckage was too badly mangled to ascertain the condition of his flight-control cables, but witnesses on the ground reported the airplane seeming to go out of control and hitting the ground with the engines operating normally.
The weather was perfect, and no cause of the crash was ever determined.
Every incident of possible sabotage we wrote about in the story is real, as is the flat refusal of any of the women pilots after the race to ever discuss sabotage in or around the race.
In various taped interviews, some of the women were visibly agitated or angry when the topic was brought up, but they still refused to break their silence on it.
This silence lasted for decades and was deafening.
For the rest of their lives, the nineteen surviving pilots never once answered an interview question, never made any statement, and refused to even speak the word sabotage in connection with the race or with Marvel Crosson’s death.
We, the authors, are convinced this silence says more about what the women thought had happened than any complaints or accusations the women could have made.
We must remember the race took place in a time when women were routinely committed to asylums for being “hysterical,” when women were believed to be flighty and less intelligent than men, when a man’s word was always taken over a woman’s, and when women were not even considered credible witnesses in courts of law.
If there was, in fact, sabotage of their planes in the race, who would the women have complained to? Who would have believed them? Would their complaints and accusations have been taken seriously and thoroughly investigated or blown off?
Of note, sixteen people, many of them women pilots from the race, were subpoenaed to appear before a committee in Los Angeles investigating allegations of sabotage in the race. That investigation was brief and cursory, however, and quickly declared the rumors unfounded.
Likewise, the accident investigation into Marvel’s death was a farce that whitewashed or buried all evidence contrary to the accident board’s preconceived explanation of how she perished.
The hasty removal of her body, lack of an autopsy, and complete failure to listen to aviation experts by the judges, who were completely unknowledgeable about aviation, were largely as we portrayed them in the story.
Had the women called foul and made accusations of sabotage, would they have been perceived as whining and making excuses for poor performance? Would they have been accused of chickening out on completing the race?
Most importantly, would the reputation of all women aviators have suffered if they ran around pointing fingers and making accusations of sabotage against them?
It does seem clear the pilots who flew in the race were acutely aware of this and loathe to harm all women pilots for the sake of complaining about apparent sabotage . . . no matter how much real and circumstantial evidence there was that it happened.
It’s clear to us after our extensive research into this race and the time period that, had the women complained, they would have been accused of something other than making a legitimate complaint and labeled in some negative way.
Moreover, they would’ve risked losing their pilot’s licenses if an accusation of hysteria had been leveled at them.
The stock market crashed at the end of October 1929.
Within a few weeks, jobs became scarce and unbelievably precious.
It was a time when nobody wanted to risk rocking any boats or jeopardizing their own reputations and sources of income, let alone a bunch of women aviators who already had two strikes against them for being too bold and acting in an unseemly way for women of their time.
It’s completely true that any woman pilot in the 1920s who had a baby would lose her pilot’s license and be forced to start over from scratch to earn a new pilot’s license.
The chief doctor of what would become the Federal Aviation Administration stated repeatedly and publicly that pregnancy caused women to become hysterical and made them completely unfit for flying.
While we’re on the subject of hysteria, Pancho’s husband did try to abscond with her fortune around the time of the race.
He loudly despised her flying and made frequent demands that she stay home and give him more children.
Of course, she was known to buzz his church in her plane during Sunday church services and disrupt his sermons.
While Rankin never tried to have Pancho institutionalized or accused her of hysteria that we’re aware of, in the 1920s women were actually put into asylums by their husbands and subjected to electroshock therapy until they lost their hysterical desire to fly.
Pancho was fully as wild as a teen as we depicted her, and the story of her running off to Mexico disguised as a boy on what turned out to be a gunrunning ship, jumping overboard and swimming ashore, riding a horse and burro through the jungle with her boyfriend, calling her grandfather to wire her money for train tickets home, and earning the moniker of Pancho is true.
Pancho attended increasingly strict Catholic girls’ schools throughout her teenage years, and quickly after she graduated, her parents arranged a marriage for her to Rankin Barnes.
He was older than her and a rector at a prestigious church.
They hoped he would settle her down and do a better job of controlling her than they had.
He failed.
Pancho was an accomplished horsewoman and loved to race and jump horses. She tried to race cars but was prohibited from doing so because of her gender. That was when she turned to flying.
Pancho’s grandfather was Thaddeus Lowe, one of the first aviators in North America.
He flew surveillance balloons for the Union army in the Civil War and declared himself the most shot-at man in the war.
He invented a barometric altimeter that used air pressure to calculate his height above the ground, a design that was later adopted for airplanes.
He also invented a balloon-to-ground signaling system he used to convey position reports on Confederates to Union commanders.
He was shot down several times in the war, and his wife drove a horse and wagon to where he landed, hid him and his balloon in the back of her wagon, and drove him across Confederate lines to safety.
Thaddeus also invented the first commercial ice-making machine and adapted that technology to create the first crude nonelectrical air-conditioning system.
(Thank you, Mr. Lowe!) Ultimately, he patented dozens of inventions and became one of the wealthiest men in America.
He moved his family to California and built the largest home on the West Coast until the Hearst Castle was built.
Of all his children and grandchildren, Pancho was the one who shared his passion for aviation.
When she was a little girl, Thaddeus took her to see the Wright brothers fly their Wright Flyer, and she declared that someday she was going to fly airplanes.
Not only did her grandfather encourage her interest in flying, but he also financed it.
When Pancho and Rankin married, her grandmother built them a mansion on the family estate, and when her parents died in 1928, Pancho inherited vast wealth.