Quimby Story

In July 1911, a rumor is circulating at The New York Times: A woman is taking flying lessons!

Any woman attempting to fly at that time — even with a man in the plane — becomes instantly notorious.  And, a woman flying alone?

Early planes are insect-like contraptions: unstable and difficult to manage.  But a greater challenge is overcoming perceptions about what nice girls shouldn’t do and, in fact, couldn’t do.

Flying schools — such as the Wright Brothers — won’t take women.  And when one European woman tries to solo, male fliers pour water into her gas tank.

The Detroit Free Press answers the question: Ought women to aviate? with a resounding No. “Women are temperamentally unfitted for flying because they are prone to panic.”

A reporter for The New York Times hurries to the scene, and finds early morning fog engulfing the landing field on Long Island. As he moves closer, the hangar doors open. Five shadowy figures emerge, pushing a plane. Then a sixth.   

His jaw drops when he sees a distinctively feminine figure, wearing a pilot’s ensemble: leather jacket, pants, goggles and gloves. He recognizes her as Harriet Quimby, the drama critic for Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. He knows he has a big story.

 The next day’s headline screams: “Woman in Trousers.”

She is the most tantalizingly beautiful creature of her generation: a willowy brunette with high cheekbones and haunting eyes, lovely enough to be a Gibson girl, the supermodel of her day.   She is also a journalist, crusader, and the first aviatrix in the Americas.  But more than that, she is the first woman to live — and die — on her own terms, and in her own way.  

From the beginning, she is a woman of mystery.  When was she born?  Who are her parents?  Even the color of her eyes remains in doubt.  One story is that she was born in Boston to a proper family that collected rare silver.  Another is even more intriguing.  She is the daughter of a poor farmer in Coldwater, Michigan, who went bankrupt and ended up peddling patent medicines.  Her mother decided that her daughter would never grow up depending on a man.

In the San Francisco census Quimby lists her occupation as actress.  Her portrait, whether clothed or not, supposedly hung in the prestigious Bohemian Club, where wealthy men toasted her, until the earthquake of 1906.

But Quimby is more than a portrait . . . or a pretty face.  She is a constantly searching, restless human being.

In 1900, she begins to write articles for The San Francisco Bulletin on the city’s Chinatown. Journalism is the one profession where — in the era of Nellie Bly — a woman could make her way. One editor says that she has the best nose for news of any reporter he’s ever seen. But she has to be careful.  Any hint of marriage could end her career.

Then in 1903, she takes a train across the country to New York City, the journalistic capital of the world. It’s a gutsy move; she has no job and no place to live. But she captures the attention of Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly — the Time magazine of its day — by attending the theater and writing five mock reviews that get her the job of drama critic.

She becomes one of the first women to drive, to use a typewriter, and to take her own pictures.  In between stories on acrobats, divas and comedians, she tells women how to budget their income, find a job and even fix their own automobiles.  She even exposes child neglect.  

And she writes seven film scripts that are made into movies by the famous D.W. Griffith, making her America’s first female screenwriter.

Quimby loves speed and racetracks, and in October 1910, she goes to the Belmont Park International Aviation meet to see the second air show in America. There she meets a reckless daredevil named John Moisant.

Moisant never met a woman he didn’t love — or a plane he didn’t crash and burn . . . or perhaps it’s the other way around.  He represents the U.S. in a race around the Statue of Liberty and wins her admiration when he cracks up his own plane, talks a fellow pilot into letting him borrow his, and then re-enters the race and wins.  Harriet asks him to take her on as a student.

 “Flying looks quite easy,” she says.  “I believe I could do it myself, and I will.”

The next year she attends Moisant’s flight school on Long Island, but Moisant is not there.  He has crashed and died at an air meet in New Orleans.

In August 1911, she goes for her flight test and does everything right except overshoot the landing.  The flight instructors expect her to give up.  Instead, she comes back the next day and sets an accuracy record.

“After the flight,” she recalls, “I walked over to one of the officials, looked him in the eye and said, `Well, I guess I get my license.’”

She is the first American woman to get a pilot’s license, the first to fly a monoplane, and she sets an altitude record for a student.  “Easier than voting,” she describes it.  And this is before the 19^th Amendment gives women the right to vote.

But Quimby is not a feminist, and she opposes the confrontational tactics used by the suffragettes.  When one of them asks her to name her plane after a suffragette, she refuses.  Instead she names her plane “Genevieve” after the French patron saint of fliers.

Her goal is practical: to show, through her own achievements, that women can do almost anything men can do.  “Flying could be the perfect sport for a woman,” she says.  And only a month after getting her license, she makes the first night flight recorded by a woman.

Every issue of Leslie’s with her articles on aviation, such as “How a Woman Learns to Fly” or “How I Won My Aviator’s License,” sells out.

She sees the future of aviation: multi-passenger planes, air mail and aerial photography.  But above all, she sees the beauty.  “When I’m flying, I do not feel like ever coming to earth again,” she says.

Quimby creates a whole new fashion style.  Just as balloons created the balloon sleeves on 1800s dresses, now ladies fly with berets, divided skirts, and some even without corsets!

This doesn’t sit well with some men.  Bishop Nilan of Hartford, Connecticut, thunders: “Women are wearing fashions that closely resemble man’s attire, which disfigures her beauty and deforms her nature.  Gone is the expression of sweetness and modesty, and in its place we have swagger and stare.”

But an open cockpit — with nothing underneath — is like flying a cobweb, and requires changes in women’s attire. Normally skirts keep below the ankle, and women are so afraid to show their legs that the lower seam is weighted with lead. In order to fly, they tie their skirts to their ankles to keep them from billowing up.

Harriet goes one better.  She creates a one-piece suit of purple satin with knee-length pants and a satin hood, flying goggles, elbow-length gloves, and high-laced black kid boots.  Admirers call her “the Dresden China Aviatrix” because of her beauty and daintiness.

“Harriet was the prettiest girl I have ever seen,” said a friend.  “She had the most beautiful blue eyes, and when she wore that long cape over her satin, plum-colored flying suit, she was a real head-turner.”

In November 1911, only three months after getting her pilot’s license, Quimby orders a new plane.  She wants to be the first woman to fly across the English Channel.

From the start there’s a universal assumption that she’ll fail.  By the time she gets to England its winter storms keep her landlocked.  Her plane arrives late and she doesn’t even get to make a practice flight.

A pilot friend shows her how to use a compass for the first time, but he’s so worried that he offers to wear her famous purple flying suit, make the flight for her, and then rendezvous across the channel to switch clothes and let her take the credit.  

Of course, she refuses.  “They probably thought that I’d find some excuse to back out of the flight, but it made me even more determined to succeed,” she says.

There are high winds for two weeks.  Then — in April — a break in the weather.  The sky seems clear, but there are masses of fog over the channel, and the French coast isn’t visible.

But she can’t risk waiting; someone else may do it first.  She puts on an extra raincoat and — at 5:30 a.m. — she’s off.

It should be easy.  Just fix your eyes on Dover Castle, fly over it, and speed straight across the English Channel to Calais.

But there’s no windshield.  Oil blows back in her face.  She is flying a winged-skeleton with an underpowered motor and no instruments, except for the untried compass, which she has never used in a bouncing plane. 

Then she hits the fog bank, and loses all sense of direction.  She flies higher and higher, to 6,000 feet, trying to escape it.  The air gets colder, but the fog remains.  She has to pull her goggles up to see.  At a mile a minute, the mist feels like tiny needles on her skin.   She knows that just the day before a pilot who tried this flight vanished over the English Channel.  As little as five miles off course and she’ll be lost. 

She keeps the compass between her knees and follows it faithfully.  Her head aches from keeping the craft level, and she listens carefully to the engine.  If it fails, she won’t survive a crash-landing in the channel. 

She decides to go down again.  As she does, the engine begins to flood and backfire. “The treacherous North Sea stood ready to receive me,” she wrote.    Just then the excess gasoline burns off, and the engine starts to run again.  She checks her watch and sees she should be close to the French coast.

Then the plane breaks through the mist and she sees the shoreline of France.  She makes a quick landing on the sandy beach after a one hour and nine minute flight.  French fishermen gather around her.  She is only two miles from her destination at Calais.

Harriet’s epic trip across the channel is unremembered.  It takes place on April 16, 1912, two days after a tragedy in the North Atlantic that claims 1,573 lives.  The Titanic.  

So she gets no ticker-tape parade in New York.  Male leaders don’t like her because she is too independent.  Suffragettes don’t like her because . . . she is too independent.

And, of course, she’s not the first to make the flight, just the first woman. As a New York Times editorial stuffily puts it, “A thing done first is important. Done for the 7th or 8th time, it does not prove equality.” True . . . but Quimby had gotten her pilot’s license only nine months before. She had fought two battles: one to fly and one to overcome prejudice.

As for Quimby, she’s off to another air meet only two months after her historical flight over the English Channel. Promoter William Willard has offered the incredible sum of $100,000 for “the Dresden China Aviatrix” to appear at the Boston Air meet, which will take place over Boston Harbor.

But Harriet seems a little apprehensive.  “I’m like a cat,” she says, “and I don’t like water.”  Because early planes had no brakes, six men hold her new two-seater plane while she tests the controls.

Willard and his son toss a coin to see who will go up with the world’s most famous woman flier.  The elder Willard wins.  This is bad news.  He’s 200 pounds — too heavy for the delicate plane — and he’s the nervous type.

But she takes off easily, and at 2,000 feet flies into the sun, while the huge audience below watches and squints.  Suddenly, incredibly, Willard stands up in the plane, apparently to speak to her, and he’s thrown out!  Neither of them is wearing seat belts because pilots frequently have to fight engine fires and make repairs in the air.  Willard falls in an arc.

Because the passenger is behind the pilot, Quimby doesn’t even know she’s lost him. But she does feel the tail rise sharply. She struggles for control and pulls up the nose. Then the tail pitches forward again, “like a bucking bronco at a rodeo,” says one witness, and Quimby catapults out of her seat.

Five thousand people watch her fall into the shallow, muddy waters of the harbor.  They are silent, stunned, as they see the splash of the two bodies.  The plane comes down, lands upright, and then, as if to show its freakishness, tips over.

The New York Sun uses the tragedy to reflect on women’s abilities. “This sport is not one for which women are qualified. They lack the strength and presence of mind and the courage to excel as aviators.”

Yet, ironically, just before she died, Quimby received a permit to carry the airmail.  And, two women who are at the meet go on to become famous aviators.

The mystery of Harriet Quimby continues even after her death. There is no birthrate on her gravestone. And now, more than 90 years later, she is remembered only on a U.S. postal stamp which, as she predicted, is for airmail.

But you don’t have to believe that Quimby is buried under a tombstone with no birthdate, or is only a face on a stamp.  If you want to, you can believe, as I do, that she is still flying up there where it is so beautiful that “I do not feel like ever coming to earth again.”