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made a fortune manufacturing a patent medicine for horses, allowed her to drive the family car down the streets of Rochester -- alone. This stirred such an outcry that Blanche was hustled off to a boarding school.

She wasn't through with autos, however. When she had finished school she wrote to John Willys, a motorcar builder whose Overland was popular in those days.

She suggested that she drive one of his cars from New York to San Francisco to demonstrate that motoring coast to coast was 
so simple even a woman could do it.

Willys liked the idea and on May 16, 1910, Miss Scott headed west from New York on a zigzag course that took her 5393 miles by the time she reached San Francisco July 23.

***
BLANCHE enjoyed the accolades, she recalls, and agreed to take a ride in a Farman biplane, one of the first French aircraft brought to the United States for exhibitions. The plane was to take off from San Diego, cross over the border into Mexico and land. The flight never came off, because the plane was wrecked in a crash before Blanche could go aloft. But a zealous wire service reporter had filed a story to New York the night before and it made papers around the country. Blanche didn't deny she had made the flight for fear the reporter would lose his job.

Back in New York Blanche joined the 
flying team of Glenn Curtiss, who already had won a wide reputation as an aviator and airplane designer. First, of course, Curtiss had to teach Miss Scott how to fly. She took lessons aboard a Curtiss pusher biplane fashioned from spruce, bamboo and cloth. 

Blanche, sometimes referred to as the "Tomboy of the Sky," learned to fly in less than a month and on Sept. 6, 1910, Curtiss declared her America's first aviatrix.
  
"I never had a pilot's license," she recalls.

[[partial image]]
GLENN CURTIS (LEFT) TAUGHT BLANCHE HOW TO FLY IN THIS PLANE
The fans at the show liked to see crashes

[[image]]  
BLANCHE STUART SCOTT IN RETIREMENT 
In the old days they were all kooks

SO BLANCHE Stuart Scott became a member of the Curtiss team. She joined such legendary early pilots as J.C. "Bud" Mars, Eugene Ely, Charles Willard and Augustus Post.

Blanche's career came to a temporary halt after her first public appearance during a two-day exhibition at Fort Wayne, Ind. Billed as "The First Woman to Make a Public Flight in an Aeroplane," Blanche flew for more than 15 minutes at altitudes of 50 to 100 feet. The promoters didn't want the non-paying spectators outside the gates to get a free show.

Later Miss Scott overheard two spectators expressing disappointment because "nobody got killed" during the exhibition flights. That was enough for Blanche. She quit and married the man who had been her advance publicity agent on the cross-country auto trip.

Apparently, however, you can't shake the flying bug that easily. So in the spring of 1911, Blanche was flying biplanes in exhibitions 
at Mineola, N.Y.

"We were all kooks," Miss Scott says of early-day flying barnstormers. "We made 
lots of money, as much as $5000 a week, but spent it just as fast as we made it."
***
MISS SCOTT later joined Glenn Martin, the California plane builder. She test-flew his prototype planes even before the final blueprints were drafted prior to production.

Blanche's most serious accident came in 1913, when her plane's throttle wire broke during an exhibition at Madison, Wis. The 
plane crashed in a swamp. She was thrown clear but suffered multiple injuries, including a broken arm and and wrenched back.

Flying lost its appeal and with her second husband, Blanche moved to New York, then to Hollywood, for a variety of careers, including movie producing and comedy dialogue 
writing for a major film studio.

Her right to call herself the first American aviatrix has been disputed because Harriet Zuimby was the first to hold a pilot's license. Others have also claimed the title.