6.19.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated June
twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is a
reading service intended for people who are blind or have
other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
Please join me now for the first article titled Amaze

(00:22):
Yourself with the Unbelievable Story of Bessie Coleman, the Black
aviator who wowed the nation with her high flying achievements.
Long before the Tuskegee Airman, Coleman inspired a generation of
pilots to take to the skies by Victor Luckerson, it
felt like a home coming. Thousands of onlookers cheered wildly

(00:46):
as daredevil pilot Bessie Coleman arked her Curtis Jenny byplane
into a spiral above a Houston field. The weather was scorching,
but Coleman kept her cool as she cruised through Loop
de Loups and go unned across the blue skies at
seventy five miles per hour. The aviator was already a
colossal figure to many in the audience. In recent years,

(01:10):
her globe trotting escapades had taken her to Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris,
Amsterdam and beyond. The Chicago Defender had declared her the
Queen of the Air. Now back home in Texas, on
June nineteenth, nineteen twenty five, she was finally achieving her
true aerial ambitions as a main attraction in the first

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ever all black air show in the state, and doing
it on June teenth. No less, I am a native Texan,
she told a newspaper reporter, and proud that a Texan
is the only Negro aviatrix in the world. While the
Tuskegee Airmen have become icons in the history of American aviation,

(01:55):
fewer people know the story of Bessie Coleman, the black
pilot who charted a corps for them and many others
in the nineteen twenties. Known as Brave Bessie or Queen Bess,
Coleman boasted a fearlessness that made her a perfect fit
for a June teenth celebration. The holiday got its start

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in Galveston, Texas, on June nineteenth, eighteen sixty five, when
enslaved African Americans learned of their freedom following the Civil War. Coleman,
herself born to sharecroper parents, in Slavery's shadow took that
promise of freedom airborne. The June tenth show in Texas

(02:35):
was the culmination of an unlikely rise, literally to the clouds,
for a black woman whose courage still astounds a century later.
Coleman was born in eighteen ninety two in Atlanta, Texas,
and moved to the town of Waxahachie when she was
a toddler. According to her biographer Doris L. Rich, her father,

(02:57):
who was part Native American, left the family for Oklahoma
when Bessie was young. Money was tight and education was
hard to come by. Coleman picked cotton for months each year.
After the eighth grade, she worked as a washerwoman and
watched over her younger sisters. Still, she yearned for more.

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When her older brother invited her to come live with
him on Chicago's South Side, she leapt at the chance.
She went to beauty school in the city and soon
became a manicurist. Pretty and quick witted, Coleman preferred to
work at barber shops, where she would charm mail customers
for generous tips and provide manicures to proud patrons in

(03:38):
the front window. She also befriended Robert Abbott, the founder
and publisher of the Chicago Defender, the nation's leading black newspaper,
who had become a valued mentor. A Defender news item
in nineteen eighteen, praised her as a shining example of
a progressive, up to date young woman. But Coleman was

(04:01):
not content to be a window prize. One day, her
older brother, John, a World War One veteran, came into
the barber shop and proclaimed that black women would never
be able to fly airplanes. Coleman took the insult as
a challenge and soon began researching where she could pursue training.

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She found that no white pilots in the area were
willing to teach her. Military training was also a non
starter since the U. S. Army Air Service, a forerunner
to the Air Force, did not accept women, so Coleman
expanded her vision. She began studying French and saving money
for a passage to Europe, where women pilots were not

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so disdained. Abbot, reportedly keen to mine black success stories
to help sell newspapers, urged her on and even provided
financial backing. On November twentieth, nineteen twenty, at the age
of twenty eight, Coleman and embarked on the S s Imperator.
For France. She would train at the Ecco da Bastillon AH.

(05:07):
She would train at the Eco d'aviacion de Frere Coudron
at Laquatois, one of France's most prestigious flight schools. Coleman
spent seven months learning lupe de loups and banking turns
in a Newport eighty two, a French biplane used for training.
The plains were rickety contraptions with no brakes that belched

(05:30):
castor oil and had to be dragged to a stop
with the tail skid after landing. Every pilot knew how
dangerous flying was, and Coleman herself watched a class mat
die in an accident while training in France, but she
was determined to prove that she and people who looked
like her could conquer this new frontier. I thought it

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my duty to risk my life to learn aviating and
to encourage flying among men and women of the race,
she said. I made up my mind to try. I
tried and was successful. In June nineteen twenty one, Coleman
received her license from the renowned Federacion Aeronotique Internacional, becoming

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the first black woman to earn the distinction. The license
granted her the ability to fly anywhere in the world.
Word of Coleman's unusual achievement soon reached the States. When
she returned to America in September nineteen twenty one, she
became a full blown celebrity. A gaggle of reporters awaited

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her arrival in New York on the s S Manchuria.
A series of profiles in the Chicago Defender soon followed
when she attended a popular Broadway musical in Manhattan. The
cast presented Coleman with an engraved silver cup, and the
multi racial but segregated audience gave her a standing ovation. Still,

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Coleman remained focused on her craft. Soon she was back
in Europe, gaining more aerial training from leading aircraft experts
in Amsterdam and Berlin. In the late summer of nineteen
twenty two, when she again returned to the States, she
began conducting flying circuses in New York and Chicago and
at various state fairs. Thousands of fans attended the events,

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which often cost between a quarter and seventy five cents
per head. Around fourteen dollars to day, and sometimes included
a chance for attendees to go airborne themselves, with Coleman piloting.
Her stylish clothes enhanced her showmanship. Her typical uniform was
a custom leather coat, shiny boots, and a leather helmet

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and goggles. Coleman took her responsibility as a black role
model seriously. She hoped to launch a flight school to
train black pilots, especially women. She refused to perform for
white's only audiences, and while her shows often segregated seating,
she wouldn't allow venues to force her black fans to

(08:05):
come through a separate entrance. A movie in which she
was set to star fell apart when she got hold
of the script and saw that she'd be portraying an ignorant,
poverty stricken black woman. No Uncle Tom's stuff for me,
she told the film's manager as she walked out on
her contract. But even with the glamor of celebrity, making

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a living was a constant challenge as a member of
an ensemble. In her early aerial shows, she rarely raked
in major profits. Planes were expensive, so she typically borrowed
one from a local pilot for her shows. When she
finally purchased her own plane in nineteen twenty three, she
crashed it in California on the way to a performance.

(08:50):
The accident put her in the hospital for three months
with fractured ribs and a broken leg. From her hospital bed,
she insisted her career wasn't over. Tell them all that
as soon as I can walk, I'm going to fly,
she wrote in a telegram to well wishers. After her injury,
Coleman struggled to book gigs and cycled through a series

(09:12):
of dubious managers in Texas. Though things finally started to
turn back around. She found fresh income by lecturing on
her European exploits, which only boosted fan's eagerness to see
her take to the skies. The June teenth, nineteen twenty
five festivities cemented her comeback. When Coleman returned to the ground,

(09:35):
one reporter observed more than a dozen pairs of hands
were outstretched to help her from the machine. For the
rest of the summer, Coleman toured around Texas, even performing
in Waxahachie, the town where she'd grown up. At one show,
she did a wing walk, stepping out onto the wing
of the plane while airborne and leaping down into the

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crowd via parachute. She was invited to meet with Miriam
ferguson the state's first woman governor, at the Texas Governor's mansion.
Coleman was planning to transition away from daredevil stunts and
towards speaking and building her flight school for black pilots.
Less than a year later, however, tragedy struck. In April

(10:20):
nineteen twenty six, Coleman and another pilot named William Wills
were conducting an aerial survey of an airfield in Jacksonville, Florida,
where Coleman was prepping for her next big show. At
about thirty five hundred feet, Wills lost control of the
plane and the aircraft flipped upside down. Coleman fell out

(10:41):
of her seat and plummeted to her death. Wills died
when the plane crashed into a nearby farm. Investigators later
found that her wrench had jammed the plane's control gears.
Rumors swirled that someone had sabotaged Coleman, but no further
evidence of foul play ever emerged. Freak accidents were unfortunately

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common in the early days of aviation. Coleman's death had
the weight of a national tragedy, at least in Black America.
More than five thousand people attended her memorial service in Jacksonville.
In Chicago, where Coleman had first pursued her dream of
becoming a pilot. Ten thousand mourners honored her coffin ahead

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of her funeral at Pilgrim Baptist Church. Congressman Oscar de
Priest and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells participated in
the homegoing ceremonies. The Defender published several obituaries, mournful but proud,
Coleman's eyes, one article reflected, were always fixed on the stars.

(11:49):
Coleman was just thirty four when she died, never achieving
her lifelong dream of training a new generation of black pilots,
but her legacy as an aviator would touch many lives.
Just three years after her death, a Los Angeles based
pilot and aviation entrepreneur named William Powell formed a flight

(12:10):
school called the Bessie Coleman Aero Club. Among the group's
members was James Banning, who in nineteen thirty two made
history with Thomas c. Allen becoming the first black pilots
to conduct a transcontinental flight. In nineteen thirty four, when
Powell published a book about his own aerial exploits, he

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dedicated it to Coleman, who had displayed courage equal to
that of the most daring men. Over the ensuing decades,
Coleman's legend quietly grew. When astronaut May Jemison became the
first African American woman to travel to space, she carried
a photograph of Coleman with her. Coleman also inspired Jesse L. Brown,

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the first African American pilot to complete Navy flight training,
and this summer, Coleman will be featured in the renewed
Pioneers of Flight Gallery at the newly renovated Smithsonian National
Air and Space Museum, celebrating her role as a groundbreaking
aviator and a thrilling barnstormer, and accompanying this article, pioneering

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teenage parachuter Georgia Tiny Broadwick showed that courage isn't counted
in pounds. The first woman to parachute from an airplane.
She will be recognized in an exhibit when part of
the newly renovated National Air and Space Museum reopens this year.
By Sonia Anderson in nineteen o eight, a fifteen year

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old girl named Georgia Tiny Broadwick leapt from a hot
air balloon and floated more than one thousand feet down
to Earth under a parachute. It was the start of
a prolific aerial career. The four foot eight eighty five
pound Brodwick went on to jump from the sky some
nine hundred times, demonstrate skydiving for the U. S. Army,

(14:07):
and inspire an invention that changed parachuting. Born in eighteen
ninety three, the North Carolinian spent her youth working in
a cotton mill, got married at twelve years old, and
was abandoned by her husband shortly thereafter. When she was fifteen,
she watched the parachuter Charles Broadwick jump from a lofted

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balloon at a carnival. Hooked, Broadwick convinced him to teach
her as act, after which she took his name. At
a carnival in Raleigh in nineteen o eight, Broadwick performed
her first public jump. Soon spectators were lining up to
see her fly. Aviation was still in its infancy and

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Americans were thrilled about leaving the earth and being in
an apparatus that allows you to get closer to the heavens,
says Lieutenant Colonel Jessica Brown, a storian at the U. S.
Air Force Academy, parachutists could fall like angels and alight
without injury. Not to say Broadwick always landed smoothly as

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she went where the wind took her. Once that was
through the window of a train's caboose, another time into
a cactus patch. Soon, Broadwick became the first woman to
parachute from an airplane. In one early jump, on January ninth,
nineteen fourteen, she sat in a swing that hung from
a plane two thousand feet above Los Angeles, pulled a lever,

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and dropped. She floated safely into Griffith Park. Later that year,
Broadwick was demonstrating parachuting for soldiers in San Diego when
she encountered a pivotal snag. Her parachute's static line was
catching on the aircraft, so she cut it. Free falling,
Broadwick maneuvered her lines to open the parachute. Her snip

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is often credited as the first use of a rip chord,
later patented by Floyd Smith. Growing up in poverty, Broadwick
showed working people that the wonders of aviation weren't only
for wealthy men. Her skill and courage, Brown says, proved
that aviation is classless. Next how the Grand Ole Opry

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put uniquely American music at center stage through daring business
decisions and an eye for talent. The vaunted country radio
program still stands as a taste maker for the fastest
growing genre in popular music. By Lindsay Kusiak. On December tenth,
nineteen twenty seven, radio host George D. Hay announced the

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end of an hour long opera program on Nashville's w
SM Radio. Next up was the much more down home
Barn Dance. For the past hour, we have been listening
to the music taken largely from the Grand Opera, Hay
ad libbed. From now on, we will present the Grand
Ole Opry. It was an inadvertent and fateful christening for

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what would become a cultural institution and eventually the longest
running radio program in the country, introducing tens of millions
of listeners to a distinctly American born genre of music.
As Hay playfully commented, the Opry offered a stark contrast
to other high brow programs populating the airwaves, swapping symphonies

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and arias for jaunty renditions of old Anglo, Celtic, European
and African American ballads played on the fiddle, banjo and guitar.
It was hoedown music, or, as hay lovingly called it,
hillbilly music, and with the radio boom well underway, hay
had chosen an exceptionally precipitous time to share it. Commercial

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radio fever swept the nation beginning in nineteen twenty, with
more than six hundred new stations emerging by the time
the Opry premiered, but it was not the only barn
dance on air, and hay sought a way to make
the show unique. He was known for his theatrical on
air persona, a mordant prude called the Solemn Old Judge,

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and he encouraged each new Opry band to adopt a comical,
homespun identity that would charm working class listeners. In the process,
he transformed bands like doctor Humphrey Bates augmented string orchestra
into the overall clad Possum Hunters, and other groups into

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old timey miners or clumsy farm hands. As the Great
Depression began, Hayes's salt of the Earth approach charmed the audience,
while w s M made several ingenious business decisions that
shaped popular music forever. First, w s M did the
unthinkable amid a hemorrhaging economy, investing a quarter of a

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million dollars five point eight million dollars to day to
build a new radio tower. It was the tallest in
the country and one of only three fifty thousand WOTT
clear channel towers in the United States. It allowed w
s m's broadcast to reach the whole nation to bolster

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musicians whose record sales were plummeting down from one hundred
million in nineteen twenty seven to a meager six million
dollars in nineteen thirty two, w s M began selling
bands on regional tours during the week, creating one of
the country's first talent agencies, the Artist's Service Bureau. Soon,

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Opry stars were performing for as many as twelve thousand
people a day at schools or picnics Sunday through Friday,
before hustling back to the Opry for their Saturday night
radio gig. In nineteen thirty nine, the Grand Ole Opry
joined NBC's radio network, transmitting the show to one hundred

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twenty five stations. It wasn't long before the Opry's successes
gained a big time sponsor. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company,
maker of Camel cigarettes, which sponsored a USO style tour
starring several Opry stars called the Grand Ole Opry Camel Caravan.

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The troop appeared exclusively for military members at bases throughout
the US and Central America during the summer of nineteen
forty one, charming soldiers with toe tapping, hillbilly music and
comedy from Minnie Pearl. A few months later, following Japan's
attack on Pearl Harbor, millions of those same soldiers were

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now crooning the Opry's songs on troop ships and in
overseas barracks as they deployed in World War II. The
show's new popularity among soldiers spurred the Armed Forces Raped
Service a f RS to add the Grand Ole Opry
to its overseas broadcast in nineteen forty three, transmitting the

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Opry's weekly show to three hundred and six outlets in
forty seven countries. By nineteen forty five, an AFRs station
in Munich reported that Opry superstar Roy Acuff was more
popular among its listeners than Frank Sinatra. The show even
triumphed in the Pacific Theater, where famed war correspondent Ernie

(21:32):
Pyle reported that during the Battle of Okinawa, Japanese troops
were chanting to hell with Roosevelt, to Hell with Babe Ruth,
and to hell with Roy Acuff. In nineteen forty three,
the Opry moved into the Ryman Auditorium, the city's largest
venue at the time and still the Saturday night showcase

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featuring up and coming stars like Hank Williams and later
Patsy Klein, Willie Nelson, and Loretta Lyne, sold out each week.
It wasn't until nineteen seventy four that the Opry finally
moved into its current home, the four thousand, four hundred
forty seat Grand Ole Opry House. To day, the Grand

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ol Opry has spent nearly one hundred years as a
country taste maker, elevating stars like George Jones, Garth Brooks,
Johnny Cash, and hundreds more. Thanks to this hardy institution
and contributions by crossover artists like Beyonce, country music continues
to dominate the streaming charts, and in twenty twenty three

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was declared the fastest growing genre in popular music. As
country singer and Opry member Brad Paisley put it, Pilgrims
traveled to Jerusalem to see the Holy Land and the
foundations of their faith. People go to Washington, d c.
To see the workings of government and the foundation of

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our country, and fans flock to Nashville to see the
foundation of country music the grand Ole Opry, and accompanying
that article a family affair. The opry thrives on a
network of stars invited to join its ranks. Here are

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four of the longest serving members, by Teddy Brokaw Bill
Monroe member for fifty six years. It's often been said
that if there were a mount rushmore of the Opry,
Bill Monroe's face would be featured. In nineteen thirty eight,
the mandolinist formed the Bluegrass Boys, a group so essential

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in the development of the style that it would ultimately
give the genre its name. So popular was the group's
music on the weekly radio program that the show's manager
once told Monroe, if you ever leave the Opry, you'll
have to fire yourself. Monroe, who died in nineteen ninety six,
helped launch the careers of other Opry legends like Flat

(24:07):
and Scrubs, and also inspired trailblazers far beyond the country
music world. Elvis covered his Blue Moon of Kentucky, and
Jerry Garcia traveled with Monroe's tour before forming The Grateful Dead. Next.
Geenie Seely member for fifty seven years. From the time

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she was tall enough to reach the dial of the
family radio, Jeanie Seely had dreams of the Grand Ole Opry.
After a series of hits in her signature country Soul's dial,
Seely was inducted into the Opry at age twenty seven.
She pushed its boundaries from the outset, helping to bring

(24:54):
down the Gingham Curtain, the show's requirement that female performers
wear long drawn dresses, by refusing to comply unless the
rules were enforced on the audience as well. Seely repaid
the Opry with a devotion that persists today, holding the

(25:14):
record for appearances with over five thousand. When the Opry
house flooded and waters destroyed Cely's home in twenty ten,
she still performed in borrowed clothes. Next. Loretta Lynn member
for sixty years. For six decades, Loretta Lynn, the coal

(25:37):
miner's daughter, constantly propelled the genre forward. Her hard scrabble
upbringing in Kentucky, immortalized in her autobiography and its film
version starring Cissy Spacek as Lynn in an Oscar winning role,
seemed to drive her unapologetic approach to music. Hits like

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The Pill, which in nineteen seventy five stood as one
of the first songs to tackle the use of birth control,
nearly caused her to be banned from the Opry. A
defiant Lynn played The Pill three times during one Opry
show and told the media, if they hadn't let me

(26:20):
sing the song, I have told them to shove the
grand Ole Opry. Lynn died in twenty twenty two. Finally,
Bill Anderson, member for sixty three years, the longest tenured
member of the Opry. Whispering Bill Anderson began his adult

(26:40):
life on an entirely different path, turning down an offer
to attend the Chicago Cubs training camp as a pitching
prospect to attend the University of Georgia as a journalism student. There,
Anderson availed himself of a half built college television studio
to record City Lights, which quickly became a smash hit

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for the country star Ray Price in nineteen fifty eight.
Anderson followed that success with tracks of his own. Now
in his seventh decade with the show, he still performs
at the Opry and continues to release music. Lately, his
biggest hits have come from collaborations with other artists, as

(27:28):
with Whisky Lullaby, a two thousand three double platinum hit
co written with John Randall for Brad Paisley and Alison Grause.
This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for to day.
Your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening,

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and have a great day.