Walking on Air Read Free

them?
    I called Della May to introduce myself. It took several conversations and sending her copies of my books and pieces I’d written about Phoebe to convince her that I was a serious scholar and writer. I assured her that I had no designs on the materials. All I wanted to do was see them and use their contents to write the very best biography I could. She said I sounded like a very nice person (a good sign), but that she wanted some legal advice (maybe not a good sign).
    I impatiently waited the two weeks she requested before calling her back. She said that the papers were a mess, and that she would have to get her niece to help her sort them out before I could see them. (Sort them out!? Terrible words to a historian.) I gently suggested that I might be a better judge of what was valuable in the papers than her niece. I offered to come to Indianapolis, go through everything, sort and organize what had value. Della May told me about her deathbed promise to Phoebe and her concerns about the final disposition of the papers, saying she had been “praying to God every day to help” her resolve her dilemma. I said, “Della May, we are the answers to one another’s prayers. Without you, I cannot finish this biography, and without me, you cannot fulfill your promise to Phoebe.” Okay, she said, come on.
    At Della May’s home in Indianapolis, I found four large cardboard boxes and a small pile of personal items, including a battered suitcase, a traveling typewriter, and some clothes still in the dry cleaner’s bags. Among the treasures were stacks of crumbling clippings about her career and the political concerns that consumed the last years of her life; photographs covering a span of seventy years, from a formal baby picture to snapshots of her takentwo weeks before she died; her first scrapbook, begun in 1921, in which she called herself an “air nut”; pieces of her autobiography and extended essays describing her role in federal projects, and why she left government in 1952; dozens of letters to friends and contemporaries and their replies, many neatly clipped together. These materials helped me fill in many of the missing puzzle pieces. 1
    Although there remain many things about Phoebe that I do not and can never know, her story here is as complete as I can make it.

Bibliography
Archives and Collections
    Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn
    Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park
    Memphis and Shelby County Airport Authority
    Memphis Public Library and Information Center
    Minneapolis Public Library
    Minnesota Historical Society
    National Archives
    Ninety-Nines Museum of Women Pilots, Oklahoma City
    Pink Palace Museum, Memphis
    Quad Cities Airport Archives, Davenport
    Southern Museum of Flight, Birmingham
    Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville
    Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland
Private Collections
    William E. Barnes Collection
    James T. Kacarides Collection
    Louise Thaden Collection
Interviews
    Glenn Messer and Elaine McClure, interviews by Gene Scharlau, 1982,
    International Women’s Air and Space Museum
    Interviews by author:
    Emma Jean Whittington Hall
Della May Hartley-Frazier
Deloris Navrkal
Dorothy Swain Lewis
Pat Thaden Webb
Secondary Sources
    â€œAir-Rail Line Spans America in 48 Hours.”
Modern Mechanics
, November 1929, 27, 165–168.
    Allard, Noel E., and Gerald N. Sandvick.
Minnesota Aviation History 1857–1945.
Chaska, MN: MAHB Publishing, 1993.
    Barry, John M.
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
    Beatty, Jenny T., and Ellen Nobles-Harris. “99s Then and Now: Airmarking.”
International Women Pilots Magazine
, May/June 2003, 6.
    Blair, Margaret Whitman.
The Roaring 20: The First Cross-Country Air Race for Women
. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006.
    Bobbitt, Charles. “The North Memphis Driving Park, 1901–1905: The Passing