Cincinnati Magazine
December 15, 2020
Like a meteor briefly flashing through the heavens, Laura Bromwell caught the imagination of Americans in the heady days of aviation following World War I. Her short-lived but inspirational career began in Cincinnati.
Image digitized by the Smithsonian Institution Air & Space Museum
She was a farm girl from Switzerland County, Indiana, where she was born in 1897, the seventh of eight children. When Bromwell was 12, her father died when he landed on his head falling out of the hayloft.
A few years later, Laura moved to Cincinnati and found work as a cashier in a Fourth Street restaurant. One day, a customer learned that sheâd dived 50 feet into one of Indianaâs flooded quarries, and he suggested she would never jump from the Suspension Bridge into the Ohio River. When the customer backed his statement with a $20 bet, Bromwell immediately took him up on the wager.