Barnstorming Mother Fondly Recalls Thrills, Spills

Like all other mommas before her, my momma told bedtime stories to her children. But with a difference.

Hers were about the thrills of flying in the early days, about spills and all manner of forced landings, including the story about the pilot who got them back into the air after plugging a leaky gas tank with a manicure stick from Momma’s purse. The only harm done was to the farmer’s corn stalks that were flattened by their landing.

Momma, the first Theasa Tuohy, wasn’t exactly a wing walker, but she came close. She flew open cockpit planes upside down and is among a select few surviving early aviators who flew CX5s, the engines that powered the famous World War I Jennys.

Momma soloed in 1929. She remembers it well. She came in too fast for her landing. The rubber wheels hit kerplunk, bouncing her straight up in the air. She gunned the engine and took off. Here she was, on her own for the first time, no instructor to tell her what to do.

My father, standing in the field, figured she was going to run out of gas while she kept circling, trying to get up her nerve to try again. It was that fear of a dry tank that finally brought her down to a smooth, fine landing. Now she was eligible for the coveted license that in those days was signed by Orville Wright.

Grannie brought up three daughters who knew how to support themselves. They taught school, worked in judges’ and doctors’ offices, one became county treasurer, the first woman in Young County, Tex., to be elected to public office in the county.

So my mother’s mother didn’t bat an eye when Momma put on pants and a helmet and took to the skies at age 18.

My father loved to tell about one barnstorming pal who jumped from the wing of a plane into Belle Isle Lake for $25. The guy almost lost his nerve, and the pilot was screaming at him to jump. The plane was so low and slow for the stunt that the engine was about to stall and the added weight on the wing was making it impossible to pull out of it.

This was the Depression. Most folks were not only broke, but they were pulling all sorts of stunts to make a dollar. Flagpole sitting, marathon dancing, walking on wings or hanging from them by a rope clutched in the teeth. This last stunt usually included a few supporting wires that were invisible to the gaping crowd gathered below.

“Watch Oswald, the trained duck, make a parachute jump from 2,000 feet,” reads an old poster at the Air and Space Museum here. It was advertising an air circus for July 19, 1936, in El Reno. Admission was 15 cents and you could take a plane ride for $1. A free ride went to the person who found Oswald and returned him to the field.

It’s funny how memory is. Momma remembers the time Wiley Post--the little guy with the black eye patch who wowed the world in 1933 with his solo flight around the world--dropped by the house for a look at her new baby. But she has no recollection of his funeral a few months later, even though it was said to be the biggest thing Oklahoma City had ever seen.

Post and humorist Will Rogers had crashed taking off from a strip of Alaskan tundra. Flowers and crepe paper funeral streamers were dropped from planes flying over the state Capitol. National guardsmen struggled to control the crowd of 20,000 people as Gov. E.W. Marland intoned “Happy landing, Wiley.”

Momma has a vivid recollection of a state air tour she was on, but she can’t remember when it was--sometime during the Hoover Administration. She remembers at Ft. Sill, Okla., being lifted out of the lead plane by its pilot, Capt. Ira Eaker, and the thrill of the fleeting view over his head of the entire fort standing at attention in parade salute.

“At 19, you’re self-centered enough to feel they’re saluting you,” she always says with a laugh when she tells that story. But when you try to pin the 81-year-old memory down to when or who, she says: “Oh, I rode mostly in the Braniff plane with some Cabinet official. We started in Tulsa with a big party and everything, then we landed at different towns. They entertained us every place we landed. We’d have civic luncheons one place, tea another, a formal dinner dance at night. I had a beautiful evening gown.”

She remembers about Eaker: “He’s the one who flew the Question Mark and set the first record of refueling in the air. Later he was Gen. Eaker, who commanded the 8th Air Force in World War II.”

“Some of this stuff I’ve forgotten,” she says in apology for her memory. “But a lot of it I didn’t pay any attention to at the time. I was too busy doing and having fun.”

The air museum gave us part of the answer during a recent visit there. Momma spotted a picture of the nameless Cabinet official--who turned out to be Secretary of War Patrick Hurley, standing in the snapshot next to President Hoover.

What was all this for?

“To promote flying,” says Momma. “They wanted all the little towns to build airports. Our government was pushing that.”

Momma intended to be a stunt pilot. But she hated flying upside down, so she wasn’t very cooperative in the grand plan to make her famous doing stunts. “I was always worrying I would fall out of the plane. I had to fly with a pillow behind me, and I was always thinking: ‘What if that pillow falls out.”’

She needed the extra padding to help hold her in the open-cockpit planes because she weighed only 87 pounds and the seat belts were too big. Besides, the pilot’s seats were generally not much more than a hole in the fuselage.

Momma may have hated stunts, but she adored flying. She told me once when I was a little girl that when she was flying aloft she used to look down with pity at all the people stuck down there on the ground. But, she assured me, when she started having children she found that was an even bigger thrill so she didn’t miss the adventure of flying.

Momma remembers a testimonial dinner for Post; she can’t remember when it was or what he had just done. It sticks out in her memory because he turned the tables by giving inscribed gold watches to a bunch of Braniff pilots and mechanics who had helped him out of a spot.

Braniff, it seems, had fixed up his round-the-world plane, the Winnie Mae, after a crackup, but Post didn’t have the money to pay his repair bill. So a bunch of the airline’s employees gave back paychecks to get Post’s plane out of hock.

Momma’s embarrassed by the things she can’t remember. I’m flabbergasted by the things she can. Take this exchange at the museum after she spotted a picture of a 1930s vintage single-engine plane with Braniff markings and three little portholes, indicating that it could carry several passengers.

“Paul Braniff and your father and I drove to California to ferry that plane back. Or one just like it.”

What was it called?

She frowned, gave an exasperated little stomp to her foot and said: “Well, I can’t remember what it was called. But I know it had a Wright Whirlwind engine.”

They all knew their engines in those days.