a live audience once again to dodd auditorium. [ applause ] for the first time in almost two years. and of course to those of you who are streaming the program tonight, welcome to you as well. incidentally, i'll tell you, it's our plan at this point subject to change, i need not say, subject to change, but our current plan is to offer the remaining programs this year both in person and via live streaming. and you can always consult our website for updates concerning the venue. the sponsor for this evening's program is one of our oldest, who have been with us for many years and we're extremely grateful to them for their continuing generous support. this might be a good time to encourage any of you who may be so inclined to make a contribution to great lives as the continuation of the program depends on this kind of individual and corporate support. you can do this by, once again, going to obvious website for information on how you may contribute. our speaker this evening is keith o'brien, author of "fly girls: how five daring women defied all odds and made aviation history." keith was born in cincinnati and graduated from northwestern university. he is a former staff writer for both "the boston globe" and "the new orleans times-picayune." as a newspaper reporter he won multiple awards including the casey medal for meritorious journalism. he has also written for "the new york times," politico, "the washington post," slate, "esquire," among others. he has spoken on npr's "all things considered," "morning edition," and "weekend edition." he has written two books, the most recent of which is the aforementioned "fly girls" with a third scheduled for publication this april titled "paradise falls: the true story of an environmental catastrophe." "fly girls" has received widespread acclaim including two assessments that i will mention from authors who have spoken previously in great lives. you may remember them, one of them is jonathan ive who said of that book, quote, if you liked "the boys in the boat" or "unbroken," and i suspect everybody who has read them did like them, you will love "fly girls." this story, carefully researched and expertly written, offers an irresistible cast of characters and high octane drama. karen abbott, who was also a speaker at great lives, offered a similarly glowing evaluation, writing, quote, this is more than history, it is a powerful story for our times. it has it all. adventure, tragedy, and heroes who overcame cruel prejudice to rule the air. "fly girls" reads like a heart-stopping novel but this story is all true and thoroughly inspiring. some of you may remember that keith was originally scheduled as part of the 2020 great lives series but that talk was canceled because of the pandemic. well, we've looked forward to having him for two years now. so it's a special pleasure tonight to finally welcome to the great lives podium keith o'brien. [ applause ] >> thank you, dr. crawley, for that introduction. i really appreciate it. i mean, you did have two years to work on it, though. so -- and i want to say thank you to all of you for coming out tonight. thank you to the university of mary washington. thanks to the great lives lecture series and thanks to ali heber who works here at the university. for two years we've been trying to make this night work. it was on, then it was off, then it was off, then it was off. and as recently, for me, anyway, as recently as yesterday, i thought this event was going to be livestreamed. i was told, you know, we would not have a crowd tonight, and i would just be standing behind this podium in this beautiful room all by myself. and, you know, in these times, we've all had to learn how to adapt and learn how to roll with the punches. you know, the store might close early, the restaurant might not be open, our cereal we like might not be available. so i was willing to do whatever it took to finally make this event happen. but of course it was a little upsetting, a little depressing and disappointing that i was coming here to fredericksburg, a city that i have been before, and do really enjoy, and i was going to be in this empty room. i said to my wife, i said, yesterday, before i got on the plane, should i even bring nice shoes? should i even plan to wear pants up there? and it's fortunate, really, for all of us that my wife told me yes. so it's really great to be here. and i'm going to be speaking tonight about my book and really excited to finally share it with you. but before we get into that, i wanted to start with a confession of sorts, and that is, i don't really like to fly. i don't like turbulence. i don't like the little sounds that a plane makes for seemingly inexplicable reasons in the middle of a flight. and i really don't like takeoff, that moment when you're barreling down the runway so fast that as you take off into the air, you can feel the weight of the air in the plane on your chest as you move further and further away from the ground. i really don't like that feeling at all. now, i do like to travel for pleasure in normal times. and i do travel for work. so, you know, not flying for me is not an option. which means that from time to time, you will find me in the 29th row of coach, white knuckling the armrests as if i alone am holding up the plane. a few years ago i was on a flight like that. i was flying from new orleans to chicago on a hot summer night. and it was one of those flights where the pilot comes on before you even take off and he said, folks, it's going to be a bad flight. and he was right. you know, in the middle of that night, in this summer storm, there we were, bouncing around in the sky. and there i am, you know, trying to curl up into a tiny ball in my seat but resisting the urge to do that because that would be an insane thing for a grown person to do on a plane. and the woman next to me, she totally noticed, and she finally couldn't take it anymore and she turned to me and she said, honey, i think i can help you. i have xanax. that's a true story. that's me as a flier. it sort of begs the question why someone like this, someone like me, would spend 2 1/2 years researching and writing about planes at a time when plane travel was exponentially more dangerous than it is today. why would i do that to myself? why? and the answer is really that it has nothing to do with planes. you know, i was drawn to the story that ultimately became "fly girls" because it is the story of an epic quest. populated by characters who are willing to risk everything for the thing they loved. who had faced adversity after adversity, entrenched discrimination, and the deaths of their friends, and still they would keep flying, still they would keep going, only to triumph over the men in 1936 in one of the most epic air races of them all. that's a story i would hope anyone would want to tell. and it's certainly one i'm excited to share with you here tonight. so, you know, whenever i'm writing, whether it's for magazines or radio or for books, i like to think about my stories in terms of scenes, in terms of moments. identify early on what are the most important moments here, and then build around those. so i thought i would begin tonight with you, with a moment. i want you to imagine september 1933. the waning days of summer. labor day weekend in chicago. the city had been struggling in the grips of the great depression at that point for years. record unemployment, bread lines down the street, flophouses, as they were known at the time, so filled with people that you would sleep on your shoes so that someone else would not steal them. but that weekend, labor day weekend, chicago, 1933, was going to be different. the city was preparing for a crush of visitors. 500,000 people streaming in by rail car and automobile. they were coming for an exciting event. they were coming for the air races. we need to forget about what we know about modern day air shows, you know, those scripted flying events with the world's most modern planes. air racing in the 1920s and '30s, this was a real sport, with winners and losers, enormous crowds, and jackpots of money for the victors. in this little window of time where my story takes place, between 1927 and 1936, air racing was one of the most popular sports in america. it was baseball, it was boxing, it was horse racing, and it was air racing. and it was just definitively also the most dangerous. inevitably, pilots flying at a high rate of speed, low to the ground, would crash. and these pilots would sometimes die right in front of the grandstands. and i want to make clear that it wasn't just air racing that was considered dangerous or dubious at that time. it was flying itself. you know, for my book, i did a ton of research, of course, and read a lot of news coverage from the 1920s and '30s. and in one of these stories, it was an expose in "the chicago tribune" of what they termed wildcat flight schools. these were flight schools in the chicagoland area in 1927 where one could get a pilot's license in a matter of 90 minutes. and that summer in chicago, "the chicago tribune" ran a series of stories about this problem, this obvious problem. and there was one line in this story that really jumped out at me. and i wanted to share it with you now. it said, officials feel such schools should furnish one or more coffins with each diploma. i mean, this is 1927 in chicago. this is how people felt about flying. so because of these risks, because of these dangers, because of the crowds at the air races, because of the money involved, because of the stakes, many men believed that air racing and, indeed, flying was no place for a woman. it's sexist, of course, and obviously wrong. but at the time, at the time, women were banned from doing all sort of things. from waiting tables after 10:00 p.m., from working in the factory, from working night shifts. on the east coast of the united states in the late 1920s, women were banned from driving taxicabs in every single major american city. and if you were a married woman, in particular if you were a married teacher, cool steven, it was schoolteacher, it was even harder for you. if you were a single female teacher in the late 1920s in america, right here in virginia, perhaps even here in fredericksburg, and you had the audacity to decide over the course of that school year to get married, at the end of the year, your local school board or superintendent, almost always men, would force you to resign from your job at the school, because it was believed by these men that a woman couldn't handle the rigors of teaching our children all day only to go home to raise her own. so women are denied access to jobs. women are denied basic rights. and they were denied other basic things too. you know, in the late 1920s, when my story begins, there was a major tragedy in washington, dc. a theater roof collapsed under the heavyweight of a blizzard snowfall. and it was national news. it was a real calamity. many people died, including a young boy. and the boy's mother wished to sue the theater company for negligence, a case she likely would have won. but laws denied her that right. only a father, only a father, had the right to sue in the wrongful death of a minor child at that time. and this boy's father was already dead. meaning the mother in question had no husband, no child, and no recourse. women hoping to fly planes in the late 1920s faced similar challenges. the presidential election of 1928, there were 29 million women who were eligible to vote. 29 million women of voting age. out of that number, 29 million, fewer than a dozen, fewer than 12, had a pilot's license on file at the u.s. department of commerce, which was the regulating agency at the time, the faa of its era. that really made the few women who did fly planes real renegades, true radicals. the kind of radical that's almost hard to imagine today. in september 1933, labor day weekend in chicago, one of those women was about to do the most radical thing of all. she was going to race her plane against the men. whipping it around pylons placed in a triangular course around the airfield. 50-foot towers. she was 29 years old, this woman, divorced and afraid of nothing. her plane that day, called a gb, was so fast as to be known to be dangerous. this model of plane in fact had killed many men before. but she knew what she was doing. she knew how to fly it. and as she reached the home pylon that labor day just at sundown right in front of the grandstand, the crowd knew it too. screaming into that pylon at 220 miles an hour, roughly 50 or 60 feet off the ground, she banked that plane so hard, so perfectly around the tower, that it stood up on its wing. just look at that girl, the announcer said. those were his words. just look at that girl. have you ever seen such a beautiful race? she was trailing the two leaders but she was in third place, she was right there. and then on the eighth turn, at the home pylon, a problem. the right wing of her speedy gb began to disintegrate in mid-flight. this wing, built out of spruce and linen, began to fall apart and fluttered to the ground like so much confetti. and with the wind now whistling through the holes in her wing, the woman in the cockpit did exactly as she was supposed to do. she peeled off-course, away from her fellow competitors and the crowd, south toward the city of chicago, out over glenview road and lake avenue. she was trying to save the people on the ground. and she was struggling to gain altitude to save herself. everyone now at the airfield in chicago was watching her little red plane in the sky, knowing one of two things was about to happen. she was going to bail out from a dangerously low altitude or she was going to crash. either way, it probably wasn't going to end well. that woman's name was florence klingensmith. you see her here pictured with amelia earhart, one year earlier, in 1932, after florence won the first ever all-female speed air race, the amelia earhart trophy. you know, you probably haven't heard of florence klingensmith. most people haven't. when we think about women in aviation in the 1920s and '30s, we tend to think about one or two women. bessie coleman, the first black female aviator in this country, and the only one who died in a plane crash in florida in 1926. or of course amelia earhart. and when we think about amelia, we like to think of her all alone, you know, alone in that plane over the ocean, alone flying into those cultural headwinds. but at the time amelia was flying, other women were flying with her. each of them was brave. each of them was bold. some of them arguably, objectively, were perhaps more talented in the cockpit than amelia. today we've forgotten almost everything about them, their battles and their losses, their friendships and their rivalries, what they fought for, how hard they fought. we've forgotten too that seemingly impossible victory over the men in 1936. with this book, with "fly girls," i set out to change that, reminding readers of this time and these characters. women who stood up for themselves and each other again and again, defiant in the face of rules that were intended to keep them in their place. and also confident in the knowledge of who they were. now, i want to be very clear here. this is not intended to be a comprehensive history of women in aviation in the 1920s and '30s. this sort of textbook history where each woman gets her own chapter. this is not that kind of book at all. if you wanted to write that kind of textbook history of women in aviation at that time, you would need 25 or 30 chapters. my story is really a narrative about a group of friends. amelia earhart and her friends. and i would like to introduce you to them now. ruth elder was 24 years old in the summer of 1927, already on her second marriage and living in lakeland, florida where she was answering phones at a dentist's office. it was not the life that ruth had imagined for herself growing up in anniston, alabama. she was obviously a beautiful woman. but she also had an electric personality, a certain charisma about her. and to be frank, she was bored in the dentist's office. so in the summer of 1927, ruth elder crafted a bold plan. she knew how to fly a plane. and she decided she wanted to be the first woman to ever fly across the atlantic ocean. she was inspired of course by charles lindbergh. that spring, may 1927, lindbergh had flown the ocean, arriving in his now-famous "spirit of st. louis" on long island, at roosevelt field, that may. i want to be clear that lindbergh wasn't flying for the pioneering spirit of it all. he was flying for a jackpot of money. $25,000, about a quarter million dollars in today's money, had been put up for the first man, and it was believed it would be a man, who would fly nonstop from new york to paris or paris to new york. many men had tried to win that prize and failed in spectacular fashion before lindbergh arrived in new york that may. these men crashed on runways, in planes loaded down with too much fuel. they burned up in infernos right there on the airfield. or they disappeared over the ocean, never to be found or heard from again. lindbergh himself nearly crashed on takeoff in may 1927. it had rained all night in long island. his fellow competitors who were also trying to win this prize decided not to fly that day. lindbergh's plane, which was quite small, sank into the clay runway as it eased out onto it that morning. they set up a flag about three-quarters of the way down and told lindbergh if he wasn't off the ground by the time he reached that flag, he needed to abort. lindbergh reached that flag, still on the ground, and kept going, flying straight into a crowd of about 500 people who inexplicably had gathered at the end of the runway. lindbergh's screaming toward that crowd, barely gets off the ground just before he reaches them. he's so low to the ground at that moment that the people who were standing there could see his face through the cockpit glass and would tell "the new york times" the next day that this young man was suddenly aged by worry. lindbergh was worried because he was flying directly into a wall of trees which he narrowly missed, sort of flitting through an open hole in the canopy, then disappearing into the morning mist, not to be heard from again for 33 1/2 hours, which is how long it took to fly across the ocean in 1927 in a single engine airplane. i don't think i'm going to ruin the story for you by telling you, lindbergh will make it. he will. and when he does, he's going to win that $25,000 prize. he's going to win a book deal. and all the fame that comes with it. he's going to fly back to america. and then take that "spirit of st. louis" around the country that summer and fall, 92 cities in all, a goodwill tour that stretched across america. and it was in this moment, this moment of the post-lindbergh afterglow, that air fever was born in america. that's what they called it at the time, air fever. and it had a surprising side effect or at least one that male aviation officials had not expected. women now wanted to fly across the ocean. and unlike lindbergh and the men, they were willing to do it for free. ruth elder will leave five months later in this plane right here. october 1927. it was a red plane, bright red, with yellow leather down the side in a cursive script that you can sort of make out there. the plane was aptly called "the american girl." this plane was 32 feet from nose to tail, 46 feet across the wing. and obviously a single engine airplane with a top speed of 105 miles an hour. just for reference, when you're barreling down the runway at takeoff at reagan these days, to take a flight, you're already going 105 miles an hour. and this plane had no radio, no way for ruth elder to contact the outside world. for this flight in october, she would earn headlines on two continents and become at the end of 1927 arguably the most famous woman in the world. before this flight with her co-pilot here, george haldeman, ruth elder would also pay a really awful personal price. amelia earhart as a social worker from boston who comes next. in our quest to remember earhart or to solve the mystery of how she disappeared, we seem to have forgotten almost everything about how she actually lived. and the fact of the matter is, in 1927 and 1928, amelia earhart wasn't a famous pilot. she was a licensed pilot. but by her own admission, she wasn't doing much flying anymore. she was working at a settlement house on tyler street in boston, what people in boston now call chinatown. she was helping new immigrants to this country learn how to speak english, learn how to get a job. it was here at the settlement house in 1928, six months after ruth elder's flight, that connected east coast businessmen would discover her, including her future husband, george putnam of putnam publishing. and they would put amelia earhart on a sea plane sitting in boston harbor flown by men, a plane that was going to be going across the atlantic. on this first flight, amelia had no job but to sit behind the two men who were at the controls and take notes for a book that she would write for george putnam if they made it, if they survived. of course they do. the sea plane lands safely in the water off the coast of wales in june 1928. by the time they open the door of that plane and amelia steps out, she's already become one of the most famous women in the world. but to her enduring credit, amelia knew that what she had done on that flight was really nothing. as she would say that summer, i was just a sack of potatoes on that plane. i was cargo. and she would spend the rest of what would be a very short life, just nine years in the spotlight, making bold flights in an answer to her critics. it would surprise us to think about it now, but even amelia earhart had critics. ruth nichols was a daughter of wall street wealth, born on the upper east side of new york, and raised in tony westchester county. and more than any other woman, really, it's ruth nichols who will challenge amelia earhart for the title of most accomplished female aviator in this time, in the 1920s and '30s. and for ruth, it's a journey that really begins when she's just a young girl. not much older, really, than the students right here on the campus at mary washington. you know, when she graduates from high school in 1918, her parents want her to get married and they want her to marry well so that the story of her marriage might appear in "the new york times." but the first bold decision that ruth nichols makes for herself is that she's not going to do that. and she defies her parents' wishes and instead she goes to college. this is ruth nichols' graduation photograph, 1924, at wellesley college in massachusetts, a school for women that of course still exists today. it was here at wellesley that ruth nichols decided not only does she want to choose her own path, not only did she want to live her own life, she wanted to fly planes. in 1930 she would acquire this plane here. this was a lockheed vega, undeniably the fastest, most modern plane of its time. she named it the akita and had borrowed it from a businessman that some of you may recognize. his name was powell crosby, the owner of the cincinnati reds. in a matter of months ruth in the case olson was flying this plane into the record books. she quickly had the altitude record, the trans-continental speed record, the shortland speed record. and in june 1931, she will attempt to fly this plane right here over the ocean, trying to be the first woman all alone at the controls of an aircraft, flying over the atlantic. it's worth pointing out, this was a full year before amelia earhart would dare to make such a flight. were it not for happenstance and bad luck, the kind of happenstance and bad luck that dogged fliers in these days, ruth nichols might have made it. and if she had, it may be she who we remember today and not amelia. florence klingensmith, who i mentioned before, was the daughter of a farmer in northern minnesota, raised on a plot of land just across the river from fargo, north dakota. and just like ruth elder in 1927, florence was not satisfied with her lot in life. she wasn't doing anything exciting. she was working at a dry cleaners in downtown fargo, starching and pressing shirts. what she really wanted to do was fly planes. but like a lot of us in life, she had no clear and obvious path to her dreams. her parents had no money, no connections in this nascent world of aviation. and so florence did the only thing she could do. she enrolled at mechanics school, at what is now modern day hector field, the airport in fargo for those of you who have been there. she was one woman out of 400 men learning to build and fix airplane engines. and it was here at hector field that a young florence began to press her case to connected businessmen in fargo. she wanted one of them to help her learn how to fly and help her buy her own plane. finally one man relented and he said, if you're willing to risk your neck, i'm willing to risk my money. and he gave her $3,000 to buy a plane, and florence too was quickly flying into the record books. you know, her special skill was air racing. that act of whipping a plane around pylons placed on a course in a city or at an airfield. it was an incredibly difficult thing to do, a skill that would require the use of both your left and your right hand, your left and your right foot, as you worked the throttle and the racn chicago at labor day 1 to get yourself around those pylons at a high rate of speed. and the reason why she was invited to race the men in chicago, at labor day 1933, is she had proven herself to be one of the most talented air racers in america, both men or women. and for her flight that day in chicago, it would really change life for women both in the air and on the ground. and finally, there's louise thaden. louise to me is the rarest kind of flier in these days. she wasn't just a woman who flew and raced planes. louise was a mother. she had her first child, a son, in 1930. and her second child, a daughter, in 1933. and at a time when culture and society and indeed many husbands expected their wives to stay home and raise children, louise did a very modern thing. she wanted to have it all. she believed she could juggle her responsibilities at home and her love for her children with her personal goals and ambitions. and it really is only because of the sacrifices that louise made in this little window of time that we wrongly erased her from this picture and this story. so now that i've introduced you to them individually, i want to say a few things about them collectively. and then i'll be happy to take any questions you might have. i want to talk to you about who they were, what they overcame, and why they still matter today, because they do. we simply cannot overstate how dominated aviation was by men, in particular white men, in the 1920s and '30s. planes were built by men, for men. these planes were often too large for most women. in fact many of my characters in my book would have to modify the cockpits with padding and pillows just so that they could reach the pedals or the controls. and when these women flew across the country, trans-continental, as they all did, and stopped to refuel in wichita or st. louis or kansas city, they would walk inside these primitive airfield buildings and find there was only one kind of restroom, it was a men's room. and when the modern air races began in the summer of 1928, the women were not invited to compete. those first air races were put on by this man here. his name was cliff henderson. he was an incredible salesman, a car salesman in los angeles. and he decided to stage the first modern national air races that summer in this bean and barley field just south of downtown l.a. by the way, we know this bean and barley field today by three letters. that is l.a.x. and, you know, for these air races, cliff henderson wanted amelia earhart to come and louise thaden to come and the others. and indeed, amelia and louise were there. but they were not invited to race. they were not invited to compete. indeed, the only job for women at those first national air races was to hand out the trophies to the men if they so chose to do that. probably wouldn't surprise you to know that these conditions didn't sit well with the female aviators of this era. in particular, these three here, amelia earhart and ruth nichols and louise thaden. they were really the triumvirate of this time. and they quickly realized that they could compete against one another in the sky. they could try to fight one another across the ocean. indeed, amelia and ruth nichols lied to one another about their trans-atlantic plans. both of them didn't want the other one to know what they were hoping to do. each of them understood that the first woman to cross the ocean solo in a plane would have that key to the room of immortality. but on the ground, they recognized right away that they had to stick together. and indeed, they would become good friends, because who could understand ruth nichols better than amelia earhart? or louise thaden better than ruth nichols? i've often thought about louise in the early 1930s and what it would have been like to drop your kids off at kindergarten and preschool, how little she would have had in common with the other mothers there. and so they did become really close. and i found a lot of evidence of that in my research. in 1932, amelia of course will fly the atlantic solo. and in 1935, she wants to add the matched set to that record. she wants to fly the pacific solo, flying from honolulu to oakland, california. now, this is a flight some of you might have made, of course a very common flight today. but at the time, flying a single engine plane all alone across that stretch of ocean was very dangerous. indeed, many men had gone missing over that stretch, never to be found again. and aviation officials gave amelia about a 50/50 chance of making it. she does, of course. you know, and when she lands at oakland, 10,000 people are waiting at the airfield, having waited all night, not knowing when she might arrive, not knowing, you know, her timeline or her itinerary. no one was live tweeting anything at the time. and when she does land, amelia receives accolades from around the world. but not from her friend, louise thaden. that week, louise, who's back home in arkansas, writes amelia a letter. and louise had a very specific kind of way of speaking, a sort of folksy charm about her. and spoke with a little bit of a country twang. and she told amelia in this letter, and i'm quoting here, she said, darn your hide, i could spank your pants. some day you have to tell me why you do things like this. and in this letter, louise goes on to tell her friend amelia that she wished amelia would rest on her laurels. and then very prophetically, louise tells her, you're worth more alive than dead. this is of course 2 1/2 years before amelia will go missing in another very dangerous ocean flight. and, you know, the same was true of amelia and ruth nichols. they had a bit more complicated friendship. maybe each of us has had this kind of friendship in our lives, where we understand someone and we appreciate them but we're also sort of competing against them all the time. that was ruth and amelia. and yet, you know, i found evidence of their closeness too. that summer, 1935, after amelia has flown the pacific ocean, ruth nichols has a terrible crash in upstate new york. not in an air race, not in anything fantastic, just on a flight, the kind of flights that went down in those days. and in the next day's papers across the country, front page news, says that ruth nichols is in critical condition, and might not survive. at that time, amelia really is at the peak of her fame, and her husband then, george putnam, is keeping her out on the speaking trail day after day after day. and when ruth crashes, amelia is on the road in michigan. but she took time away from whatever speaking engagements she had that day, amelia did, and she went down to the western union office and wrote ruth nichols a telegram. it's not really what she says in the telegram but how she says it. for starters, amelia doesn't refer to ruth by her name. she calls her by her nickname. she calls her rufus. she says, dear rufus, we can't bear to have you on the sidelines for long, get well soon, a.e. and it clearly meant a lot to ruth nichols, because she saved it her entire life. until i found that telegram in a windowless cinder block storage room filled with old dusty air race trophies at a regional airport in cleveland, ohio, where that letter and all of ruth nichols' papers had been sitting unnoticed for decades. so they overcome much. they are good friends. and they really will change the world. some of you have probably heard of the women's air service pilots, the w.a.s.p.s, those women who flew airplanes during world war ii for the military, not in combat but from factory to bases. the w.a.s.p.s from time to time are in the news these days because the last of them, sadly, are dying off. were it not for these women here, the w.a.s.p.s never come to be. if these women had accepted the rules that were stacked against them, if they had accepted their lot in life, if they had listened to what the men wanted them to do, there would have been no platform from which the women could have argued to fly in the military during world war ii. i really do believe that every female pilot that comes after really stands on their shoulders. and yet, there are still challenges and great deficits today. in america today, just 7% of licensed pilots are women. and when you go to airlines, major airlines, that number gets even lower. it's just 2%. in fact some airlines have even fewer than that. now, we could have a long conversation about why that might be. i do think there are many factors at play. but one undeniable factor is the entrenched discrimination that women faced in aviation, not just in the '20s and '30s, but for the bulk of the 20th century. you know, at the time my story takes place, the first woman was hired at an airline to fly as a pilot. her name was helen richey, she was from mckeesport, pennsylvania, and it did not go well for helen. this airline, now defunct, was called central air. by rule at central air, you had to be a union pilot in order to fly. but the all men in that union would not admit her. so helen richey is hired at central air to do a job because she's good at doing a job, and then told she can't do that job. after about ten months, she quit, because she wasn't doing anything. and as a journalist, and as an author, as a historian, you're always asking yourself questions. one of the questions i had when i learned the story of helen richey was, when was the next woman hired as a pilot at an airline? and i was stunned to learn that it would be 39 more years, 1973, until women were hired at an airline again. that summer, summer, 1973, fro air, hired a woman, still a very small regional airline at that time and american airlines hired this woman here, she was 24 years old and from florida, a pilots daughter. she had been struggling for years to get hired at any kind of flying outfit, cargo or passenger and she had failed. some airlines still in existence today denied her and told her don't bother applying again, we don't hire women. but she persisted. and in the summer of 1973, american airlines hired her to be a pilot and a grand ceremony that august, the president of american airlines pinned the wings of the lapel on that jacket there, the first airline flyer jacket tailored specifically for a woman, and still, she faced adversity. snide remarks from her colleagues, insulting remarks from passengers, at times in the 1970s, when a man would get on a plane and see a woman in the cockpit he would refuse to fly. and instead of removing the male passenger from the plane, the airlines sometimes removed the female pilot from the cockpit most surprising at least to me, is she faced snide and insulting remarks from the press, the same press that at times had dogged my flyers back in the 1920s and '30s. you know, i mentioned that ceremony that summer where the president of american airlines pinned the wings on the lapel of that jacket, american airlines made a big deal out of that event as they should have, invited all the national media to come and that weekend, the los angeles times, one of our most prestigious papers both then and now ran a little feature story about this woman and it ran under a very unfortunate headline you know, when i was told about this headline, i thought it couldn't be real. it had to be one of those things embellished and exaggerated over time but that's the beautiful thing about newspaper micro film. it never goes away. and because i knew when the woman had been hired and because i knew when the ceremony had taken place, it took me all of about five minutes to find this headline. it's a headline that's memorable for all the wrong reasons. and you know who remembers it the most? the pilot herself. for 20 years she fly at american, rising up the ranks of seniority, year after year, one pilot by one, until she was flying those coveted ocean routes that ruth nickels and amelia airheart had once longed to fly, new york to bajamas, new york to paris, bonnie kapusa she's still alive today a mother in new york city and i had the pleasure and honor of meeting her since this book came out. indeed, you know, i've had the honor of meeting so many bold women and in fact, pilots from the ages of nine to 92 and this book really still inspires me in many ways and i want to close with a few reasons why. for starters, and it's sort of a backwards kind of way, fly girls and this story inspired my next book which dr. crawley mentioned is coming out this april. it's called "paradise falls" and has nugtd to do with aviation, as i came out of the fly girls project, one thing that bothered me was some of those women, including louise damon lived long lives, some in the 1980s and no one had found them, no writer, no author, no journalist to track them down, to talk to them about their days flying in the early moments of aviation. it was really sort of crushing, actually, to see that. you know, there's a columbia university in new york, there's a very large trove of oral histories, it's an incredible resource for historians, academics and others. and there is a very large collection of aviation oral histories there. but almost none of them were with the women who flew in this time. and so as i came out of fly girls, i thought to myself, well, what are the stories that are around us right now? you know, populated by people who had once done something great and are still with us but may not be for so much longer, and that brought me in a round-about way to a story some of you may remember, the story of love canal, a chemical land fill in the city of niagara falls upon which an entire desirable lower middle class neighborhood starter homes built in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, a desirable place to live at the time, a school and playground at the heart of it but as some of you know, the chemicals inside that old canal just underneath that school and playground began to seep out in the late 1970s, ultimately alarming people in the neighborhood and leading to fundamental changes in our environmental policy in this country. you know, in this window of time between 1978 and 1980, you know, everything would change about how we thought about our own backyards, how we thought about the environment, how we thought about the modern chemicals that we used inside our houses. and it's really a story of resistance, primarily of ordinary, everyday, stay-at-home moms or as they were called at that time, housewives. these women who were not really active or radicalized in any way before this, began to fight to escape their own home and see in a matter of of two years went from being ignored from the local officials in niagara falls to having the ear of jimmy carter in the white house and the national media so that book is coming out in april. i wrote it, by the way, in the thick of the lockdown pandemic with both my kids inside my house so it was of course the hardest thing i've ever done. and if you want you can preorder through the book store this evening or through my website, through any number of book sellers everywhere. so fly girls really did, in a great way, inspire this story. i've also been inspired by the fact that we've adapted the story of flygirls into a young readers book. taken this story, condensed it by about half and wrote it for kids roughly eight to 12 years old. and, you know, when i talk about this, people often ask me well, what do you think young girls should take away from "fly girls" and my first answer to that question is i hope it's not just young girls reading it. i hope boys are reading it too and i say that as the father of boys. you know, boys also need to understand that a woman can be just as bold, just as brave, just as strong as they are if not moreso. and it's had an incredible impact on kids that i've met, you know, through the course of this book. you know, kids turning their front sidewalks into chalk art for fly girls. kids decorating their books with hearts, you know, boys and girls reading it. and once, in the spring of 2019 in those gilded prepandemic days, i received an email from a mom just outside of boston massachusetts and she had told me that she had a daughter who was a middle school girl and her middle school, like a lot of middle schools was doing a wax museum where each child had to dress up as a real character from the past and write some kind of report about him or her. and, you know, this is a very common activity, lots of middle schools and elementary schools and usually there's a list of people the kids can choosz from often categorized by sports, politics, you know, revolutionary war, and when you get to women in aviation, usually only offer one woman, amelia airhart but this girl had read my book and she informed her teachers she didn't want to dress up as amelia earhart, she wanted to go as ruth nickels and said do you have any photos or artifacts or letters you can share with my daughter sara so she can do her report? of course i was very excited and sent her what i could and asked her when this wax museum was going to be and she told me the date, and by total luck, i was doing an event that very day at wellsley college which was a mere 15 minute drive from this girl's school. and so, of course, i had to, i popped in just to say hello to the new ruth nickels. and i really do think about these women, a good bit, actually, and always when i fly. and i think a lot about ruth nickels. you'll see here on her pilot's license, from 1930, it's signed of course by orville wright. and, you know, when this book first came out, i was in new york city for the launch for the first day and i had a busy day but that morning was unscheduled and so i decided to do something that morning that i had never had a chance to do during the actual research for the book and that is, i left my hotel in manhattan and i got on a train and i went to lebronx to visit ruth nickel's grave. she's buried in a place called woodlawn cemetery which is a massive and important cemetery in new york city. you know, if you were of money or of fame in the 19th or 20th centuries and you lived in new york, chances are you're buried at woodlawn so i took the train up there, got off in the front office at woodlawn because when you do go there, you're supposed to check in and i told them and told them who i was there are to see and on this map, there are little icons for all the famous people who are buried at woodlawn. i looked at them and quickly realized there was no icon for ruth nickels. so i told them who i was looking for and with the help of the associate there and an app they had me download on to my phone, we triangulated where she was and off i went on foot on this hot summer morning into the cemetery. when i got to the place where they told me ruth nickel's grave would be it was clearly wrong. i couldn't find her, so using the app and the map, i sort of had to start over and walk 15 minutes in a different direction. finally, i did find her grave. you know, at woodlawn, there are ornate tombs and mausoleums built by people who wanted us to know they were important, but when i got to ruth nickels grave it was just a simple tomb stone, waist high, the kind of stone maybe one day we might be buried under and there were just a few words on it. it had her date of birth, date of death and then down on the bottom there was just three words. it said beloved by all. and it really stopped me because she was beloved by all and they were all beloved by all and i do hope they will be again. and i want to thank you so much for listening to me tonight, thank you for your attention, thank you for coming out into the real world, i'd be happy to take any questions you all might have. [ applause ] >> thank you, keith. so we'll take some questions from the audience if you have some. if you'll raise your hand, kelly will seek you out and guess who has a question if it's not bill mock. now, one of our regulars, bill, good to see you back and all the rest of you as well. bill. >> my question has to do with how the women aviators received support. you indicate you had five of them there, 10 of them there, you said one lady wanted to fly and so she goes to this man who had money, he gave her money to buy the airplane. so is that the way it worked for all the other -- did all the other women do that, go -- to rich men, to get money to do that? and, my second part, what if there had been 24, 36, or 48 women who wanted to fly, would they have been able to receive support? >> so, yeah, i mean almost everybody, men and women who wanted to fly in the 1920s and '30s received support of some kind. remember, this is the great depression, people couldn't just go down the street, typically and buy a plane. some men built their planes themselves, in fact some of the great air racers of that time actually built their planes in their garage and then would fly them at 250 miles an hour. it was really the sort of the wild west of aviation. and so yes, every woman during this early time received some kind of support. you know, amelia received a ton of support. starters from her husband george putnam but also many different investors who helped her buy planes over the years. louise thayden got her first break selling planes for a man in kansas by the name of peach, peach craft, and every plane she ever flew in the air races was a peach-made plane. and so yes, they all did receive some kind of support but really it was -- it's not all that different from a nascar driver today receiving support from his or her sponsors. it was just like it would be incredibly difficult to purchase and have your own nascar vehicle, it was incredibly difficult and expensive to have your own airplane in 1932. well there were -- like i said, so in 1928 as i said there were fewer than a dozened licensed pilots but by the end of 1930s were -- sorry end of 1918s, about 117 women licensed in this country and at the end of that year, december 1929, these women in my book, many of them, louise and amelia included met on long island to discuss, should they form some kind of group? some kind of advocacy group for these, you know, 117 women? and they sent out letters to every single one of them across the country and received responses of yes, from 99 of them. and so they dubbed themselves the 99s and that organization for female flyers is still in existence today. >> other questions? >> kelly, right there. >> i was intrigued by your talking about finding the archive of one of the flyers in the small museum in ohio. so when you decide to write this book, did you have the five in mind at the beginning or say i want to write about female aviators and the early history of aviation and through your research find these are the five i was able to research and get good information about, so how does the information versus the topic play out as you write the book? >> so i actually discovered this story in a very accidental way. in the string of 2016, i was flying from boston to pittsburgh for a story i was doing at the time for political magazine about the unlikely possibility of donald trump carrying the state of pennsylvania that fall. and for the flight, i grabbed a book that had been sitting on my bedside stand for some time which is where my to-be-read pile typically piles up and this is a book some of you may have heard of, called the astronaut wives club by billy copple, a nonfiction narrative of the wives of the mercury 7 astronauts, allen shepherd's wife, you know, and one of my favorite books of all time is tom wolf's "the right stuff" that seminal work about the mercury 7 astronauts so i wanted to read copple's book, lily copple's book to see how she had done it, how authors do, taken this story which we all know and flipped it around in reverse and told the sort of from the opposite perspective. so i'm reading this book very closely on the plane and very early in the book and mentioned one of the wives was a private pilot who had longed to fly in an all female airplane race that started in the 1920s and once featured amelia earheart and that's the line that just stopped me because like most of you i had never heard of air racing, never heard of an all-female air race, never heard of amelia racing anything, only knew the story most of us knew, she flew across the ocean, the first one to do it. so because it was 2016, i was able to open my computer, get wifi off the plane and google it instantly, i don't know what happens when you do that now but in 2016 when you google this race all i really found was a wikipedia page and listed the 20 women who competed in that race and as i glanced at the list i quickly realized i only knew two of the names, amelia airheart and i knew poncho barns, as skmf you remember, poncho is a character in all the right stuff, owns the bar where the fly boys go and have drinks after they flew planes in the desert there. so by the time i landed in pittsburgh, i knew there was something here but didn't really know much and for a little white i researched it on the internet and after a short time, i started going to the library. i live in new hampshire in a university town where at least back in those times the library was open until about 3 in the morning and so after my kids would go to sleep i would leave home and drive two miles and go to the library and i would live in the micro film from august, 1929. and, you know, when i'm looking for a book idea or even a story idea, i'm looking for a few things. i'm looking for an interesting world. i'm looking for characters you can root for and root against and then i'm looking for some kind of arc, some kind of journey. and it became pretty apparent to me even from those early nights in the library that there was an interesting world here. and at that point it was just incumbent upon me to figure out who were those key characters, who did drive the story forward and what was that arc? and that did take a little bit more time. but i do remember specifically being in the library in the middle of the night, no students there, just me at the micro film machine and i remember stumbling on to that story of florence clinginsmith in chicago and didn't find the exact news story at first, i found reference to see it and had to figure out what had happened and when i found that story of florence in chicago and what happened that day and the ramifications of it, i knew what i had and i could really see that story at that moment but it did take a few months. . >> kelly is there another question back there? one up front. go ahead. >> thank you. it was really interesting. i have really two questions. one is did any of them have to leave their families or sacrifice their families for their vision and their spouses must have been pretty special back then to support them because it was probably against whatever was going on back then. >> you hit on something pretty important here. interestingly, and maybe perhaps not surprisingly, based on, you know, what we discussed her tonight, many of these women never married. and those that did, like amelia, did not have children. and i think it's plain to me that these women would have been very intimidating to a man in the nearly 1930s. you know, they could fly a plane. they could fly at 225 miles an hour in a plane low to the ground, over the ocean, that would have been very intimidating to most men. now, louise did marry and her husband was named herb thayden and he was a plane builder. not really a pilot although he did fly, he built planes. and i do think herb is a very interesting character because clearly he was very modern. even allowing his wife, louise to race in 1936 with two children under the age of six right there in their house in arkansas. but a lot of them never married and i do wonder about that, in particular with ruth nickels. but it was only after i sort of stumbled on to her papers that i realized that she had actually longed to get married for years and simply could not find a man. >> hi. wonderful talk. thank you so much. >> thank you. >> a friend of mine gave me your book about a year ago knowing i was doing research on my mom, she got her pilot's license in 1937, we're from chicago. she went from chicago to new york city and became a buyer which then for a woman to do that was amazing. she got her pilot's license at flushing meadows, it was $1.60, i have her whole flight log, $1.60 a lesson, when she soloed made it sound like it was no big deal and we know it was, she flew so long, the question -- she met my dad, prior to meeting my dad, interviewed with jacqueline -- all female pilots, accepted to that, started with them and then decided she wanted to be over seas because jacqueline cochrans was strictly on the u.s. flying men around base to base. my question is all these women came from all different parts. mom came from chicago, and i never understood what, nor did i ask, until it was too late, to say what is it that drove you, gave you the backbone to go and get your pilot's license and be able to do things like we have said, men certainly held women back back then and yet she kept, oh, mom would say is because i wanted to. so each of these women sat there being from all over the united states. where did they get -- the word barnstorming in all these places. what was it that drove these women to have that love of the air? >> so, you know, early on in my research, before i had really gone deep down the rabbit hole and before i had ever really written a word, but after i knew i was going to do this book i did try to answer that question for myself, you know, what did unit them? because clearly, demographics wasn't it. right? i mean ruth nickels comes from money. florence clingingsmith is a farmer's daughter, you know, amelia comes from a broken home with an alcoholic father. you know, everybody had a different kind of up bringing. but there were a couple of key things that are important. the first is, interestingly, in each of these womens cases their fathers supported them in this endeavor from a young age, indeed it was often there fathers who had bought them their first flight, you know, a $5 flight at a state fair or a beach on a saturday or paid for their first flight lesson. they had their father's support, but i think more importantly and more telling for parents and for all of us as a parent today is from a young age, and i mean from the time these women were little girls, first grade, second grade, they knew at their core that they were different. amelia wanted to wear her air short which was not allowed in her house and not really acceptable in society in the early 1920s so she would sort of sneak it by cutting off her hair 1 inch at a time. louise's mother was this proper southern woman and she wanted to dress louise up in frilly white dresses and indeed there are photographs of louise as a young girl in these kind of dresses with a pearl necklace, the kind of photo you would have paid good money for around 1914. but louise wanted to wear overalls and liked to get dirty and often when she left her house as a young girl in the dress that her mother had told her to wear, she would go to the barn behind her house, change into the clothes she had left there and then run off to play. so, you know, for me as a parent now, i just sort of think about my own kids and kids in general and look at them a little bit differently, because these women didn't know when they were seven or eight or nine or ten years old that they wanted to fly planes exactly but they did know they were different, they did know they were unlike the girls sitting next to them in school and that was something that really drove them their whole lives. >> well thank you, keith, for this riveting presentation. many thanks to ethan brian, and good night to everyone from great lives. [ applause ] >> thank you. you. first readies in their own words. our patient part series looking at the role of the first lady, their time in the white house and the issues important to them. >> it was a great advantage to know what it was like to work in schools. education is such an important issue both for a governor and also for president. and so that was very helpful to me. >> using material from c-span's award winning biography series, first ladies. >> i'm very much the kind of person who believes you should say what you mean and mean what you say and take the consequences. >> and c-span's online video library. we'll feature first ladies ladybird johnson, betty ford, roselyn carter, nancy reagan, laura bush, michelle obama and melania trump, watch first ladies in their own words, saturdays 2:00 p.m. eastern on c-span 2 or listen to the series as a podcast on the c-span now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts . >> there are a lot of places to get political information, but only at c-span do you get it straight from the source. no matter where you are from or where you stand on the issues, c-span is america's network. unfiltered, unbiassed, word for word. if it happens here or here, or here, or anywhere that matters, america is watching on c-span powered by cable. >> ahoy, mates. and welcome to the nice great lives presentation on america's parents. the talk is sponsored by the bakers chesapeake who we are grateful to the general support the