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^[[handwritten]] Mar 28, 1948 San Francisco Chronicle[[/handwritten]]

[[newspaper clipping]]

From Where I Sit: Flight Anniversary

By Mildred B. Robbins

Ruth Law gathered a few of her old-time friends around her in her home on Monterey Heights on November 20 for an informal cocktail party before going out to dinner. The date marked a historic occasion for the hostess and...the world.

For the little party was given on 32nd anniversary of Ruth Law's dramatic flight in 1916. Fantastic as this may seem today, she captured on that November date over three decades ago the nonstop record for America by flying from Chicago to New York! Screaming headlines in newspapers throughout the Nation hailed her as the champion woman flyer of the world.

It was in a decrepit old Curtiss biplane of a type long considered obsolete. The distance was approximately 680 miles, which she covered at an average speed of 113 miles an hour in six hours and seven minutes.

The propeller of this plane, along with her compass and map box, has been on view in the Ford-Wright Museum of Aviation at Dearborn, Mich., for a couple of years now.

The aviatrix, whose proper and formal name is Mrs. Charles A. Oliver, is, any way you want to look at it, an early bird. She first took to the air in 1912—the year William Howard Taft was President of the United States, the year the Titanic struck an iceberg off the Newfoundland coast.

Before the first World war, Miss Law had achieved the distinction of being the first person to fly at night, as well as the first woman to fly upside down and the first to loop the loop. Pilots in those days didn't wear parachutes either, and she never remembers having been strapped in.

Although refused admittance to the newly conceived Army Air Corps, she was permitted to wear a uniform during that war and flew over enemy lines in France. She flew in this country on Liberty Loan drives, too, and Army recruiting programs.