Tag / pilot

by Mary James

11. Aviatrix, Sir/Madam, and The Ninety-Nine’s

In the last post, we established that Helen was way more foot loose and fancy free than her outward persona would indicate. My husband commented about the cruise post and how strange it must have been, in 1934, to meet a single, 31 year-old woman, traveling alone, who flew planes, wants to know all about boat engines and navigation, knows all about sports, has an M.A. from Columbia, is wearing slacks, and may or my not be perched on a railing of a freight boat, highball in hand — not to mention she is funny, flirty, and one sweet patootie to boot (that meant pretty back then, and I say that it is true, objectively, as an impartial Great Niece). Here she is:

Helen Skinner, circa 1934, Gulf Port College, looking good and hiding her cray cray side

Below are some additional flight artifacts from the 1930s.

Beep Beep, Aviatrix on Board!

I swear I posted this one already, but now I can’t find it. Helen taught Physical Education in summers at Purdue University in Indiana, and luckily they had an airfield (perhaps that is why she taught there Amelia Earhart also taught at Purdue at the same time, but it seems not in the summers. Helen logged many air hours there and got a nice shout out and photo in the Lafayette Journal.

High flying Helen, featured in the Lafayette Journal (which still exists)

Note it says she was the FIRST WOMAN on the Purdue faculty to fly solo from the airfield. And that she is popular (among the male flyers, heh). The Capt L.I. Aretz, who is mentioned in the snippet, has lots of press with Earhart. Not that it’s a competition or anything, but still, Helen was first to fly solo from their airfield and not anyone else.

Dear Sir Madam:

The below letter is fun if you look closely. Do that. You’ll see it is a template. There is preprinted text with salutations and addresses and such (the preprinted text is darker — look at the numbers after ‘license No.” for instance). Then look at the salutation and see the XXX typed over the word ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ is typed in after it. The 1930s was an era of Sirs doing official things that needed letterhead. So it made sense then that Sir was built into the template. But not for long! Here comes Madam Helen, swooping in after a perfect wing over! The letter uses both Miss and Madam, as seems appropriate for the time, since Ms. wasn’t around just yet.

(I just looked up the Mr./Mrs./Ms./Miss. history and it is a hoot. Google about it AFTER you are done with this post.)

Letter containing Helen’s Pilot License and ID, from the Department of Commerce, 1936

Now I am looking up details about the letter:

J. Carroll Cone, who penned it, or at least dictated it, was a bigwig in aviation and became an assistant director for the Air Commerce Bureau under FDR and others. Robert R. Reining was Chief of the Bureau of Air Commerce Registration. He’s named several times in a journal article from the The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery alongside picture of Amelia Earhart.

The enclosed license and ID are shown back in this post.

The address the letter was sent to in Arlington, New Jersey, was not Helen’s, but her parents, as Helen was a bit nomadic, especially in the summers, and this was August.

Ninety-Nine’s

The next artifact is the card in the image below. The Ninety Nine’s are female pilots, named after the number of charter members who first were licensed. Helen was not part of that original group and I can’t find the membership history outside of the charter members, but for what it’s worth, the group was started in 1929 and Helen got her license in 1934. I have in my possession one Ninety Nine’s membership club, good from September 1936 to September 1937:

Membership Card for the Ninety-Nine’s, Sept 1936 – Sept 1937

That is business card sized and would have been tricky to roll into a typewriter, but whomever typed it was skilled. Dorothy George, who signed it, is mentioned in this newsletter about the Ninety-Nine’s from 1938, which is all festive for Thanksgiving.

Then in 1939, Helen received an invite from a Miss Jacqueline Cochran (who at the time was busy setting airspeed records — I suspect she might not have actually penned the invite) — to a buffet in honor of Bettie Gillies (this is when Bettie became president of the club, when she was a wee 31 years old). I don’t know if Helen attended the event, because by that point her life had taken a loopdeloop and she was living in Western Canada, was married, and fiddling with motorcycles and cars.

The invite mentions the Graybar Building. That is still there and very art deco looking. And Michel’s on 53rd Street was fancy and formal looking.

A room full of female pilots in the 1930s musta been something to behold.

I keep finding more things! Like a personalized barometer, tickets to the 1932 Olympics, and a syrupy letter from Helen’s soon to be brother-in-law (my grandfather, who I have been told was not a bit syrupy). But those will wait until the next post, as I don’t want to extend the title of this one more. Until soon!

by Mary James

8. Amelia Earhart Coincidences

Helen told friends that she’d lived in a dorm once inhabited by Amelia Earhart. I Googled about this. Amelia Earhart, who was six years older than Helen, attended Columbia University in 1919-1920. Helen was first at Columbia in 1920-1924 and then again in 1931. So it would have occurred in 1921-1924 or in 1931.

Another coincidence is that they both taught at Purdue in the same year — Earhart from 1935 to her disappearance in 1937, and Helen in 1936. Helen flew planes at Purdue 29 times in 1936 between June and July. And Amelia was uber famous by then. It is possible though that they weren’t there at the exact same time — Helen might have just been there for a summer semester and maybe Earhart didn’t stay for the summers.

Here is Helen at Purdue in 1936:

The back says, Helen, Purdue, Lafayette.
“Purdue University, Aerodrome” It was likely 1936.

Next up: Leaving familiar shores.

by Mary James

4. The Helen Artifacts

Another large envelope, vying for size with the flight one, was Helen’s 1937 freight boat trip around the world. In it I found that my uncle had transcribed her journal – which came to 70 typed printed pages – without using a scanner, which must have been painstaking because her handwriting was smaller than the font on a side-effects label (see below) – like she didn’t want anyone reading it at the time. But she did later, when she got older, as she was the one who curated the notes and pictures, as all the envelopes had the same handwriting, but a half a font bigger.

Pages from Helen’s journal from her freight boat trip around the world, 1937.
The pages are 4×7″ (my iPhone XR is 3×6″ so only a little smaller, to give you an idea of the size).

But before heading around the world, let’s look into her early years and what might have set her on such an adventurous path.

by Mary James

2. The Annual Aeronautical Exposition – 1919

From the neatly labeled materials that Helen left for family, I started with the pilot folder. The items, mostly from 1932-1936, consisted of a training log, pilot license, newspaper clippings, a few picture of her in or leaning on planes, an invite to fly with a famous racing couple (Jim and Mary Haizlip, who are worth a looksee). But one item was older. On a scrap of paper seemingly ripped out of a journal, with handwriting and language were different than her usual writing, it said:

“Thursday 3/14/19

During school hours is too dry and dull to write here. For once I really didn’t go to the doctor’s. Instead I came home and ran over my Latin (literally) and wrote a composition on ‘Americanism’. At five o’clock I changed my dress and had my supper and I left the house at five-thirty to meet my father in New York at 6:15pm. When I got off the car at Park Row, New York, he was already there and we then took the subway to 23rd street station and walked about four blocks to Madison Square Garden (which is a building about the size of the Hippodrome in St Paul, only larger) and walked in upon the Aero Show!! No one could ever tell about all we saw there, it would be impossible! There were big aeroplanes and small ones, and flying boats, and planes that didn’t swim, and balloons and…”

Helen Skinner’s journal page from 1919, when she was 16

This was her at age 16, going with her father to Madison Square Garden to see an air show. She would have travelled to meet her father from Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she lived with her parents, Frank and Gertrude Skinner, and her much younger sister Mary Elizabeth (my maternal grandmother and namesake).

Bit of trivia: the current Madison Square Garden isn’t where it used to be, which is why she could get off at 23rd Street and walk four blocks and be there. It was where Madison Square Park is now. 

She also mentions in the note, ‘For once I really didn’t go to the doctor’s.’ This refers to childhood health problems — seemingly mostly sinus in nature — that persisted well into adulthood. Those problems are also why she knew how big the Hippodrome in St. Paul was — she left Brooklyn for a while to live in the mid-west, where the air was supposed to be better (another theory is that she hated the aforementioned church and went to live with family friends to get away from her strict parents).

As the internet has absolutely everything, I found an ad for the air show on Ebay and purchased it.

Magazine ad for The Annual Aeronautical Exposition in 1919, which Helen attended when she was 16