Happy Bottom Riding Club (eBook)

Lauren Kessler (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010 | 1. Auflage
346 Seiten
Random House Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-76964-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Pancho Barnes was a force of nature, a woman who lived a big, messy, colorful, unconventional life. She ran through three fortunes, four husbands, and countless lovers. She outflew Amelia Earhart, outsmarted Howard Hughes, outdrank the Mexican Army, and out- maneuvered the U.S. government. In The Happy Bottom Riding Club, award-winning author Lauren Kessler tells the story of a high-spirited, headstrong woman who was proud of her successes, unabashed by her failures, and the architect of her own legend.

Florence 'Pancho' Barnes was a California heiress who inherited a love of flying from her grandfather, a pioneer balloonist in the Civil War. Faced with a future of domesticity and upper-crust pretensions, she ran away from her responsibilities as wife and mother to create her own life. She cruised South America. She trekked through Mexico astride a burro. She hitchhiked halfway across the United States. Then, in the late 1920s, she took to the skies, one of a handful of female pilots.

She was a barnstormer, a racer, a cross-country flier, and a Hollywood stunt pilot. She was, for a time, 'the fastest woman on earth,' flying the fastest civilian airplane in the world. She was an intimate of movie stars, a script doctor for the great director Erich von Stroheim, and, later in life, a drinking buddy of the supersonic jet jockey Chuck Yeager. She ran a wild and wildly successful desert watering hole known as the Happy Bottom Riding Club, the raucous bar and grill depicted in The Right Stuff.

In The Happy Bottom Riding Club, Lauren Kessler presents a portrait, both authoritative and affectionate, of a woman who didn't play by women's rules, a woman of large appetites--emotional, financial, and sexual--who called herself 'the greatest conversation piece that ever existed.'

From the Hardcover edition.

Textauszug

Pancho Barnes had taken up flying only a year before, but she thought she had a good chance to win. On the dirt field that August afternoon, the airplanes were strung out in two long lines as a crowd estimated between 100,000 and a quarter of a million waited in the dust and searing heat for the radio-relayed pistol shot from Cleveland to cue the starter on the field. One of the largest aggregations of newspaper reporters, photographers and newsreelers ever to assemble on the west coast was there. Movie and stage comedian Will Rogers, an aviation enthusiast, presided over the ceremonies, entertaining the crowd -- but not the leather-jacketed flyers -- by referring to the entrants as 'flying flappers' and 'petticoat pilots.' In the press tent, a reporter turned to his colleagues. 'I don't care what you guys write about their bravery, their skill, their sportsmanship or their adaptability to goddamn aeroplanes,' he said. 'What I'm gonna say is, 'Them women don't look good in pants.'' At precisely two p.m., the pistol shot in Cleveland sounded over the loudspeaker in Santa Monica, and at one-minute intervals, each contestant took off at the wave of the starter's flag. The first afternoon's flying was a sixty-mile, get-the-bugs-out hop to San Bernadino. Louise Thaden landed first, twenty-seven minutes later. Marvel Crosson was second. Pancho clocked in with the third fastest time. She felt confident as she flew over familiar southern California turf that first day. She had spent several weeks in June flying the entire course all the way to Cleveland, so she knew well what lay ahead and felt prepared for it. She had not done as much cross-country flying as some of the other women, but what she had done, she had loved. She loved the challenge to wits and stamina, the feeling that she was alone and in charge. That night, the pilots were first feted at a much publicized banquet and then sat through a lengthy briefing on the next day's flight. It was not until after midnight that they were able to go to their rooms and go to sleep. Fatigue, it would turn out, was almost as great a hazard as the flying itself. They were up at four a.m. and in the air by six. By mid-morning of the second day, flying across the desert toward a refueling stop in Yuma, Arizona, the temperature soaring to the triple digits, the women sat in their open cockpits in their leather jackets flying east into the sun feeling woozy. Landing at Yuma, Amelia Earhart ran into a sand bank and damaged her propeller. Flying over the Gila River country of southern Arizona, Marvel Crosson was overcome by the heat and the turbulence. She suffered a severe bout of airsickness and parachuted out -- too late and too low. Her body was found two hundred yards from the wreckage of her plane. The other pilots heard about Marvel's death at their scheduled stop in Phoenix that night. Pancho had flown the fastest leg and now led the field in elapsed time, followed by Louise Thaden, Gladys O'Donnell and then Amelia Earhart. Stunned by the news, the women nonetheless wanted to carry on. Flying was risky. The women knew and accepted that. But the American public was less ready to. Race organizers were immediately pressured to end the event. 'Women have conclusively proven that they cannot fly,' one newspaper editorialized the next day when it reported on Crosson's death. The women held firm. 'It is now all the more necessary that we keep flying,' Earhart told the press. 'We all feel terrible about Marvel's death but we know now that we have to finish.' The next day, again battling the desert heat, there were more mishaps. One...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.12.2010
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 0-307-76964-X / 030776964X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-76964-0 / 9780307769640