Two weeks ago in this space we looked at “eminent Rochestrian” Blanche Stuart Scott, up until she came to Hammondsport in 1910 to become America’s first woman pilot.
*Assuming she was only 18 (as per her publicity), and figuring that a woman being killed would wreck the airplane business, Glenn and Lena Curtiss supervised Blanche closely at first. Even so, by the time she finished training Glenn had signed her on as an exhibition pilot… exhibitions being where the money was, in those early days.
*But someone as savvy as Blanche, and as skilled as Blanche, always had a crack at a better deal. She also flew in succession for Glenn Martin, for Tom Baldwin, and for Jimmie Ward… always a crowd-getter, and always a crowd pleaser.
*“Rain, Shine, or Cyclone,” her posters declared. Screaming crowds loved her “death dive,” from 4000 feet to 200. Billing herself as “the Tomboy of the Air,” she made (she claimed) $5000 a week, “and spent it just as fast.”
*“We were all kooks,” she said, “and I was probably one of the biggest.” Cerainly those who did stunt flying back before World War I were not run-of-the-mill or middle-of-the-road people, and even among the fliers, very few were women.
*Blanche was actually flying at the Harvard Air Meet on July 1, 1912 when she saw headliner Harriet Quimby and a passenger fall a thousand feet to their deaths. She landed safely, but was so shaken that she had to be lifted from the airplane. Even so, newspaper ads the following day listed Blanche as the Meet’s new headliner. And she flew.
*“Miss Scott,” as she was known, had some scares of her own, and she claimed to have broken dozens of bones. She acted and flew in two or three silent movies. But eventually she became disgusted at being treated as a freak (a woman pilot!) rather than as a highly-skilled aviator, which she certainly was.
*The snapping point came when she overheard a spectator complaining that nobody had been killed. “No more!” she said, and had given up flying by 1916.
*She stayed active in movies (mostly writing), and moved on to radio when that became popular. In the 1930s she came back to Rochester because her mother’s health was failing. Paul Roxon, who worked for the C.A.B. for years, told me that she used to come around to air shows and the like, but always seemed like she was on the outside looking in. Like so many of those pioneer pilots, she had been forgotten.
*She worked in a Rochester factory making batteries during World War II, regaling skeptical co-workers with tales of her exploits. After the war she worked in TV, and as a publicist for the Air Force Museum, besides boosting the idea of a museum for Glenn Curtiss. For quite a few years she lived near Hornell, broadcasting on WLEA. When Otto Kohl opened Curtiss Museum she donated her gauntlets and flying hood, still on exhibit there. (A 1980 air mail stamp, first issued in Rochester, depicted her in that hood.)
*Blanche Scott died in 1970, sixty years after becoming America’s first women pilot. “Life has been exciting and interesting,” she once said. “I have lived it my way, and found it good.”