The Roaring Twenties brought welcome changes for many women in the United States. Besides gaining the right to vote nationwide in 1920, more ambitious, confident women attended college and entered the workforce, boldly chasing dreams and defying expectations. Some of them flocked to rising industries like entertainment and aviation, eager for initiative, risk-taking and creativity. Although chauvinism and misogyny were still prevalent, several daring women seized new opportunities in the fields of film and flying that thrived in Burbank and the surrounding areas, becoming the pilots of their own lives.
Pancho Barnes
Legendary hellraiser Florence Lowe “Pancho” Barnes conquered both the film and aviation fields as a daredevil pilot. The granddaughter of the pioneering Thaddeus S.C. Lowe — who introduced balloons to the Union Army during the Civil War and was the namesake of Mt. Lowe in Altadena — the larger-than-life tomboy grew up in wealthy San Marino and married young. Escaping propriety, the hard-partying, reckless adventurer fell in love with aviation, saying that “flying makes me feel like a sex maniac in a whorehouse with a stack of $100 bills.”
The cigar-smoking go-getter formed a barnstorming troupe, competed in air races, broke speed records, worked as Burbank-based Lockheed’s first female test pilot, and performed stunts in films like Hell’s Angels, The Lost Squadron and Young Eagles, later establishing the Association of Motion Picture Pilots and the Women’s Air Reserve. In 1935, thrill-seeking Barnes founded the notoriously raucous Happy Bottom Riding Club in the Mojave Desert, a dude ranch, restaurant and hotel that was later subsumed by Edwards Air Force Base.
Amelia Earhart
Much more circumspect than the rowdy Barnes, fabled Amelia Earhart called Toluca Lake home in the 1930s. Earning the nickname “Lady Lindy” in 1928 for crossing the Atlantic as a flight passenger a year after Charles Lindbergh first flew the route, the poised Earhart achieved prominence as the first woman to fly solo across the U.S. later that summer. The daring aviator rocked the world on March 20, 1932, when she flew from Newfoundland to Ireland in her Lockheed Vega, becoming the first woman to pilot solo across the Atlantic.
Earhart moved west to California in 1934, settling on Valley Spring Lane and establishing her flying base near Lockheed at Union Air Terminal (now Hollywood–Burbank Airport). In 1935, after setting speed records, she crossed the Pacific Ocean from Honolulu to Oakland, the first aviator to complete the risky journey solo. Lockheed Martin designed a new Model 10 Electra for Earhart in 1937, in which she and co-pilot Fred Noonan set off to circumnavigate the globe before disappearing somewhere near Howland Island on July 2, 1937.
Beryl Markham
The fearless, statuesque Beryl Markham resided on Otsego Street in North Hollywood in the early 1940s after making a name for herself by successfully piloting solo through stormy weather from Great Britain to North America in 1937 for what she called her “adventure on wings.” Raised in Kenya by her racehorse-training father, Markham grew up wild and independent, hunting game and wandering the fields. Earning her pilot’s license in 1930, the unconventional risk-taker delivered air mail and freight and scouted elephants for safaris with her friends Isak Dinesen and Denys Finch-Hatton (later immortalized in Dinesen’s book Out of Africa and its subsequent movie adaptation).
Challenged to fly westward across the Atlantic Ocean, the daring Markham piloted through strong winds and rain without instruments, battling freezing gas lines to crash-land into a bog on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, on September 5, 1936, after a 22-hour flight. Lauded for her adventurous spirit, Markham arrived in Hollywood in late 1939 as Columbia Studios considered filming a biopic of her fascinating life. While waiting, the workaholic pilot served as technical advisor on the 1940 Douglas Fairbanks Jr. film Safari before penning the bracing memoir West With the Night in 1942, which Ernest Hemingway called a “bloody wonderful book.”
Ruth Chatterton
A feminist ahead of her time, headstrong actor Ruth Chatterton loved taking chances and conquering new fields. After she criticized the acting in a play she had seen, friends challenged the stubborn teenager to do better at it. Joining a stock company at age 16, the determined Chatterton skyrocketed to fame, headlining Broadway shows just three years later. Venturing to Hollywood in the late 1920s, she won two Academy Award nominations while mastering both silent and sound films. As one of the top stars at Warner Bros. in Burbank, Chatterton portrayed driven, take-charge dames in such films as Female and Journal of a Crime in the early 1930s.
After separating from her husband, actor George Brent, she took flying lessons, later crisscrossing the country three times solo. A United Press news story reported that Chatterton “takes a hop in her big Stinson cabin plane every afternoon when she finishes work at the studios.” In 1935 she offered a $1,000 prize for the winner of a transcontinental air race, male or female, for which she served as pacemaker. The winner was a fellow female flyer, Grace Prescott of San Diego. Chatterton sponsored the RC Sportsmen Pilots’ Derby in 1936 with $5,000 in prize money, women once again competing against men. The race was a test of accuracy rather than speed, with pilots calculating their target flight time based on weather conditions and the ideal cruising velocity of their planes and then striving to meet that goal as precisely as possible. About 100 amateur pilots took part, taking off from Cleveland and touching down in San Diego five days later, then flying to Los Angeles to open the National Air Races. Chatterton would eventually return to headlining on Broadway before becoming a successful novelist dealing with controversial topics.
Grace Huntington
Obsessed with aviation as well as animation, young Grace Huntington pioneered in both fields. After she submitted story ideas to Walt Disney, the famed animation producer hired her in 1936 as the second female animator at his Burbank studios, though he wondered if she would marry and then quit after working only a short time. Enduring harassment and bullying by male employees, Huntington found solace in flying. Though she completed work for Bambi, Silly Symphony and Mickey Mouse shorts, she took to the air for relaxation, earning her pilot’s license during a vacation in 1938. Within a year, Huntington pushed toward the stars, practicing flying higher and higher, wearing an oxygen mask and aiming for altitude records.
A determined Huntington competed against Evelyn Hudson to set records for “sky jumping” during the spring of 1939, hitting new heights in small planes while using oxygen. On June 2, 1939, she broke Jacqueline Cochran’s altitude record, reaching 20,000 feet during a flight in which she departed from Burbank’s Union Terminal and landed at Glendale’s Central Air Terminal. The stubborn Huntington continued, establishing a new record of over 24,000 feet in a two-and-a half-hour flight traveling over Burbank, Palmdale and the Cajon Pass. She even joined the American Rocket Society. The bold pilot suffered multiple rejections because of her sex after offering to ferry planes to Great Britain in 1940 for its war effort. Marrying in 1941, Huntington gave birth to a son before dying of tuberculosis in 1948 at the age of 35.
Confident and assertive, these driven women boldly chased dreams and landmark achievements, bringing fame to the Burbank area where they lived, worked and flew. Through patient, dogged study and practice, they overcame bullying and harassment, demonstrating how passion and talent shot them to the top echelons of Hollywood film production and the rarefied world of aviation.