June 23, 2021 • 45 mins
Quimby is most well-known for aviation, but journalism was an even bigger part of her life. Before taking up flying, she had managed to carve out a life for herself by merging her love of adventure with her knack for writing.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy be Wilson. And today's
topic is one that I have been scribbling in various
notebooks for years. I kind of keep a notebook that's
(00:23):
my to do list and schedule er, and then I
will move to the next one, and I will scribble
it in the next one and go, oh, revisit that one,
to keep a section at the back for those scribbles.
And you have actually heard an abbreviated version of her
story on the show before she appeared in the episode
by Sarah and Bblina titled four Flights of Female Aviators.
(00:43):
But to me, calling her an aviator kind of ignores
what you could argue is really the biggest part of
her life, which is journalism. That previous episode touches on
her journalism a bit, but it really did seem that
Quimby actually carved out a very nice life for herself
health by merging her love of adventure with really quite
a knack for writing. And she always said that her
(01:05):
career was the most important, and she did things to
sort of protect her career, which we'll talk about in
the episode. And it can be a little bit tricky
to get a sense of this person's life, which is
Harriet Quimby, uh, prettily her early life, because she herself
sometimes changed the details in telling her life story in
an effort to sort of craft this public persona that
(01:27):
was different than her private persona. And we'll talk about
kind of where that originates. It seems almost like a
theme lately, right, I mean, we we run into that
a lot, and it was certainly way easier in the
late eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen hundreds to go. You know,
I'm just gonna tweak this a little. No one will know.
But even though she did remain very private about a
(01:48):
lot of her her personal details in her personal life,
throughout her entire life, her public life was very well
documented and she was something of a celebrity journalist in
her day, even before she became amoss for her feet
to flying. But of course, what truly made her famous
on the world stage was aviation. Quimby was born in Coldwater, Michigan,
(02:10):
on Man. Cold Water is in Branch County, which is
roughly the midpoint between Chicago and Detroit. Her parents were
William Quimby and Ursula Cook Quimby. William was from an
Irish immigrant family and Ursula was from a comfortable and
pretty progressive New York family. William had served in the
(02:31):
Union Army in the US Civil War and met Ursula
after he was discharged due to illness. After they met
in New York, they moved to Michigan to get married
and start a family. Harriet was their tenth child, but
one of only two, the other being a sister named Helen,
who survived into adulthood. And there's no birth certificate that's
(02:52):
ever been found for Harriet, and her birthplace has often
been misreported because she frequently told people that she had
been born in California, San Francisco specifically, and she did
spend some of her childhood in Arroyo Grande, California. That's
about two hundred and fifty miles or a little more
than four hundred kilometers south of San Francisco. The Quimby's
(03:13):
moved to California when Harriet was little, but then they
moved again within California four so she was settled in
San Francisco by the time she was about nine, but
even before they got to California, they had moved from Coldwater, Michigan,
to the township of Arcadia in Manistee County. You will
sometimes see that listed also is her place of birth.
(03:34):
All of these places get listed as her place of
birth depending on what source you're looking at. Uh And
they had made that move from place to place in
Michigan after their first farm failed and that second effort
at farming in Michigan didn't succeed either, nor did Williams
other job, which was running a general store, and all
(03:55):
that is why they moved west in search of better opportunities.
They ended up farming once again in Arroyo Grande and
struggling financially, just as they had back in Michigan. William
eventually took work in a dairy to support the family,
and then they moved once more, this time to San Francisco.
Things were a little bit better with the family there.
(04:16):
William worked as a salesman and Ursula sewed packing bags
for fruit companies. Yeah, Ursula also was from a family
that involved some chemists when she was back east, and
so she also started concocting various potions and whatnot, and
William would self um One of the things that Harriet
(04:38):
was really good at throughout her life was sort of
being the person that people wanted her to be. So
when she met with the public, she was often characterized
not having come from a poor farming family, but having
been from a wealthy family, and she seemed pretty inclined
to go along with that. Rather than divulging that she
had actually grown up poor on a rural farm and
(05:00):
is a sort of middle ground between the truth and
the falsehood, she would mention instead that her parents were
from the eastern part of the country. In a May
nineteen twelve article that appeared in the Baltimore, Maryland paper
The Evening Sun, this bolsterring of her parents backgrounds as
part of her story becomes really clear. It reads quote,
(05:20):
Although she is a Californian by birth and has many
Western ideas, she first saw the light of day in
San Francisco. Her mother is a New Yorker and her
father hails from New England. Her father, by the way,
is more or less conservative and is not at all
favorably impressed by his daughter's flightly tendencies. Her mother, however,
(05:41):
is extremely sympathetic, and it has been suggested that she
too may take flight one of these days, at least
as a passenger in her daughter's airplane. Yes, so they
were always kind of refining this image of the family.
Uh and this shifting of the facts of Harriet's early
years is also often attributed to her mother. Really, Ursula
(06:03):
Quimby is believed to have been really quite disillusioned after
the failed farms in the store, and she wanted her
daughters to not depend on a husband for a living.
All mention of Harriet's sister actually vanishes from the family story.
Shortly after they moved to California, she eloped and moved away,
but Harriet remained, and it seems that Ursula focused all
(06:25):
of her energies on ensuring that her remaining daughter was
prepared to make her own way in the world. Harriet
graduated from high school in Los Gatos, California. In it's
unclear exactly when, but at some point in her life
as a young woman, her mother Ursula started telling people
not only that Harriet had been born in Boston, but
(06:47):
also that she had gone to school in France and Switzerland.
Ursula also fudged her daughter's age a lot, saying that
she was nine years younger than she really was. Whether
this was intended to make people think that Quimby was
some sort of wunderkinned or for some other reason, that's
not really clear. Well, and especially when someone is like
(07:09):
still quite young, like in their twenties, even to say
that their nine years younger is uh the big gap.
So like when when Harriet was, you know, twenty four,
she was still telling people she was only fifteen. Ursula
really wanted above all else for her daughter to be
(07:31):
a modern career woman, again going back to that fear
that requiring a man to support you would be let down,
And she specifically wanted her to be a journalist because
Mrs Quimby thought that that was a career that would
open doors. But at the time, Harriet actually wanted to act.
She wanted to be an actor, and she did without
any apparent training. She started acting in plays in the
(07:53):
San Francisco area, and she also worked as a retail clerk,
and through those two jobs she eventually was supporting herself
and largely her parents, although they were also still bringing
in a small amount of money through their own endeavors.
Harriet's stage name was Hazel Quimby, and she really hustled
to make this acting dream work. Along with friends, she
(08:14):
convinced San Francisco's mayor to lend them the money to
rent a theater for the production of Romeo and Juliet
Hazel Slash. Harriet played Romeo, and she'd gotten an entertainment
journalist she knew and was friends with to review the production.
That led to Harriet getting more roles and other shows.
(08:35):
Throughout this time, she became deeply entrenched in the city's
art scene. Yeah, pretty early on she saw like journalism
has a power it can make or break people. That
becomes more and more important to her. But it was
through those connections on the art scene and is a
member of San Francisco's Bohemian club, that Harriet actually started
(08:55):
working herself as a journalist. In nineteen o one, when
it started to become a parent that acting was not
going to bring in enough money. She wrote an article
called the Artist's Colony at Monterey for The Call, and
it was a Sunday feature and in that article she
wrote about the coastal town and its beauty. Later, she
made stabs into writing short fiction, including an article called
(09:18):
A Night at a Haunted House, which was published on
February second ninety two in the San Francisco Chronicle. But
news was really where Harriet Quimby flourished as a writer,
and while she primarily covered the arts in San Francisco
for both The Call and the Chronicle, she also wrote
on a variety of topics, including everything from sex trafficking
(09:38):
to hospital reform. She wrote a great deal about San
Francisco's Chinese community. She wrote about issues like voting rights
for women, which she strongly supported, although she didn't identify
as a feminist, she felt that label and some of
the movements associated with it, actually caused more discord than solutions.
As she was really starting to develop up a pretty
(10:00):
solid career, there were rumors about her having various romantic partners,
but there's no clear evidence of her ever having been
seriously involved with anyone. She seemed to be focused almost
entirely on her work, which was both gaining her notice
and respect, and she decided, after having gotten a taste
of all that, that the next logical step for her
(10:22):
career was to move to New York and work as
a journalist there. So in early nine three, she did
just that, Despite the fact that she knew no one
in New York, and she didn't even know at the
time where any of the major newspapers offices were. We'll
talk about her arrival in New York after we take
a quick sponsor break. After Harriet got to New York,
(10:49):
she spent one night at the Pennsylvania Hotel, and then
the next morning she arranged to rent a room in
a boarding house at sixty eight and Third. That was
a connection she had made through a reference that one
of her San Francisco editors had given her. And after
her lodging was sorted, she took her portfolio of published
pieces from her work on the West Coast and some
new writing that she had done on the five day
(11:11):
trip across the country, and she started visiting publication offices
looking for work. Her first stop was at Leslie's Illustrated Weekly,
which is a publication that comes up as in the
show as having articles about topics that we're talking about.
She spoke with two assistant editors who seemed to like her,
but she had to return the next day to meet
(11:32):
the editor in chief before any decisions could be made.
After going through one of her samples and verbally telling
her all of the edits that he would make which
was just not a level of criticism that she was
accustomed to. The editor John why Foster offered her a
job on a trial basis. He also asked if she
shouldn't try a more conventional job for a woman, and
(11:56):
she told him she was a better writer than she
was a cook. Three later, Foster published Harriet's article Curious
Chinese Customs, in which she described the tradition of Chinese
paper offerings. That article was picked up by several other outlets.
Yeah right away, her work was super popular. She and
Foster actually ended up being great friends for years and years.
(12:17):
But it was kind of the way it's described sounds
like a tug of war in the beginning of here's
everything wrong with this article? Uh, you you seem plucky, though,
so I'll try it. And when he asked her if
she shouldn't try doing something that was a more natural
fit for a woman, her perception was that it was
(12:37):
a test and that if she was like well, maybe
he would have been like, get out. But instead she's like, no,
this is really all I do. After the success of
that first article, she took assignments for Leslie's and she
wrote a series on the lives of the occupants of
tenements in New York. She also campaigned to be given
a regular sea at a review column. She still loved
(12:58):
the arts, and she was granted that, and soon after
that she was just given the title of drama critic
because she did so well, and this was a role
that she filled with enthusiasm. Often her coverage included interviews
with actors and various shows, a number of which she
had met or been friends with back in San Francisco,
And if she didn't know someone, she was still usually
(13:19):
able to win them over and get them to consent
to a conversation about their work on their record. One
of her great successes as the paper's drama critic was
a section at the end of her weekly column that
offered a list of which plays a man might safely
take his wife or daughter too. I have thoughts, uh
I do too. It's sort of charming and insulting all
(13:40):
at the same time. It's the tangle. Quimby was doing
well at this time. She may not have been working
exclusively for Leslie's. It's possible she was also writing for
other publications under other pen names, although there's no solid
evidence there, but she was making enough that she was
able to move out of the boarding house into a
(14:01):
place of her own at Hotel Victoria and Broadway. That
was convenient it put her closer to work. In addition
to moving into a nicer place, Harry had also started
traveling for work. She went on assignment to Cuba to
write a series of stories for Leslie's and subsequently she
became the papers travel correspondent. After that, she traveled the
(14:22):
world in search of stories. And while she had been
living in San Francisco, she had become friends with German
American photographer Arnold Genta, and he had taught her how
to take photographs. This skill really served her well in
her new role because she was able to photograph her
travels throughout Europe, Africa, and South America herself, making her
a photojournalist as well. The first years of the nineteen
(14:45):
hundreds had really offered Harriet Quimby exactly the life she wanted,
one that was filled with success and adventure. This is
also the time when automobiles are being developed, both for
racing and for a wider consumer market. Quimby had rid
in a race car on Long Island while covering the
topic for a paper, and after that she really wanted
(15:05):
to learn to drive. She took lessons, got her license,
and bought herself a Model t in nineteen o eight.
Over the next several years, she tracked the growing popularity
of automobiles and the United States with a particular eye
toward women drivers, noting that driving eventually became a fashionable
activity for a modern woman. She also used her platform
(15:28):
as a writer to encourage women to learn how their
cars worked for themselves they would not be taken advantage
of by mechanics. As an aside, you might sometimes see
Harriet Quimby touted as the first woman to receive a
driver's license in the United States. That isn't entirely accurate.
Uh Anne Rainsford French was given a license to drive
(15:49):
a quote four wheeled vehicle powered by steam or gas
in nineteen hundred, so that was about eight years before
Harriet's fascination with cars blossomed into her getting a license.
Life Magazine actually ran a profile of French, who had
married and taken the last name Bush, in nineteen fifty two,
and by that point she was seventy three. As Quimby's
(16:10):
journalism star had continued to rise in New York, her
circle of friends back in San Francisco did not have
the same good fortune. Even those who had been doing
well on the San Francisco theater scene found themselves without
a safety net after the earthquake and fire of nineteen
o six, which we have talked about on the podcast.
Before David work Griffith was among those friends. He and
(16:33):
his wife Linda had been close with Quimby on the
West Coast. After struggling to find stage work, Griffith found
himself under contract, first as an actor at Biograph Studios
and then as a director, after which he was able
to bring his wife on as an actor as well. Yeah,
he was initially a little scorely about that. He's like,
(16:54):
I don't I don't want to do film. That's not
real art um. Harriet helped both through this new avenue
for the Griffiths, though, by writing articles about their work
and explaining to the public how this still new industry
of film turned out its pictures, how the whole thing worked.
She would take photos during set visits and publish those
photos along with her write ups, giving her readers a
(17:15):
behind the scenes peak and kind of helping to elevate
public opinion of moving pictures, which had been seen up
to that point as kind of CD, particularly by theater goers.
Harriet also wrote several scripts for Biograph while DW was
directing there, and she also made a cameo appearance in
one of the shorts that she wrote, titled Fisher Folks.
(17:37):
While working as a screenwriter might have been fun, Harriet
was really dedicated to her journalism career. She had no
intention of leaving it. But it was a desire to
seek out the new and exciting so that she could
write about it that led her to the thing that
she became most well known for historically. That was aviation.
So in October Harriet attended a flying race with her
(18:01):
friend Matilda Moissant. This was just a year after Wilbur
Wright got paid a massive fifteen thousand dollars to perform
several flying demonstrations in New York as part of the
Hudson Fulton celebration. Again, that's a lot of money. Flying
at this point was of course new and enthralling, so
naturally Harriet gravitated to it, and in the years since
(18:22):
Wilbur Rights demos, aviation racing had emerged as a dangerous
but potentially lucrative endeavor. John Moissant, Matilda's brother, was one
of the competitors on the day that Harriet attended the
event to gather information for an article for Leslie's John
Moissant had studied flying with French aviation expert Louis Bleriot
(18:43):
and then used his money to set up his own
aviation enterprise in the United States. He had been the
first pilot to offer regular passenger flights from Paris to London,
and once he had established his business, Moissant International Aviators
in Mississippi, he can tinued to offer passenger fares. He
and his brother Alfred had also opened a flying school
(19:05):
in Minnela, New York, hoping that spectators who saw the
races in New York would be enticed to learn to
fly themselves. That is exactly what happened to Harriet Quimby.
Now had she attempted to enroll in the school that
the Right brothers had opened, she would have been turned away.
The rights thought that women only wanted to learn to
fly as a sort of stunt and would not take
(19:27):
it seriously, and so they did not take on women students,
not even their sister uh. They also doubted that any
women would even make enough money to afford their school,
but Quimby, along with Matild Moissan, made her case to
John and Alfred, as well as to their friend A.
Leo Stevens, who was a balloonist who also taught at
the aviation school. Matilda also wanted to fly, and the
(19:51):
men agreed, after a bit of cajoling, that if the
women could wait until spring, they would teach them. So
Harriet busied herself with work, basically counting down the weeks
until warm weather. Yeah, that was like in October, so
she was just like, okay, five months, six months, something
like that. But unfortunately John Moissant never became her teacher.
(20:12):
He was killed a little over two months after they
had met in New York while he was flying in
the Michelin Cup Race outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. Moissan's
plane had caught a gust of air and he was
thrown from the plane and fell to his death. And
while that tragedy caused everyone involved in the Moissant Aviation
School to reconsider their future and their agreement to teach
(20:34):
Harriet and Matilda how to fly, the school and that
plan moved forward, there was a minor bit of deception
in the mix, Harriet and Matilda had to disguise themselves
as men anytime they were at the airfield. That disguise
plan was in part because it was inherently controversial for
women to be enrolled. If you've heard us talk about
(20:55):
women's flying clubs and like flying as a really popular
her hobby for women in the US that was later
than this. They're sort of the forerunners in a lot
of ways. But Harriet was also protecting her professional reputation.
She was always careful any time she was in public
(21:16):
to behave in a way that would in no way
invite any criticism for her employer. She loved her job
and did not ever want to jeopardize it, and to her,
behaving that way was simply part of being a professional journalist.
It is also one of the reasons that we like
we mentioned at the top of the show that so
much of her personal life remains a little bit murky, right.
(21:38):
She was known, for example, to smoke, but only behind
closed doors. The only accounts of her doing so are
from her close associates, and it was something she would
never have been seen doing in public. Similarly, she did
not want her attendance at Aviation School to put Leslie's
in the hot seat before she was ready to write
about it. And there was also another layer in play
(22:00):
here because Quimby had not told her editor at Leslie's
where she was up to. She wasn't telling anybody she
was taking flying lessons, so she had a really vested
interest in keeping this whole thing under wraps. Before she
was allowed to try her hand at flying, Quimby, like
all the other students at the Moissant School, had to
learn about aerodynamics and airplane design, as well as basic
(22:23):
lessons and engine mechanics. Then there was cockpit time and
a simulator that was a plane that was outfitted with
all the necessary machinery but was fixed to the floor
of the hangar. Then it was basic flight in a
plane designed to fly only a few feet off the ground.
As she went through all these different lessons, Harriet Quimby
was taking notes for the articles she would later write
(22:46):
describing this whole process. After five weeks of lessons and tests,
which included a final week of piloting with an altitude limited,
the students at the Moissant School moved on to actually
flying a monoplane built in the French style of Blario.
This aircraft was made of wood, piano wire, and rubber
coated silk, and though she got coated in cast royal
(23:08):
spray from the engine, Harriet loved the experience of flying.
Despite her efforts to stay anonymous through this male presenting disguise,
Harriet was found out by a reporter from the New
York Times. This reporter cornered her at the school one
morning and foolishly asked her if she liked flying. She replied, well,
(23:29):
I'm out here at four am each day. That ought
to be answer enough. Well, she was quimpy in that moment.
This outing forced her to confess to her bosses at
Leslie's that she had been secretly attending flight school with
the intention of writing about it, and then she had
gotten scooped in the process, right, like I'm gonna write
(23:50):
this amazing thing, someone else was coming out with the
article first. Sorry, this might also discredit the paper. Um,
But those discussions where she confessed it was going on
to her boss's actually went really quite well, probably because
they were a little accustomed to having this writer who
kind of did as she pleased and then wrote about it.
There was no big surprise in the Leslie's offices, and
(24:14):
this venture was kind of seen as a pretty big
potential paper seller. Consider that this was a woman in
flight school, which was controversial enough that other papers wanted
to write about their reporter doing it. And while The
Times was planning to go to press with the story
before Leslie's could, it would not have been able to
include any of Harriett's first hand accounts of the experience.
(24:36):
The Times ran their story in early May, and on
Leslie's ran the article how a Woman learns to Fly.
It was the first in a series, and that series
was very popular. Leslie's Weekly was so happy with the
series that Quimby was actually reimbursed for her expensive flying lessons.
In a moment, we'll talk about how Quimby gained new
(24:58):
levels of fame from the pile at Seat, But first
we'll hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff
you missed in history class. Going throughout the publication of
those early articles in the series, Quimby was still in
flight school. She had not yet taken her pilots exam.
(25:21):
That didn't happen until August of nineteen eleven, and initially
the officials from the Aero Club of America, who facilitated
such exams, did not even want to bother testing Quimby.
They thought this whole thing was a stunt and that
it was going to be a waste of their time.
The flight school had to schedule her test in the
same session as a male pilot candidate just to get
(25:42):
those officials to agree to travel to the airfield, and
the first day of her tests, she did pretty well
on the first two segments, which involved various flight maneuvers
like figure eights, but then she misjudged the third test,
which was landing, and she put the plane down too
far from the target. She had the chance to reach
test to the next day, so she resolved to do it.
(26:03):
Matilda Moissant agreed to also test, but wanted to let
Harriet go first so that she could be the first
woman to be issued a pilot's license. The day initially
looked like it was a bust because of heavy fog conditions,
but things cleared up by midday. Despite some gusty wind,
Harriet managed to complete the first two parts of the
test again, and then in the third section she executed
(26:26):
a precise landing. When she emerged from her plane, she
got in a dig to the ongoing inability of women
to vote in the US by quipping, believe me, flying
is much easier than voting. That might be my favorite
thing she ever said. Harriet was already a celebrity in
New York by this point, all the way back to
(26:47):
her theater articles, she had been really popular, but becoming
a licensed pilot expanded her fame considerably, and she gained
a devoted following. When she made public appearances, huge crowds
gathered to see here, both because of the novelty and
because she was very charming. Her first paid gig as
a pilot was in Staten Island in October of nineteen eleven,
(27:09):
so just a couple of months after she got her license,
and more than twenty thousand people filled the field and
they actually had to clear the field for safety, and
even as she tried to land after her flight, there
were spectators running onto the field that caused her to
have to make a bouncy and slightly dangerous landing just
beyond the target area, although she did so successfully. She
(27:29):
got paid fifteen hundred dollars for that day, and it
was the first of many bookings that she would get
in the months that followed, sometimes on her own and
sometimes with Matilde Moissant, who had also successfully tested for
her license. Soon, Harriet Quimby and the other pilots who
flew exhibitions for the Moissant organization were on their way
to Mexico City for a festival booking. She was devoted
(27:53):
still to her journalism career, and Quimby met her deadlines
and sent her articles from on board the ship that
was carrying her south. She was to be in Mexico
for two months, and she promised to write travel accounts
for her editors at Leslie's, but the revolution in Mexico
quickly put an end to this booking. The whole team
had to flee the country soon. Matilda had given up
(28:16):
flying after being burned in an accident when her gas
tank exploded, and that left Harriet is the only woman
pilot on the Moissant team. Harriet had rocketed to fame,
but she still had the feeling that there were people
that saw her not as a skilled pilot, but as
a publicity stunt. She did not like that, and she
wanted to prove them wrong. So she plotted away to
(28:39):
prove her metal and for her that was going to
be flying across the English Channel. Now, this was something
that had been done before, but not by a woman,
and really not very often even by male pilots. A
Leo Stevens from the Moissant team joined her on her
journey across the Atlantic, and by this point he was
managing her bookings, and there were rumors that the two
of them were a cup although that remains unverified. They
(29:02):
sailed to London on the S S America, and once
in London, Harriet secured a sponsorship of five thousand dollars
from the London Daily Mirror. In return, the paper got
exclusive European rights to the story of her attempt. This
was something of a race to be the first. The
plane that Harriet wanted to use was a Blurrio that
she would be acquiring in France, and it wasn't ready
(29:25):
yet when she got there. Louis Blurrio had become the
first pilots fly across the Channel in nineteen o nine,
and Quimby wanted to be the first woman to do so.
So she convinced Blurrio to loan her a plane for
the stunt and completed her purchase for the more powerful plane,
which she intended to fly back to the United States,
(29:46):
but while all of that was being worked out, pilot
Gustav Hamel flew a woman passenger, eleanor Treehawk Davies, across
the English Channel. She was not the pilot, but Mrs
Davies became the first woman to cross the Channel in
a plane. That was a huge blow to Quimby. Yeah,
she was super mad about the whole thing. Then when
(30:10):
it came time for Harriet to prep for her own flight,
there was Gustave Himel again. He insisted that Harriet let
him teach her how to use a compass. That was
something she had not done before, and he was kind
of like, look, if you get off track going over
the channel, things could get really bad. Please let me
teach you. But then he also offered to make the
flight for her disguised as a woman. So it seems
(30:33):
like that compass thing might not have been so much
a kindness as a you, poor ding dong, let me
help you. It's a little condescending. She did take his compass,
but she turned him down on the other offer. Then,
when the perfect day of flying weather came, Harriet, to
everyone's surprise, opted to stay grounded. She said she wouldn't
fly that day because it was a Sunday and she
(30:55):
had promised her mother that she would never ever fly
on Sundays, so there's some appointment. But everybody cleared and
then the weather was clear again on Tuesday April, and
Harriet took off at five thirty in the morning, remarking
later how once the trip was under way quote, it
seemed so easy, but soon the fog rolled in she
(31:17):
lost all visibility. She kept an eye on her watch,
and after twenty two minutes in the air, she decided
to start her descent. The Blario's engine flooded when she
tipped the nose down, and she considered landing on the
water when the gasoline finished burning off and the engine
stopped backfiring. As she descended out of the fog, she
(31:37):
saw the French coast and put the plane down at Harlow,
which was not her intended destination of Calais. She was
about fifty three kilometers away from her intended landing spot,
but she had crossed the English Channel. She did not
really speak French terribly well, so the locals kind of
(31:57):
communicated to her in their uh halting effort laden way
that you do with someone who doesn't speak your language,
that she had to move her plane to avoid it
being swept to see when the tide came in. Uh.
There was also a local woman who served her breakfast,
including tea in a cup that Harriet described as six
times larger than any she had ever seen. Uh. The
(32:19):
woman insisted she keep the cup as a a mento,
which Harriet did and later said that she prized it
more than any trophy she could have imagined. And Harriet
at this point was absolutely elated to have achieved her goal.
But what she did not know, and which no one
else on the beach with her new, including the reporters
who arrived, was that the Titanic had gone down the
(32:41):
night of April fourteenth. Harriet expected to be the headline
and papers around the globe, but the story of that
tragedy overtook her accomplishment in press rooms everywhere, unsurprisingly really,
even in The Mirror, which had paid so dearly for
this exclusive. The Mirror put her story back in the
section of the paper that was reserved for advertisements aimed
(33:04):
at women, which, again, like you could see where it
would be downgraded maybe a little bit insulting on the placement.
But we should say there was press coverage of Quimby's accomplishment.
If you go looking in papers in April of you'll
see that people wrote it up. It just was not
nearly the level of coverage that she or her editors
(33:24):
at Leslie's had anticipated. And those articles that came out
did talk about her achievement, but they were also just
as focused on Harriet the person, because she was seen
as being so unusual, even outside of being the first
woman to cross the English Channel. One element of her
work that was often mentioned in the news coverage of
her flying was actually her clothing. It was a unique
(33:47):
outfit which she had designed herself, and she had collaborated
with a prominent New York taylor to have this jumpsuit
created that she felt was feminine yet functional for flight.
And it was made of satin with a woolbacking and
included a hood, and there were gloves and custom boots,
and according to a write up in the New York Times,
this outfit, which was purple quote is made in one piece,
(34:09):
including the hood, which by an ingenious device, can be
converted into a conventional walking skirt. Because of her high profile,
and maybe also because of that purple flying outfit. Quimby
was asked to be the new spokesperson for the armor
company promoting their grape soda called vin Fizz. Was made
of the first women to become a brand spokesperson. There's
(34:33):
a somewhat grizzly aspect to all this, though. The prior
spokesperson had been Carl Rogers, who made the first transcontinental
flight across the US in nineteen eleven. Rogers died during
an exhibition flight in California, two weeks before Harriet Quimby
made her English Channel crossing. His death is why this
(34:55):
position was even open. Yeah, a little unsettling. In July nine,
Harriet was contracted to fly at the Boston Air Meet
in Squantum, Massachusetts. She was the big draw of the
event and was rumored to have entered into a very
profitable contract for it. She was going to fly the
(35:16):
plane that she had purchased in France, and that was
a two seater, and in her practice runs she had
experienced an unexplained stall and had plummeted toward the ground
before she could level the plane out to land. She
and her mechanic had examined everything and they chalked it
up to basically a bad wind gust. The events promoter,
William Willard, was very taken with Quimby and may have
(35:38):
had a bit of a crush on her. His interviews
about the event all sound sort of wowed about how
pretty she was, and when the day came and a
coin was tossed to see who her lucky passenger would be,
Willard wanted. He excitedly joined Harriet and her barrio as
she prepared for the twilight flight. So she and her
(35:58):
team started the engine and they ran the plane through
its checklist. That was something she did before every single flight,
and the first half of that flight went absolutely perfectly,
but as the spectators could see against the orange sunset sky,
just after it had made its turn at the halfway
point to come back, the plane's tail whipped upward into
(36:19):
the air. It was basically pointed down. Willard had been
ejected from his seat. Harriet, seemingly unaware of her lost passenger,
initially struggled to try to write the plane. She did
make some initial progress, but then she lost control entirely.
She was also thrown from the craft, and she and Willard,
as well as the blarrio plummeted into Dorchester Bay. It
(36:41):
was low tide. The plane surprisingly managed to bob upright
in the water and glide to a stop, but the
bodies of the pilot and passenger were retrieved and taken
to Quincy Hospital, although they were both already dead on
the scene. A particularly heartless ride up of this tragedy
appeared in the Spokesman review of Spokene Washington under the
(37:05):
headline little Miss Dresden, China broken at Last. The sub
had read quote how Harriet Quimby, most daring of air women,
apparently nothing but frivolous femininity, full of odd superstitions, was
flipped out of her flying machine by the hand from
the clouds which she had always feared. That nickname in
(37:27):
the headline, the Dresden, China Aviatress had come from the
fact that she was always really quite dainty and ladylike
in her public persona. She also hated that nickname, and
her superstitious nature was well known. She had always carried
good luck charms, and she wore what she believed to
be lucky jewelry. But of course it seems incredibly cruel
to sum up her death in this sensationalist manner, which
(37:50):
reads like the nineteen twelve equivalent of click bait, and
it also robs her of her reputation within the aviation
community for being fearless, yes, but also being very skilled
and really very careful. The article includes a lot of
speculation about how she must have panicked and done something
wrong to cause the crash. The actual cause was never
(38:10):
conclusively determined, but there were several possibilities that were evident
right away. Examination of the just freakishly undamaged Blarrio showed
that the left rudder wire was caught on the lever
that operated the wings, but there was some debate over
whether that had been the cause, or whether it was
(38:32):
something that had happened on the way down or possibly
on impact. One theory was that Quimby had briefly lost
consciousness and by the time she came to the plane
was too out of control to regain it. Another theory
was that William Willard, who was a large man and
had been leaning far forward to speak to her in flight,
(38:52):
might have unwittingly caused the blarrio to become unbalanced. An
article appeared in Aircraft magazine Scene suggesting that the design
of the Blarrio was fundamentally unstable, and that the tail
wing was the cause. Obviously, safety belts were not in use.
They were not standard safety equipment. Yet there were witnesses
(39:15):
who claimed that they did see Quimby quote buckle abroad
strap across the space in front of her. If she
did that, she had unbuckled it at some point afterward.
For several months after Harriet Quimby's death, articles that she
had filed before that final flight continued to be published,
and one in particular reads a sort of bitter suite.
(39:36):
It was about the potential for careers in flight for women.
She wrote, quote, there is no sport that affords the
same amount of excitement and joy or exacts in return
so little muscular strength as flying. It is easier than
walking or driving, simpler than golf or tennis. There is
no reason why the airplane should not open a fruitful
(39:57):
occupation for women. She was so young when she died. Yeah,
I've listened to that Flights of four. Uh, I think
it's for female. He said it at the beginning of
the episode, And now I've forgotten what the exact title
of that older episode was. I listened to it one
time way in the past when I was trying to
figure out like which which people were discussed in it,
(40:20):
and I have forgotten a lot of the details in
the intervening years, UM, And so I did not realize
when I started out reading through this episode for the
first time that that she did die at such a
very young age and so early in her career as
a pilot when that became the thing that she was
really known for. Yeah, I mean she was a pilot
(40:41):
for a licensed pilot for less than a year of
her life, whereas she had been a journalist for quite
some time at that point, UM and had really, like
I said at the top of the episode, I'm always
a little like when people are like aviator Harry, mean,
it's like she was, but like, I don't think she
would have necessarily identified that a I think she would
(41:01):
say she was a journalist first. And there are quotes
from her where people asked her, are you giving up
your journalism career to fly full time? And she was like, no,
way up. She was always still planning to keep writing.
She actually had been talking about um leaving journalism and
possibly leaving piloting for a while after that flight where
(41:23):
she died so that she could write a novel because
it was something she had always wanted to try and
it had never done. Um And of course that did
not happen, which is terribly sad. But also she's quite
a creature. She's a can be a little bit conflicting,
and that in some ways she is the perfect role
of like feminism, and you know, a woman really being
(41:44):
in charge of her life and not defining herself by
the men in her life. But then she would do
things like here are place you can safely take your
wife to. Right, It's like, oh, Harriet, no, but also
very savvy because people loved that part of the thing,
that part of her her articles. Uh, since this is
(42:05):
a little bit of a downer place, I thought we
would do a fun listener mail. I think that's a
good idea about a topic I keep talking about, which
is that darn Rugarou, but I love him so much.
This comes from our listener Amanda, who writes Holly and Tracy. Hello.
My name is Amanda. I'm a huge history nerd and
have been an avid listener from almost the beginning. I'd
(42:26):
like to thank you ladies for keeping me company for
years now during my hour long commute to and from work.
You guys get me cracking up first thing in the morning,
which is no small feet, and it starts my day
out on a good note. This is my first time
writing because I just had to let Holly know what
I found in my home state of Alabama. I found
her the perfect road trip worthy restaurant. Get this. It
has a rugaru theme, It's in Birmingham, and of course
(42:50):
it serves Cajun cuisine. I haven't been yet, but I'm
planning to very soon. I included picks I found online
of the restaurant and of the stuffed rugarou. I will
let you both know if it's any good. Thanks again
for all the hard work you do. I know all
your listeners, including myself, adore you both. She also included
pictures of her dog, Pepper, who is cute. Um. So
(43:10):
here's a weird thing that came up and why I
wanted to read this one. It feels like I am
destined to go visit this restaurant. And here's why. Someone
sent me a photo completely unrelated to any work stuff,
and it had rugaru with this spelling which has an
(43:30):
X on the end like a ru um. And I
was like, what is that? What is that place in
the background. It was like in the background of a picture,
and I was like what it? So I started looking
for it online and I found this restaurant and then
this email came like two hours later, and I was like,
that's weird. Um. So it feels like I need to
(43:51):
get in the car and go to Ruguru at some
point in Alabama, maybe en route Tahoma, where I can
go visit the actual Rugaru and teach them how to
count higher than twelve. Uh. It just seems like if
I didn't read it, something bad might happen. The Rugary
is sending the signals it wants to be your friend.
Holly great. As long as it's nice to my cats.
(44:13):
He can live here. Like I said, I'll make him
some flash guards will work on the map. Um. If
you do get to go, Amanda, please tell us what
the food is like, sample everything, tell us all the
details thinking about Cajun food. Now, if you would like
to write to us about your experiences at rugarothieved restaurants,
or otherwise, you can do that at History Podcast at
(44:34):
I Heart radio dot com. You can find us all
over social media. As missed in History and you can
subscribe to the podcast on the I heart Radio app
or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart
(44:55):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy be Wilson. And today's
topic is one that I have been scribbling in various
notebooks for years. I kind of keep a notebook that's
(00:23):
my to do list and schedule er, and then I
will move to the next one, and I will scribble
it in the next one and go, oh, revisit that one,
to keep a section at the back for those scribbles.
And you have actually heard an abbreviated version of her
story on the show before she appeared in the episode
by Sarah and Bblina titled four Flights of Female Aviators.
(00:43):
But to me, calling her an aviator kind of ignores
what you could argue is really the biggest part of
her life, which is journalism. That previous episode touches on
her journalism a bit, but it really did seem that
Quimby actually carved out a very nice life for herself
health by merging her love of adventure with really quite
a knack for writing. And she always said that her
(01:05):
career was the most important, and she did things to
sort of protect her career, which we'll talk about in
the episode. And it can be a little bit tricky
to get a sense of this person's life, which is
Harriet Quimby, uh, prettily her early life, because she herself
sometimes changed the details in telling her life story in
an effort to sort of craft this public persona that
(01:27):
was different than her private persona. And we'll talk about
kind of where that originates. It seems almost like a
theme lately, right, I mean, we we run into that
a lot, and it was certainly way easier in the
late eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen hundreds to go. You know,
I'm just gonna tweak this a little. No one will know.
But even though she did remain very private about a
(01:48):
lot of her her personal details in her personal life,
throughout her entire life, her public life was very well
documented and she was something of a celebrity journalist in
her day, even before she became amoss for her feet
to flying. But of course, what truly made her famous
on the world stage was aviation. Quimby was born in Coldwater, Michigan,
(02:10):
on Man. Cold Water is in Branch County, which is
roughly the midpoint between Chicago and Detroit. Her parents were
William Quimby and Ursula Cook Quimby. William was from an
Irish immigrant family and Ursula was from a comfortable and
pretty progressive New York family. William had served in the
(02:31):
Union Army in the US Civil War and met Ursula
after he was discharged due to illness. After they met
in New York, they moved to Michigan to get married
and start a family. Harriet was their tenth child, but
one of only two, the other being a sister named Helen,
who survived into adulthood. And there's no birth certificate that's
(02:52):
ever been found for Harriet, and her birthplace has often
been misreported because she frequently told people that she had
been born in California, San Francisco specifically, and she did
spend some of her childhood in Arroyo Grande, California. That's
about two hundred and fifty miles or a little more
than four hundred kilometers south of San Francisco. The Quimby's
(03:13):
moved to California when Harriet was little, but then they
moved again within California four so she was settled in
San Francisco by the time she was about nine, but
even before they got to California, they had moved from Coldwater, Michigan,
to the township of Arcadia in Manistee County. You will
sometimes see that listed also is her place of birth.
(03:34):
All of these places get listed as her place of
birth depending on what source you're looking at. Uh And
they had made that move from place to place in
Michigan after their first farm failed and that second effort
at farming in Michigan didn't succeed either, nor did Williams
other job, which was running a general store, and all
(03:55):
that is why they moved west in search of better opportunities.
They ended up farming once again in Arroyo Grande and
struggling financially, just as they had back in Michigan. William
eventually took work in a dairy to support the family,
and then they moved once more, this time to San Francisco.
Things were a little bit better with the family there.
(04:16):
William worked as a salesman and Ursula sewed packing bags
for fruit companies. Yeah, Ursula also was from a family
that involved some chemists when she was back east, and
so she also started concocting various potions and whatnot, and
William would self um One of the things that Harriet
(04:38):
was really good at throughout her life was sort of
being the person that people wanted her to be. So
when she met with the public, she was often characterized
not having come from a poor farming family, but having
been from a wealthy family, and she seemed pretty inclined
to go along with that. Rather than divulging that she
had actually grown up poor on a rural farm and
(05:00):
is a sort of middle ground between the truth and
the falsehood, she would mention instead that her parents were
from the eastern part of the country. In a May
nineteen twelve article that appeared in the Baltimore, Maryland paper
The Evening Sun, this bolsterring of her parents backgrounds as
part of her story becomes really clear. It reads quote,
(05:20):
Although she is a Californian by birth and has many
Western ideas, she first saw the light of day in
San Francisco. Her mother is a New Yorker and her
father hails from New England. Her father, by the way,
is more or less conservative and is not at all
favorably impressed by his daughter's flightly tendencies. Her mother, however,
(05:41):
is extremely sympathetic, and it has been suggested that she
too may take flight one of these days, at least
as a passenger in her daughter's airplane. Yes, so they
were always kind of refining this image of the family.
Uh and this shifting of the facts of Harriet's early
years is also often attributed to her mother. Really, Ursula
(06:03):
Quimby is believed to have been really quite disillusioned after
the failed farms in the store, and she wanted her
daughters to not depend on a husband for a living.
All mention of Harriet's sister actually vanishes from the family story.
Shortly after they moved to California, she eloped and moved away,
but Harriet remained, and it seems that Ursula focused all
(06:25):
of her energies on ensuring that her remaining daughter was
prepared to make her own way in the world. Harriet
graduated from high school in Los Gatos, California. In it's
unclear exactly when, but at some point in her life
as a young woman, her mother Ursula started telling people
not only that Harriet had been born in Boston, but
(06:47):
also that she had gone to school in France and Switzerland.
Ursula also fudged her daughter's age a lot, saying that
she was nine years younger than she really was. Whether
this was intended to make people think that Quimby was
some sort of wunderkinned or for some other reason, that's
not really clear. Well, and especially when someone is like
(07:09):
still quite young, like in their twenties, even to say
that their nine years younger is uh the big gap.
So like when when Harriet was, you know, twenty four,
she was still telling people she was only fifteen. Ursula
really wanted above all else for her daughter to be
(07:31):
a modern career woman, again going back to that fear
that requiring a man to support you would be let down,
And she specifically wanted her to be a journalist because
Mrs Quimby thought that that was a career that would
open doors. But at the time, Harriet actually wanted to act.
She wanted to be an actor, and she did without
any apparent training. She started acting in plays in the
(07:53):
San Francisco area, and she also worked as a retail clerk,
and through those two jobs she eventually was supporting herself
and largely her parents, although they were also still bringing
in a small amount of money through their own endeavors.
Harriet's stage name was Hazel Quimby, and she really hustled
to make this acting dream work. Along with friends, she
(08:14):
convinced San Francisco's mayor to lend them the money to
rent a theater for the production of Romeo and Juliet
Hazel Slash. Harriet played Romeo, and she'd gotten an entertainment
journalist she knew and was friends with to review the production.
That led to Harriet getting more roles and other shows.
(08:35):
Throughout this time, she became deeply entrenched in the city's
art scene. Yeah, pretty early on she saw like journalism
has a power it can make or break people. That
becomes more and more important to her. But it was
through those connections on the art scene and is a
member of San Francisco's Bohemian club, that Harriet actually started
(08:55):
working herself as a journalist. In nineteen o one, when
it started to become a parent that acting was not
going to bring in enough money. She wrote an article
called the Artist's Colony at Monterey for The Call, and
it was a Sunday feature and in that article she
wrote about the coastal town and its beauty. Later, she
made stabs into writing short fiction, including an article called
(09:18):
A Night at a Haunted House, which was published on
February second ninety two in the San Francisco Chronicle. But
news was really where Harriet Quimby flourished as a writer,
and while she primarily covered the arts in San Francisco
for both The Call and the Chronicle, she also wrote
on a variety of topics, including everything from sex trafficking
(09:38):
to hospital reform. She wrote a great deal about San
Francisco's Chinese community. She wrote about issues like voting rights
for women, which she strongly supported, although she didn't identify
as a feminist, she felt that label and some of
the movements associated with it, actually caused more discord than solutions.
As she was really starting to develop up a pretty
(10:00):
solid career, there were rumors about her having various romantic partners,
but there's no clear evidence of her ever having been
seriously involved with anyone. She seemed to be focused almost
entirely on her work, which was both gaining her notice
and respect, and she decided, after having gotten a taste
of all that, that the next logical step for her
(10:22):
career was to move to New York and work as
a journalist there. So in early nine three, she did
just that, Despite the fact that she knew no one
in New York, and she didn't even know at the
time where any of the major newspapers offices were. We'll
talk about her arrival in New York after we take
a quick sponsor break. After Harriet got to New York,
(10:49):
she spent one night at the Pennsylvania Hotel, and then
the next morning she arranged to rent a room in
a boarding house at sixty eight and Third. That was
a connection she had made through a reference that one
of her San Francisco editors had given her. And after
her lodging was sorted, she took her portfolio of published
pieces from her work on the West Coast and some
new writing that she had done on the five day
(11:11):
trip across the country, and she started visiting publication offices
looking for work. Her first stop was at Leslie's Illustrated Weekly,
which is a publication that comes up as in the
show as having articles about topics that we're talking about.
She spoke with two assistant editors who seemed to like her,
but she had to return the next day to meet
(11:32):
the editor in chief before any decisions could be made.
After going through one of her samples and verbally telling
her all of the edits that he would make which
was just not a level of criticism that she was
accustomed to. The editor John why Foster offered her a
job on a trial basis. He also asked if she
shouldn't try a more conventional job for a woman, and
(11:56):
she told him she was a better writer than she
was a cook. Three later, Foster published Harriet's article Curious
Chinese Customs, in which she described the tradition of Chinese
paper offerings. That article was picked up by several other outlets.
Yeah right away, her work was super popular. She and
Foster actually ended up being great friends for years and years.
(12:17):
But it was kind of the way it's described sounds
like a tug of war in the beginning of here's
everything wrong with this article? Uh, you you seem plucky, though,
so I'll try it. And when he asked her if
she shouldn't try doing something that was a more natural
fit for a woman, her perception was that it was
(12:37):
a test and that if she was like well, maybe
he would have been like, get out. But instead she's like, no,
this is really all I do. After the success of
that first article, she took assignments for Leslie's and she
wrote a series on the lives of the occupants of
tenements in New York. She also campaigned to be given
a regular sea at a review column. She still loved
(12:58):
the arts, and she was granted that, and soon after
that she was just given the title of drama critic
because she did so well, and this was a role
that she filled with enthusiasm. Often her coverage included interviews
with actors and various shows, a number of which she
had met or been friends with back in San Francisco,
And if she didn't know someone, she was still usually
(13:19):
able to win them over and get them to consent
to a conversation about their work on their record. One
of her great successes as the paper's drama critic was
a section at the end of her weekly column that
offered a list of which plays a man might safely
take his wife or daughter too. I have thoughts, uh
I do too. It's sort of charming and insulting all
(13:40):
at the same time. It's the tangle. Quimby was doing
well at this time. She may not have been working
exclusively for Leslie's. It's possible she was also writing for
other publications under other pen names, although there's no solid
evidence there, but she was making enough that she was
able to move out of the boarding house into a
(14:01):
place of her own at Hotel Victoria and Broadway. That
was convenient it put her closer to work. In addition
to moving into a nicer place, Harry had also started
traveling for work. She went on assignment to Cuba to
write a series of stories for Leslie's and subsequently she
became the papers travel correspondent. After that, she traveled the
(14:22):
world in search of stories. And while she had been
living in San Francisco, she had become friends with German
American photographer Arnold Genta, and he had taught her how
to take photographs. This skill really served her well in
her new role because she was able to photograph her
travels throughout Europe, Africa, and South America herself, making her
a photojournalist as well. The first years of the nineteen
(14:45):
hundreds had really offered Harriet Quimby exactly the life she wanted,
one that was filled with success and adventure. This is
also the time when automobiles are being developed, both for
racing and for a wider consumer market. Quimby had rid
in a race car on Long Island while covering the
topic for a paper, and after that she really wanted
(15:05):
to learn to drive. She took lessons, got her license,
and bought herself a Model t in nineteen o eight.
Over the next several years, she tracked the growing popularity
of automobiles and the United States with a particular eye
toward women drivers, noting that driving eventually became a fashionable
activity for a modern woman. She also used her platform
(15:28):
as a writer to encourage women to learn how their
cars worked for themselves they would not be taken advantage
of by mechanics. As an aside, you might sometimes see
Harriet Quimby touted as the first woman to receive a
driver's license in the United States. That isn't entirely accurate.
Uh Anne Rainsford French was given a license to drive
(15:49):
a quote four wheeled vehicle powered by steam or gas
in nineteen hundred, so that was about eight years before
Harriet's fascination with cars blossomed into her getting a license.
Life Magazine actually ran a profile of French, who had
married and taken the last name Bush, in nineteen fifty two,
and by that point she was seventy three. As Quimby's
(16:10):
journalism star had continued to rise in New York, her
circle of friends back in San Francisco did not have
the same good fortune. Even those who had been doing
well on the San Francisco theater scene found themselves without
a safety net after the earthquake and fire of nineteen
o six, which we have talked about on the podcast.
Before David work Griffith was among those friends. He and
(16:33):
his wife Linda had been close with Quimby on the
West Coast. After struggling to find stage work, Griffith found
himself under contract, first as an actor at Biograph Studios
and then as a director, after which he was able
to bring his wife on as an actor as well. Yeah,
he was initially a little scorely about that. He's like,
(16:54):
I don't I don't want to do film. That's not
real art um. Harriet helped both through this new avenue
for the Griffiths, though, by writing articles about their work
and explaining to the public how this still new industry
of film turned out its pictures, how the whole thing worked.
She would take photos during set visits and publish those
photos along with her write ups, giving her readers a
(17:15):
behind the scenes peak and kind of helping to elevate
public opinion of moving pictures, which had been seen up
to that point as kind of CD, particularly by theater goers.
Harriet also wrote several scripts for Biograph while DW was
directing there, and she also made a cameo appearance in
one of the shorts that she wrote, titled Fisher Folks.
(17:37):
While working as a screenwriter might have been fun, Harriet
was really dedicated to her journalism career. She had no
intention of leaving it. But it was a desire to
seek out the new and exciting so that she could
write about it that led her to the thing that
she became most well known for historically. That was aviation.
So in October Harriet attended a flying race with her
(18:01):
friend Matilda Moissant. This was just a year after Wilbur
Wright got paid a massive fifteen thousand dollars to perform
several flying demonstrations in New York as part of the
Hudson Fulton celebration. Again, that's a lot of money. Flying
at this point was of course new and enthralling, so
naturally Harriet gravitated to it, and in the years since
(18:22):
Wilbur Rights demos, aviation racing had emerged as a dangerous
but potentially lucrative endeavor. John Moissant, Matilda's brother, was one
of the competitors on the day that Harriet attended the
event to gather information for an article for Leslie's John
Moissant had studied flying with French aviation expert Louis Bleriot
(18:43):
and then used his money to set up his own
aviation enterprise in the United States. He had been the
first pilot to offer regular passenger flights from Paris to London,
and once he had established his business, Moissant International Aviators
in Mississippi, he can tinued to offer passenger fares. He
and his brother Alfred had also opened a flying school
(19:05):
in Minnela, New York, hoping that spectators who saw the
races in New York would be enticed to learn to
fly themselves. That is exactly what happened to Harriet Quimby.
Now had she attempted to enroll in the school that
the Right brothers had opened, she would have been turned away.
The rights thought that women only wanted to learn to
fly as a sort of stunt and would not take
(19:27):
it seriously, and so they did not take on women students,
not even their sister uh. They also doubted that any
women would even make enough money to afford their school,
but Quimby, along with Matild Moissan, made her case to
John and Alfred, as well as to their friend A.
Leo Stevens, who was a balloonist who also taught at
the aviation school. Matilda also wanted to fly, and the
(19:51):
men agreed, after a bit of cajoling, that if the
women could wait until spring, they would teach them. So
Harriet busied herself with work, basically counting down the weeks
until warm weather. Yeah, that was like in October, so
she was just like, okay, five months, six months, something
like that. But unfortunately John Moissant never became her teacher.
(20:12):
He was killed a little over two months after they
had met in New York while he was flying in
the Michelin Cup Race outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. Moissan's
plane had caught a gust of air and he was
thrown from the plane and fell to his death. And
while that tragedy caused everyone involved in the Moissant Aviation
School to reconsider their future and their agreement to teach
(20:34):
Harriet and Matilda how to fly, the school and that
plan moved forward, there was a minor bit of deception
in the mix, Harriet and Matilda had to disguise themselves
as men anytime they were at the airfield. That disguise
plan was in part because it was inherently controversial for
women to be enrolled. If you've heard us talk about
(20:55):
women's flying clubs and like flying as a really popular
her hobby for women in the US that was later
than this. They're sort of the forerunners in a lot
of ways. But Harriet was also protecting her professional reputation.
She was always careful any time she was in public
(21:16):
to behave in a way that would in no way
invite any criticism for her employer. She loved her job
and did not ever want to jeopardize it, and to her,
behaving that way was simply part of being a professional journalist.
It is also one of the reasons that we like
we mentioned at the top of the show that so
much of her personal life remains a little bit murky, right.
(21:38):
She was known, for example, to smoke, but only behind
closed doors. The only accounts of her doing so are
from her close associates, and it was something she would
never have been seen doing in public. Similarly, she did
not want her attendance at Aviation School to put Leslie's
in the hot seat before she was ready to write
about it. And there was also another layer in play
(22:00):
here because Quimby had not told her editor at Leslie's
where she was up to. She wasn't telling anybody she
was taking flying lessons, so she had a really vested
interest in keeping this whole thing under wraps. Before she
was allowed to try her hand at flying, Quimby, like
all the other students at the Moissant School, had to
learn about aerodynamics and airplane design, as well as basic
(22:23):
lessons and engine mechanics. Then there was cockpit time and
a simulator that was a plane that was outfitted with
all the necessary machinery but was fixed to the floor
of the hangar. Then it was basic flight in a
plane designed to fly only a few feet off the ground.
As she went through all these different lessons, Harriet Quimby
was taking notes for the articles she would later write
(22:46):
describing this whole process. After five weeks of lessons and tests,
which included a final week of piloting with an altitude limited,
the students at the Moissant School moved on to actually
flying a monoplane built in the French style of Blario.
This aircraft was made of wood, piano wire, and rubber
coated silk, and though she got coated in cast royal
(23:08):
spray from the engine, Harriet loved the experience of flying.
Despite her efforts to stay anonymous through this male presenting disguise,
Harriet was found out by a reporter from the New
York Times. This reporter cornered her at the school one
morning and foolishly asked her if she liked flying. She replied, well,
(23:29):
I'm out here at four am each day. That ought
to be answer enough. Well, she was quimpy in that moment.
This outing forced her to confess to her bosses at
Leslie's that she had been secretly attending flight school with
the intention of writing about it, and then she had
gotten scooped in the process, right, like I'm gonna write
(23:50):
this amazing thing, someone else was coming out with the
article first. Sorry, this might also discredit the paper. Um,
But those discussions where she confessed it was going on
to her boss's actually went really quite well, probably because
they were a little accustomed to having this writer who
kind of did as she pleased and then wrote about it.
There was no big surprise in the Leslie's offices, and
(24:14):
this venture was kind of seen as a pretty big
potential paper seller. Consider that this was a woman in
flight school, which was controversial enough that other papers wanted
to write about their reporter doing it. And while The
Times was planning to go to press with the story
before Leslie's could, it would not have been able to
include any of Harriett's first hand accounts of the experience.
(24:36):
The Times ran their story in early May, and on
Leslie's ran the article how a Woman learns to Fly.
It was the first in a series, and that series
was very popular. Leslie's Weekly was so happy with the
series that Quimby was actually reimbursed for her expensive flying lessons.
In a moment, we'll talk about how Quimby gained new
(24:58):
levels of fame from the pile at Seat, But first
we'll hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff
you missed in history class. Going throughout the publication of
those early articles in the series, Quimby was still in
flight school. She had not yet taken her pilots exam.
(25:21):
That didn't happen until August of nineteen eleven, and initially
the officials from the Aero Club of America, who facilitated
such exams, did not even want to bother testing Quimby.
They thought this whole thing was a stunt and that
it was going to be a waste of their time.
The flight school had to schedule her test in the
same session as a male pilot candidate just to get
(25:42):
those officials to agree to travel to the airfield, and
the first day of her tests, she did pretty well
on the first two segments, which involved various flight maneuvers
like figure eights, but then she misjudged the third test,
which was landing, and she put the plane down too
far from the target. She had the chance to reach
test to the next day, so she resolved to do it.
(26:03):
Matilda Moissant agreed to also test, but wanted to let
Harriet go first so that she could be the first
woman to be issued a pilot's license. The day initially
looked like it was a bust because of heavy fog conditions,
but things cleared up by midday. Despite some gusty wind,
Harriet managed to complete the first two parts of the
test again, and then in the third section she executed
(26:26):
a precise landing. When she emerged from her plane, she
got in a dig to the ongoing inability of women
to vote in the US by quipping, believe me, flying
is much easier than voting. That might be my favorite
thing she ever said. Harriet was already a celebrity in
New York by this point, all the way back to
(26:47):
her theater articles, she had been really popular, but becoming
a licensed pilot expanded her fame considerably, and she gained
a devoted following. When she made public appearances, huge crowds
gathered to see here, both because of the novelty and
because she was very charming. Her first paid gig as
a pilot was in Staten Island in October of nineteen eleven,
(27:09):
so just a couple of months after she got her license,
and more than twenty thousand people filled the field and
they actually had to clear the field for safety, and
even as she tried to land after her flight, there
were spectators running onto the field that caused her to
have to make a bouncy and slightly dangerous landing just
beyond the target area, although she did so successfully. She
(27:29):
got paid fifteen hundred dollars for that day, and it
was the first of many bookings that she would get
in the months that followed, sometimes on her own and
sometimes with Matilde Moissant, who had also successfully tested for
her license. Soon, Harriet Quimby and the other pilots who
flew exhibitions for the Moissant organization were on their way
to Mexico City for a festival booking. She was devoted
(27:53):
still to her journalism career, and Quimby met her deadlines
and sent her articles from on board the ship that
was carrying her south. She was to be in Mexico
for two months, and she promised to write travel accounts
for her editors at Leslie's, but the revolution in Mexico
quickly put an end to this booking. The whole team
had to flee the country soon. Matilda had given up
(28:16):
flying after being burned in an accident when her gas
tank exploded, and that left Harriet is the only woman
pilot on the Moissant team. Harriet had rocketed to fame,
but she still had the feeling that there were people
that saw her not as a skilled pilot, but as
a publicity stunt. She did not like that, and she
wanted to prove them wrong. So she plotted away to
(28:39):
prove her metal and for her that was going to
be flying across the English Channel. Now, this was something
that had been done before, but not by a woman,
and really not very often even by male pilots. A
Leo Stevens from the Moissant team joined her on her
journey across the Atlantic, and by this point he was
managing her bookings, and there were rumors that the two
of them were a cup although that remains unverified. They
(29:02):
sailed to London on the S S America, and once
in London, Harriet secured a sponsorship of five thousand dollars
from the London Daily Mirror. In return, the paper got
exclusive European rights to the story of her attempt. This
was something of a race to be the first. The
plane that Harriet wanted to use was a Blurrio that
she would be acquiring in France, and it wasn't ready
(29:25):
yet when she got there. Louis Blurrio had become the
first pilots fly across the Channel in nineteen o nine,
and Quimby wanted to be the first woman to do so.
So she convinced Blurrio to loan her a plane for
the stunt and completed her purchase for the more powerful plane,
which she intended to fly back to the United States,
(29:46):
but while all of that was being worked out, pilot
Gustav Hamel flew a woman passenger, eleanor Treehawk Davies, across
the English Channel. She was not the pilot, but Mrs
Davies became the first woman to cross the Channel in
a plane. That was a huge blow to Quimby. Yeah,
she was super mad about the whole thing. Then when
(30:10):
it came time for Harriet to prep for her own flight,
there was Gustave Himel again. He insisted that Harriet let
him teach her how to use a compass. That was
something she had not done before, and he was kind
of like, look, if you get off track going over
the channel, things could get really bad. Please let me
teach you. But then he also offered to make the
flight for her disguised as a woman. So it seems
(30:33):
like that compass thing might not have been so much
a kindness as a you, poor ding dong, let me
help you. It's a little condescending. She did take his compass,
but she turned him down on the other offer. Then,
when the perfect day of flying weather came, Harriet, to
everyone's surprise, opted to stay grounded. She said she wouldn't
fly that day because it was a Sunday and she
(30:55):
had promised her mother that she would never ever fly
on Sundays, so there's some appointment. But everybody cleared and
then the weather was clear again on Tuesday April, and
Harriet took off at five thirty in the morning, remarking
later how once the trip was under way quote, it
seemed so easy, but soon the fog rolled in she
(31:17):
lost all visibility. She kept an eye on her watch,
and after twenty two minutes in the air, she decided
to start her descent. The Blario's engine flooded when she
tipped the nose down, and she considered landing on the
water when the gasoline finished burning off and the engine
stopped backfiring. As she descended out of the fog, she
(31:37):
saw the French coast and put the plane down at Harlow,
which was not her intended destination of Calais. She was
about fifty three kilometers away from her intended landing spot,
but she had crossed the English Channel. She did not
really speak French terribly well, so the locals kind of
(31:57):
communicated to her in their uh halting effort laden way
that you do with someone who doesn't speak your language,
that she had to move her plane to avoid it
being swept to see when the tide came in. Uh.
There was also a local woman who served her breakfast,
including tea in a cup that Harriet described as six
times larger than any she had ever seen. Uh. The
(32:19):
woman insisted she keep the cup as a a mento,
which Harriet did and later said that she prized it
more than any trophy she could have imagined. And Harriet
at this point was absolutely elated to have achieved her goal.
But what she did not know, and which no one
else on the beach with her new, including the reporters
who arrived, was that the Titanic had gone down the
(32:41):
night of April fourteenth. Harriet expected to be the headline
and papers around the globe, but the story of that
tragedy overtook her accomplishment in press rooms everywhere, unsurprisingly really,
even in The Mirror, which had paid so dearly for
this exclusive. The Mirror put her story back in the
section of the paper that was reserved for advertisements aimed
(33:04):
at women, which, again, like you could see where it
would be downgraded maybe a little bit insulting on the placement.
But we should say there was press coverage of Quimby's accomplishment.
If you go looking in papers in April of you'll
see that people wrote it up. It just was not
nearly the level of coverage that she or her editors
(33:24):
at Leslie's had anticipated. And those articles that came out
did talk about her achievement, but they were also just
as focused on Harriet the person, because she was seen
as being so unusual, even outside of being the first
woman to cross the English Channel. One element of her
work that was often mentioned in the news coverage of
her flying was actually her clothing. It was a unique
(33:47):
outfit which she had designed herself, and she had collaborated
with a prominent New York taylor to have this jumpsuit
created that she felt was feminine yet functional for flight.
And it was made of satin with a woolbacking and
included a hood, and there were gloves and custom boots,
and according to a write up in the New York Times,
this outfit, which was purple quote is made in one piece,
(34:09):
including the hood, which by an ingenious device, can be
converted into a conventional walking skirt. Because of her high profile,
and maybe also because of that purple flying outfit. Quimby
was asked to be the new spokesperson for the armor
company promoting their grape soda called vin Fizz. Was made
of the first women to become a brand spokesperson. There's
(34:33):
a somewhat grizzly aspect to all this, though. The prior
spokesperson had been Carl Rogers, who made the first transcontinental
flight across the US in nineteen eleven. Rogers died during
an exhibition flight in California, two weeks before Harriet Quimby
made her English Channel crossing. His death is why this
(34:55):
position was even open. Yeah, a little unsettling. In July nine,
Harriet was contracted to fly at the Boston Air Meet
in Squantum, Massachusetts. She was the big draw of the
event and was rumored to have entered into a very
profitable contract for it. She was going to fly the
(35:16):
plane that she had purchased in France, and that was
a two seater, and in her practice runs she had
experienced an unexplained stall and had plummeted toward the ground
before she could level the plane out to land. She
and her mechanic had examined everything and they chalked it
up to basically a bad wind gust. The events promoter,
William Willard, was very taken with Quimby and may have
(35:38):
had a bit of a crush on her. His interviews
about the event all sound sort of wowed about how
pretty she was, and when the day came and a
coin was tossed to see who her lucky passenger would be,
Willard wanted. He excitedly joined Harriet and her barrio as
she prepared for the twilight flight. So she and her
(35:58):
team started the engine and they ran the plane through
its checklist. That was something she did before every single flight,
and the first half of that flight went absolutely perfectly,
but as the spectators could see against the orange sunset sky,
just after it had made its turn at the halfway
point to come back, the plane's tail whipped upward into
(36:19):
the air. It was basically pointed down. Willard had been
ejected from his seat. Harriet, seemingly unaware of her lost passenger,
initially struggled to try to write the plane. She did
make some initial progress, but then she lost control entirely.
She was also thrown from the craft, and she and Willard,
as well as the blarrio plummeted into Dorchester Bay. It
(36:41):
was low tide. The plane surprisingly managed to bob upright
in the water and glide to a stop, but the
bodies of the pilot and passenger were retrieved and taken
to Quincy Hospital, although they were both already dead on
the scene. A particularly heartless ride up of this tragedy
appeared in the Spokesman review of Spokene Washington under the
(37:05):
headline little Miss Dresden, China broken at Last. The sub
had read quote how Harriet Quimby, most daring of air women,
apparently nothing but frivolous femininity, full of odd superstitions, was
flipped out of her flying machine by the hand from
the clouds which she had always feared. That nickname in
(37:27):
the headline, the Dresden, China Aviatress had come from the
fact that she was always really quite dainty and ladylike
in her public persona. She also hated that nickname, and
her superstitious nature was well known. She had always carried
good luck charms, and she wore what she believed to
be lucky jewelry. But of course it seems incredibly cruel
to sum up her death in this sensationalist manner, which
(37:50):
reads like the nineteen twelve equivalent of click bait, and
it also robs her of her reputation within the aviation
community for being fearless, yes, but also being very skilled
and really very careful. The article includes a lot of
speculation about how she must have panicked and done something
wrong to cause the crash. The actual cause was never
(38:10):
conclusively determined, but there were several possibilities that were evident
right away. Examination of the just freakishly undamaged Blarrio showed
that the left rudder wire was caught on the lever
that operated the wings, but there was some debate over
whether that had been the cause, or whether it was
(38:32):
something that had happened on the way down or possibly
on impact. One theory was that Quimby had briefly lost
consciousness and by the time she came to the plane
was too out of control to regain it. Another theory
was that William Willard, who was a large man and
had been leaning far forward to speak to her in flight,
(38:52):
might have unwittingly caused the blarrio to become unbalanced. An
article appeared in Aircraft magazine Scene suggesting that the design
of the Blarrio was fundamentally unstable, and that the tail
wing was the cause. Obviously, safety belts were not in use.
They were not standard safety equipment. Yet there were witnesses
(39:15):
who claimed that they did see Quimby quote buckle abroad
strap across the space in front of her. If she
did that, she had unbuckled it at some point afterward.
For several months after Harriet Quimby's death, articles that she
had filed before that final flight continued to be published,
and one in particular reads a sort of bitter suite.
(39:36):
It was about the potential for careers in flight for women.
She wrote, quote, there is no sport that affords the
same amount of excitement and joy or exacts in return
so little muscular strength as flying. It is easier than
walking or driving, simpler than golf or tennis. There is
no reason why the airplane should not open a fruitful
(39:57):
occupation for women. She was so young when she died. Yeah,
I've listened to that Flights of four. Uh, I think
it's for female. He said it at the beginning of
the episode, And now I've forgotten what the exact title
of that older episode was. I listened to it one
time way in the past when I was trying to
figure out like which which people were discussed in it,
(40:20):
and I have forgotten a lot of the details in
the intervening years, UM, And so I did not realize
when I started out reading through this episode for the
first time that that she did die at such a
very young age and so early in her career as
a pilot when that became the thing that she was
really known for. Yeah, I mean she was a pilot
(40:41):
for a licensed pilot for less than a year of
her life, whereas she had been a journalist for quite
some time at that point, UM and had really, like
I said at the top of the episode, I'm always
a little like when people are like aviator Harry, mean,
it's like she was, but like, I don't think she
would have necessarily identified that a I think she would
(41:01):
say she was a journalist first. And there are quotes
from her where people asked her, are you giving up
your journalism career to fly full time? And she was like, no,
way up. She was always still planning to keep writing.
She actually had been talking about um leaving journalism and
possibly leaving piloting for a while after that flight where
(41:23):
she died so that she could write a novel because
it was something she had always wanted to try and
it had never done. Um And of course that did
not happen, which is terribly sad. But also she's quite
a creature. She's a can be a little bit conflicting,
and that in some ways she is the perfect role
of like feminism, and you know, a woman really being
(41:44):
in charge of her life and not defining herself by
the men in her life. But then she would do
things like here are place you can safely take your
wife to. Right, It's like, oh, Harriet, no, but also
very savvy because people loved that part of the thing,
that part of her her articles. Uh, since this is
(42:05):
a little bit of a downer place, I thought we
would do a fun listener mail. I think that's a
good idea about a topic I keep talking about, which
is that darn Rugarou, but I love him so much.
This comes from our listener Amanda, who writes Holly and Tracy. Hello.
My name is Amanda. I'm a huge history nerd and
have been an avid listener from almost the beginning. I'd
(42:26):
like to thank you ladies for keeping me company for
years now during my hour long commute to and from work.
You guys get me cracking up first thing in the morning,
which is no small feet, and it starts my day
out on a good note. This is my first time
writing because I just had to let Holly know what
I found in my home state of Alabama. I found
her the perfect road trip worthy restaurant. Get this. It
has a rugaru theme, It's in Birmingham, and of course
(42:50):
it serves Cajun cuisine. I haven't been yet, but I'm
planning to very soon. I included picks I found online
of the restaurant and of the stuffed rugarou. I will
let you both know if it's any good. Thanks again
for all the hard work you do. I know all
your listeners, including myself, adore you both. She also included
pictures of her dog, Pepper, who is cute. Um. So
(43:10):
here's a weird thing that came up and why I
wanted to read this one. It feels like I am
destined to go visit this restaurant. And here's why. Someone
sent me a photo completely unrelated to any work stuff,
and it had rugaru with this spelling which has an
(43:30):
X on the end like a ru um. And I
was like, what is that? What is that place in
the background. It was like in the background of a picture,
and I was like what it? So I started looking
for it online and I found this restaurant and then
this email came like two hours later, and I was like,
that's weird. Um. So it feels like I need to
(43:51):
get in the car and go to Ruguru at some
point in Alabama, maybe en route Tahoma, where I can
go visit the actual Rugaru and teach them how to
count higher than twelve. Uh. It just seems like if
I didn't read it, something bad might happen. The Rugary
is sending the signals it wants to be your friend.
Holly great. As long as it's nice to my cats.
(44:13):
He can live here. Like I said, I'll make him
some flash guards will work on the map. Um. If
you do get to go, Amanda, please tell us what
the food is like, sample everything, tell us all the
details thinking about Cajun food. Now, if you would like
to write to us about your experiences at rugarothieved restaurants,
or otherwise, you can do that at History Podcast at
(44:34):
I Heart radio dot com. You can find us all
over social media. As missed in History and you can
subscribe to the podcast on the I heart Radio app
or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart
(44:55):
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