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58     FLYING      March, 1949
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'Pancho' Barnes 
(Continued from page 37)

into what seemed a clear field. She hooked the landing gear on a moving truck and rolled the plane up in a ball. She was unhurt, but the accident cost her the race.
During her racing days Pancho was a leading spirit in the birth of the short-snorters, and she insists that, no matter what anyone else says, this is the way it happened:
   "We were there and broke, of course. A bunch of us were standing around—Frank Clarke, Frank Hawks, Ray Minor, Les Gillis, Chubby Gordon and some more.
    "Being broke, we had an idea. We would pick some likely-looking candidate—maybe a young pilot who had just flown a good race and thought he was hot. We would tell him that a very exclusive club was being organized and that his name had been proposed.
    "We'd tell him that a dollar bill, which we would sign, would be his membership card, and there would be an initiation fee. We fixed the fee at what we thought we could get.
    "Once we had his money, we'd tell him: 'Listen, sucker, that's all there is. Now you go out and try it yourself.'"
     How the Short-Snorters got to be what they are today, Pancho doesn't know, but she'll swear on a stack of logbooks that this was the beginning. 
     At one time she held the women's speed record, 196 m.p.h., in the famed Travelair Mystery Ship built by Walter Beech. In this same ship she beat Roscoe Turner by 20 minutes in a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Turner was flying photos of the annual "big game" at Palo Alto for the Los Angeles Examiner while Pancho had the same assignment for the rival paper, the Los Angeles Times. Since there was no baggage compartment in the Mystery Ship, Pancho flew the 1 hr. 34 min. hop with the negatives carefully tucked under her arm.
     While flying to an air show at Tonopah, Nev., in the same airplane, she broke a fuel line and landed on a dry lake in Death Valley out of gas. A passing motorist took her on to Tonopah and she flew back with Carl Lennish, now a big wheel in the CAA, to fly her plane off the lake. Lennish landed in a severe cross wind and ground-looped, coming to a stop upside down. No one was hurt and Pancho flew the Mystery Ship back to Los Angeles. When she returned the following weekend with a crew to bring back Lennish's wrecked airplane, she buzzed the dry lake to signal the location to the truck driver. A nearby bootlegger thought she was a revenuer because of her fast airplane, and broke open untold kegs of home-made rum. 
     Pancho was the fourth test pilot hired by Lockheed. She flew the maximum load tests on the Lockheed Vega and, prior to the first flight with a full overload, engineers beefed-up the shock-cord landing gear. After adding additional shock cord, mechanics painted the jumbo-

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sized streamlined fairings and then put them into a bake-oven to dry the paint. Of course, the rubber rotted and when Pancho greased the over-loaded Vega

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15 YEARS AGO

FROM the March, 1934, issue of this magazine:

   Professor Auguste Piccard, in a talk before the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, estimated that the maximum speed for a place flying at an altitude of 10 miles would be approximately 448 m.p.h. He added, "However, such a plane would require special aerodynamic features..."

   A Curtiss-Wright Condor was the first airliner to be equipped with sleeping facilities. Two berths, an upper and lower, were used for the first time by passengers Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker and Alexander Strong, a Boston engineer. 

   The Stinson Model A tri-motored airliner which was "really an innovation in commercial flying," went into pro- [[image]] duction. The Model A, designed to carry "eight large people" (see photo), was powered by three Lycoming 240-h.p. engines and cruised at 150 m.p.h.
[[image]]

   More war stores were wanted by readers and the editor commented: "...we will have to drop the true stories and take up fiction unless we have some military action in the near future."

   Sign of the times. The following advertisement appeared in the classified section: "Young man, 20, will go anywhere, at any time, to do work of any kind, in exchange for a used airplane in good flying condition, and two or three dollars a week salary to live on..."

TWENTY YEARS AGO

Willis Ray Gregg of the United States Weather Bureau said: "Weather service for aeronautics is in the pioneer stage. We are trying out different schemes. We hope and believe some of them are along the right lines..."

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onto the runway at Burbank on her first landing, both shock absorbers broke at the same time. Had only one broken, she would undoubtedly have gone 

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through a fence, but the Vega stayed on the runway and rolled to a stop within the boundary of the field.
     Life has never been dull for Pancho Barnes. At 16 she married a clergyman. At 17 she had a son. At 18—in 1927—she left the youngster with a governess, and signed on a banana freighter for a trip down to Central America. The captain was willing to accept men as deckhands or what not, but he balked at signing on a woman. Fifty dollars changed his mind. Pancho joined the crew. 
     The captain fooled Pancho and several friends who joined the escapade by really making them work. Pancho became a quartermaster, working six hours on, six hours off.
     Going ashore in small Mexico ports was a little risky for a woman—a revolution was going on at the time—so they decided Pancho had better be a boy. Solemnly, they cut her hair—"a very poor job," she remembers—and christened her Jake.
     San Blas was under siege by a revolutionary army. Outside the town, Pancho and her gang encountered what they thought was the home guard and made friends. They discovered it was the enemy. Shortly, they were old pals with both sides. They would have lunch with the besieging forces, go back to town and dine with the besieged.      
    But Pancho always had wanted to see Yucatan, ever since, at an exclusive and dignified girls' school she had seen pictures of Chichen Itza.
    So she and a crew member quit the banana freighter and started hiking across Mexico.
    He was riding a very tall, bony white horse and was carrying a long stick like spear. She was riding a mule.
    "You look like Don Quixote," she told him.
    "And you look like Pancho or Sancho or whatever the other guy's name was," he told her. So she became Pancho, and the name stuck.
    They wandered through Mexico and Yucatan, she worked her way back on another freighter—still as a boy—and hitch-hiked and rode freight trains to her doorstep in San Marino.
    On her return from south of the border, she started flying—and frequently flew her clergyman-husband to church conventions. As a minister's wife, she was active in the usual social work and was able, with studied concentration, to separate her salty, Mexican-masquerading vocabulary from the polite drawing-room conversation of the social circle.
   In the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, Pancho's big house in San Marino became a sort of unofficial aviation center for business and whoopee. There were marvelous parties, enthusiastically attended by the famous folk of aviation, movies and the art world. These parties could last a week or two. Pancho might go away for a few days, come back, and find the party still going.
    The wall of the little barroom was scribbled with famous names. Ernst Udet drew cartoons there. Henry Clive's voluptuous siren, done with lipstick and eyebrow pencil, adorned the wall over