The Flying Omlies

Phoebe and Vernon should be considered "Memphis' First Family of Flight."

by

This story originally appeared in the December 1980 issue of Memphis magazine.

“Vernon was very definitely famous around Memphis, and Phoebe was, too. I would call Vernon and Phoebe the pioneer fliers in Memphis, very definitely. ... l remember so many of their friends, and we were together so often, but they’re all gone. It’s very sad. All of the parachute jumpers are dead — they were the real characters.” — Louise Faulkner Meadow

The date: July 10, 1922. The place: a field outside St. Paul, Minnesota. Phoebe Fairgrave was ready. She appeared shortly after 3 p.m., dressed up in her riding breeches, her goggled leather helmet, and her oversized basketball shoes with the extra-suction soles.Her personal pilot, Captain Vernon Omlie, eased the big C-6 Oriole down the gravel runway, lifted the plane’s nose, and eased it over the treetops. They climbed steadily, to an altitude of 15,000 feet.When they reached that height, almost three miles above the thousands of onlookers scattered over the pastures far below, Phoebe Fairgrave began her show. She crawled out to the end of the right wing, strapped on the big parachute she had so carefully folded a few hours before. Then she stood up uneasily — and jumped. The chute opened properly, and Phoebe floated lazily downward. When she reached the ground a few minutes later, she was a world record-holder. No woman had ever before made a parachute jump from such an amazing height.

The record-setting was, almost certainly, a well-planned publicity stunt, designed to bolster the shaky fortunes of the Phoebe Fairgrave Flying Circus. Earlier on the same day, Phoebe had marched into the newsroom of the Minneapolis Tribune, to make sure they would provide adequate coverage for the event. While there, she allowed reporters to coax her life story out of her.

She had been born, she told them, in Des Moines, back in November of 1902 — her twentieth birthday was still five months away. She had been living in St. Paul with her family since she was 12, graduating from Mechanical Arts High School in 1919. It was during that year that an air show was held in St. Paul, in conjunction with a visit by President Woodrow Wilson, who was busy hawking the Versailles Treaty and slowly killing himself in the process. Phoebe allowed that she had been flat-out captivated by the airplanes, and knew even then that aviation was her destiny.

The next morning Phoebe reappeared, and with $3,500 that her grandfather had left her in his will, bought herself an airplane.

After graduation, she went to work in an insurance office, but found herself in a state of abject misery after the first few weeks. So she began to haunt a local airfield operated by the Curtiss Northwest Flying Company. She needled the manager until he finally agreed to let one of his pilots take her up for a ride.

The manager gave his pilot special instructions: Give the girl the works — a few loops, and maybe a nose dive or two — and get her good and sick. The pilot gave it his best shot, but his efforts were counterproductive, to say the least. The next morning Phoebe reappeared, and with $3,500 that her grandfather had left her in his will, bought herself an airplane.

In those days, parachute jumping was considered an avocation only for lunatics. Few local pilots were willing to cooperate with Phoebe; none wanted the gruesome death of an 18-year-old girl on his conscience. None except Vernon Omlie, the one pilot who took an interest in Phoebe Fairgrave.

Vernon Omlie was a 25-year-old veteran. During the First World War, he had served as a flight instructor. Now he had visions of making his fortune in aviation, although his first attempt to establish his own flying company — in his native South Dakota — had recently ended in failure. It was only with a measure of reluctance and frustration, therefore, that he found himself flying for the Curtiss Company in St. Paul for $25 a week.

The Phoebe Fairgrave-Glenn Messer Flying Circus set out to barnstorm the Midwest. They were ready for the wild blue yonder, and Phoebe was ready for the headlines.

Phoebe Fairgrave, however, seemed to widen Vernon’s horizons. Here was a girl who was already making contacts with the Fox Moving Picture Company; she would soon be under contract as an aerial acrobat. After working with Phoebe for a few weeks, Vernon decided to take the plunge: He quit his job with Curtiss, and became Fairgrave’s personal pilot.

The two set off to make their own fame and fortune. To gain experience and exposure, though, they hooked up with an established barnstormer named Glenn Messer in Des Moines. After a couple of months of intensive practice, building the kind of rapport that was necessary between a wing-walker and a pilot if the wing-walker were to stay alive, the Phoebe Fairgrave-Glenn Messer Flying Circus set out to barnstorm the Midwest. They were ready for the wild blue yonder,and Phoebe was ready for the headlines.

The modus operandi of the barnstormer was pretty well set. There would be a thrill show, in this case featuring Phoebe, who would dance on the wing of the plane while Vernon put through a couple of loops with the wires whining and the wind whipping at the shirts on their backs. Then she might swing from one plane to another on a kind of trapeze. The show-stopper though, which would come even after Phoebe had hung by her teeth from the fuselage of the plane, was the double parachute drop, whereby the lines on one chute would be cut away, with another one popping open when Phoebe was some 500 feet closer to the ground.

All of this was supposed to bring the crowd close to apoplexy. But it served another purpose as well — it challenged the locals’ courage. If this 90-pound, 18-year-old girl could do all that, why shucks, there must not be much to it, they reasoned. That was how the real money was made — loading the crowd into taking passenger hops at $5 or $10 a trip. Farmers would want to see their spreads from the air. College boys might want to take a trip so as to have something to brag about at the local speakeasy.

But apparently the Phoebe Fairgrave-Glenn Messer Flying Circus never found the right formula, the right blend between thrills and passenger hops. They often made, for the lot of them, less than $10 profit per week. Not that this was unusual. This was something that happened to nearly all the brave and noble pilots who tried to make a living barnstorming. Many of them died in small heaps of wood and varnished canvas and wire; most of the survivors went broke in the end.

Phoebe, Vernon, and company were soon in big trouble. In Taylorville, Illinois, Phoebe had to hock her clothes and her luggage to the hotel keeper against payment of their bill. Glenn Messer left at this point, going back home to Iowa. Vernon and Phoebe continued south, hoping to stay one jump ahead of the ensuing cold weather.

But the rains caught them anyway, and they were forced to spend days lost in tedium in hotel rooms in towns whose names they would not want to remember. On December 18, 1921, they found themselves in Memphis for the first time. Phoebe began a series of speaking engagements at the Princess Theater on South Main, describing her life in aviation and in the movies. Already her stunts were being seen in such Fox films as The Perils of Pauline.

They were soon back on the road. And while they struggled to make ends meet, Vernon and Phoebe had at least one thing going for them. Sometime during their many months together (it is difficult for historians to pin these things down precisely), they had, in the vernacular of the time, “gotten mashed” on each other. They got married on February 22, 1922.

The date (2/22/22) was certainly auspicious. But their first year of marriage was no easier than the previous ones. Things were so bad when they next arrived in Memphis that they had to hock their clothes and luggage to the management of the Arlington Hotel (later the Claridge) in order to cover their room and board.

At that time, there were absolutely no aviation facilities near Memphis. Park Field in Millington, used as an Army training ground during the war, was overgrown with weeds. Many locals viewed aviators as part of a passing fad, like flappers: the sooner gone, the better. But Vernon Omlie looked around at the Memphis that fate had grounded him in, and saw opportunity. The old dreams of having his own aviation corporation came back. Memphis just might, he figured, become the hub of a great Southern commercial aviation network.

But all that was in the future. Such dreams took cash, cold hard cash. For the Omlies, this spelled barnstorming, more wing-walking, more parachute jumping,and more headlines.

During 1923, the Omlies set up operations in the middle of the horse-racing track at the Memphis Driving Park, just north of Downtown. Vernon began giving flying lessons, and con-ducting pleasure hops around the area. He and Phoebe continued to barnstorm the hinterlands around Memphis, saving such attractions as car/plane races for the folks who came out to Memphis Driving Park to see their aerial shows. Each night they would take what money they had made back to the Arlington Hotel, and buy back a couple of shirts, or maybe even a suitcase or two.

This was, for a couple of years, the pattern of their lives. Gradually the Omlies pushed the idea of an airport for Memphis, the first step in the realization of Vernon’s dream. By 1925, things had begun looking up. A group of flying enthusiasts, many of whom had been introduced to aviation by the Omlies (and some of whom had been taught how to fly by them), met at the Gayoso Hotel on Armistice Day and formed the Memphis Aero Club. Within a year, the Club had built Memphis’ first real airport, Guion Armstrong Field out in Woodstock, in north Shelby County.

Vernon acted as “hoghead,” the man who ran the airport. He formed the corporation after which he had hankered for so long — Mid-South Airways — and set up shop at Armstrong Field. This was the first commercial aviation company in the South. Mid-South Airways offered flight instruction, hauled cargo, did aerial photography, and made passenger trips. Two years later Vernon opened the first official flying school in the region, with offices Downtown in the Arcade Building. Four months later, the whole operation was moved to the new Memphis Municipal Airport on Winchester Pike, just north of where the present-day terminal stands.

Meanwhile, Phoebe was piling up some “firsts” of her own. In 1927 she became the first woman to receive a transport pilot’s license (she could now carry passengers as well as cargo); she was the first woman to get an airplane mechanic’s license as well. In 1928, during the Edsel Ford National Air Tour, she became the first woman to cross the Rockies in a light aircraft (less than seven horsepower).

The newspapers loved her. They followed her progress with thick headlines during the summers of 1929, 1930, and 1931, as Phoebe piled up victories in wild cross-country air derbies. The last of these, the National Sweepstakes Derby, was a race for both men and women. Phoebe flew in a Monocoupe she called Miss Memphis and, to everyone’s surprise and delight, she won, beating the brave and noble male aviators, and coming home with a brand new Cord automobile as the grand prize.

In this car she and Vernon would make their way down to The Peabody on warm evenings that summer. As they reached the doorway to the ballroom, the fellow operating the spotlight would swing it around, and train its beam on the tall, Gary Cooperish man and his short wife with the playful smile. And the light would follow the aviators as they picked their way slowly to their table.

Circumstances beyond their control began moving Vernon and Phoebe’s lives apart in 1932. Mid-South Airways took some tough licks in 1929 and 1930; Vernon had been forced to sell his majority interest to his former employer, the Curtiss-Wright Company. However, he remained president of the company and continued to manage its operations. By 1932, Mid-South Airways was solvent and continuing in business, albeit under Depression circumstances.

Phoebe became politically interested and active in that year, and took Miss Memphis on the campaign trail for Franklin D. Roosevelt. She logged more than 20,000 miles that summer, stumping in 16 different states for FDR. Her labors were duly noticed and rewarded by the new president, who appointed her as a special assistant for air intelligence of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. She was thus the first woman to hold a position of any consequence in any of the government’s aviation bureaus.

For the next three years, Phoebe was off somewhere, usually in Washington, doing the government’s bidding. Her main chore was implementing the National Air Marking Program, a WPA project whereby rooftops were painted at 15-square-mile intervals with big orange arrows indicating the direction and mileage to the nearest towns. She recruited women pilots to construct this directional net-work, which was considered a major aid to fliers in the days before the advent of radar. She made her way to Memphis whenever she could, however, and Vernon visited frequently in Washington.

By 1935 Phoebe had made enough of a name for herself (and for female aviators) that she was mentioned by Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the “eleven women whose achievements make it safe to say the world is progressing.” The next year she took to the campaign trail again, securing her position in the Roosevelt Administration, living the life of a busy and productive career woman in an age when men still acted shocked when they heard of women becoming doctors or lawyers, let alone airplane pilots.

Vernon Omlie would not have allowed his new student to take on too much liquor before his first lesson —especially since he knew that this student had been known to show great relish for alcohol in trying times. Truth be told, William Faulkner was having a great deal of trouble getting up his nerve to go ahead with his flying lessons. But Vernon was a fanatic about safety in airplanes.

And Faulkner was determined to fly. He came to Mid-South Airways in Memphis in February of 1933. Despite the fact that he took lessons only on the occasional weekends when both he and Vernon could spare the time, they proceeded famously. By April, he had made his first solo flight, and by November the Oxford author had earned his pilot‘s license. So impressed was Faulkner with Vernon’s instruction (and with flying in general) that he sent his younger brother, Dean, to live with Vernon in the apartment that the Omlies rented on Lamar. Dean too would learn to fly.

By 1934 Vernon Omlie and the Faulkner brothers had become close friends. That spring the three began appearing in towns around the Mid-South, billing them selves as “William Faulkner’s (Famous Author) Air Circus.” With them was a black wing-walker named George Ewan, supposedly a great crowd pleaser. The routine was roughly the same as the one Vernon and Phoebe had used some 12 years earlier, with a thrill show followed by passenger hops. But the motivation this time was probably different. The Faulkners were caught up in the romance of barnstorming; they didn’t need the money.

After putting on a thrill show near Pontotoc, Mississippi, Dean Faulkner was showing three locals what their farms looked like from 4,500 feet when his plane's left wing snapped off.

His experiences with Vernon Omlie inspired the elder Faulkner to write several short stories about barnstorming (“Honor” being the most notable). Late in 1934 he and Vernon flew to New Orleans to watch an airshow being held in conjunction with the dedication of an airport on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. Faulkner later fictionalized the event in Pylon, his eighth novel; in Pylon the characters of Roger and Laverne Shumann are based loosely on Vernon and Phoebe Omlie.

By July of 1935 Faulkner had become such an experienced flier that he was inducted into the “Quiet Birdmen,” a pilots’ fraternal organization. He considered this a tremendous honor; afterwards he always wore his gold “QB” lapel-pin on his jacket. When Vernon first saw Faulkner wearing the insignia, he jokingly told mutual friends that “it means that Bill is a queer bastard.” Vernon Omlie, of course,knew better. He refused to fly anywhere unless he was wearing his own “QB” pin.

Tragedy struck in late 1935. After putting on a thrill show near Pontotoc, Mississippi, Dean Faulkner was showing three locals what their farms looked like from 4,500 feet when his plane’s left wing suddenly fell off. The plane plummeted quickly to earth; Dean and his three passengers were killed instantly. William Faulkner stayed up the entire night helping a local mortician rebuild his brother’s face before he would allow other family members to view the remains.

Vernon Omlie flew down immediately; he had given Dean’s plane a thorough safety inspection only days before. He did what he could.

But the nightmare was not complete. Some six months later, in August of 1936. Vernon set off for Chicago. He had considered flying himself in Miss Memphis, but at the last minute decided to let someone else do the flying. He bought a ticket on the City of Memphis, a Chicago & Southern cabin liner that regularly covered the Chicago-St. Louis-Memphis route.

That evening, the City of Memphis approached St. Louis. The airport there was fogged in, but the pilot decided to take the plane in anyway. Vernon no doubt realized the danger. The pilot misjudged the altitude, and one of the wing tips skidded on the ground. The plane began to cartwheel down the runway, finally blowing apart altogether with a tremendous roar. Vernon Omlie, “an apostle of air safety,” a man who would not fly in inclement weather, a man who insisted upon pacing off the distance in a field before attempting to take off, was dead at the age of 40, the victim of the crash of a regularly scheduled airliner.

Phoebe was never quite the same. She and Vernon had not seen a lot of each other in the previous three years, but her behavior after his death suggests that they had remained close throughout her absence. She left her job in Washington, and returned to live in Memphis immediately after the accident. She reportedly began to drink heavily.

Over the next decade she held a variety of administrative positions.In 1952, however, she quit (saying that government was “regimenting and regulating aviation out of business”), and bought a cattle farm in Como, Mississippi, explaining how this was something which she and Vernon had planned on for their retirement. Five years later, she traded her farm for a hotel and cafe in nearby Lambert. But that, apparently, did not work out too well either, since she was back in Memphis by 1961— broke, living with a friend, and suffering through the early stages of lung cancer.

Phoebe would occasionally leave Memphis, to make appearances before various groups, speaking out against government regulation of the aviation industry — still her pet peeve. During one such trip, she checked into the York Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. She never checked out.

For five years, Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie lived in the York, described by one Indianapolis resident as “a real flea bag ... the kind of place that you don’t even want to go into, much less live in.” Suffering from lung cancer, alcoholism, poverty, and old age, she rarely ventured outside her grim little hotel room. She would see no visitors.

On July 1, 1975, Phoebe died in Indianapolis. She came back to Memphis one more time, to be buried next to Vernon at Forest Hill Cemetery in Midtown.

Phoebe’s self-imposed exile during her last years is not difficult to understand; according to those few who had contact with her, she was simply too proud to let anybody see her in what she herself described as her “deteriorated condition.” No doubt she wanted the world to remember another Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie — the one who emerged from clouds in an open cockpit; the one who climbed on canvas wings in basketball shoes; the one who strapped on a parachute and floated free and silent over thousands of awestruck faces; the one who stood beside her husband as they entered the Peabody ballroom, while the spotlight followed their jaunty footsteps.

William Faulkner well understood such pride as Phoebe’s. Barnstormers, he once wrote, were “ephemera and phenomena on the face of the contemporary scene. ... There was really no place for them in the culture, at that time. ... Everybody knew that they wouldn’t last, which they didn’t.”

The Memphis and Shelby County Room at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library is home to the Phoebe Omlie Collection, which comprises more than 1,800 items relating to her life and career, including photographs, correspondence, and other materials. In 2012, local historian Janann Shermann published Walking on Air: The Aerial Adventures of Phoebe Omlie (University Press of Mississippi).