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"LITTLE MISS DRESDEN CmonHHH
BROKEN AT LAST!
How Harriet Quimby, Most ■■ - >F?. ■
Daring of Airwomen--Appar- ■’. '•■ v ’ .■' ; >y ■;'■■■■. y' • •■■
ently frothing But Frivolous | • '>•■’ .•?■' ,y.■_~; ’.-Z.;
Femininity, Full of Odd | - •
Superstitions- Was _ ;.
Flipped Out of Her '\. '■ '
Flying Machine I y / .■ ' - X ■
the Hand From the /M k ■ ’’l
Clouds Which She &,' , A; ! g ;; |B g|| J((
Had Always Feared : ' ' • ' /?; '" ' ' '
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Harriet
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As She
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X| “The Giant Cloud Finger,
Ti re d of Playing with Her
\ f | Machine, Gave Its Tail That
v Final, Fatal Flip.”
IT is a heavy human toll that Is
exacted by the sport of aviation,
but in the long list of such sac
rifices of life none so affects the
popular imagination as that of Har
riet Quimby—the most daring of
airwomen, yet so dainty, pretty and
essentially feminine that she came
to be known as the "Dresden China
Aviatrice.”
In keeping with her outward as
pect of frivolous femininity, too,
were her odd and peculiarly fem
inine superstitions. Always when
In the air, though she handled her
powerful craft with all the cool skill
and courage of any of her masculine
rivals, she was obsessed by the notion
of a mischievously malicious giant
hand stretched forth from the clouds
behind her. snapping Its great fin
gers perilously near her outstretched
planes, or, with tfie tip of one of
those immense digits flipping up
ward the tail of her craft as though
for the pleasure of seeing It dive
headlong to the earth below.
At last that giant cloud-finger suc
ceeded In Its experiment.. Miss
Quimby's 100-horsepower Bierlot
machine suddenly stood on Its head,
up a mile in the sky above the city
of Boston, pitching the daring
woman nnd her male passenger in
to the shallow waters of Dorchester
Ray. Her odd superstition was
realized; “Miss Dresden China,” as
she had half-expected to happen,
was broken at last.
Harriet Quimby will be forever
famous as the first airwoman to fly
across the English channel. When
she was about to leave New York
last March, bent on accoinpllshlug
that feat—which the most rugged
and experienced of man-flyers at
tacked with trepidation—her friends
sought to dissuade her on the
grounds of her frail .bysique and
her generally feminine disadvan
tages.
"Why,” said one, “your appro
priate environment is the blue nnd
gold walls of a satin-upholstered
boudoir In the Louis XV. style.
You’re not a medieval German Ama
zon by Piloty; you’re a Watteau
Shepherdness. Why, everybody Is
calling you the ‘Dresden China
A viatrice.'"
"Oh, I don't like that,” laughed
Miss Quimby. “Dresden China is
so easily broken! But I'm going,
just thesame."
During that perilous channel pas
sage she could almost feel the pres
ence of that giant-cloud hand flip
ping Its fingers playfully about her
rudder —like a cat playing with a
mouse. Long before that, soon af
ter she had secured her pilot's license
and was venturing Into the skies
alone she said to one of her In
timate friends:
"Frequently when I have been
flying it has seemed to be as If a
huge cloud-hand were mischievously
rocking my slender little monoplane.
It seemed, with a playful huger, to
be lifting the tail of my machine
higher than it should be.
I actually had to fight
with my levers to keep
the machine from stand
ing on its nose—particu
larly when coming down
through the lower clouds.
That giant hand grows
more and real the longer
I fly. Whenever I get
among the clouds I can
feel it playing with the
tall of my machine.”
Curiously, nothing so
well as her own belief in
this supernatural agency
explains the mystery of
that fatal plunge Into
Dorchester Bay. Her in
structors, M. Andre Hau
pert. Vhose training en
abled her to gain her pi
lot’s license, has made
this significant statement:
"It was no lack on the
part of Miss Quimby that
caused the drop of wom
an, man and machine to
the earth. There was
nothing the matter with
her machine. It was in
perfect working trim But.
so far as we can tell,
something happened wh'ch
destroyed its equipoise,
and instantly she was at
the mercy of the air.”
"Something happened.”
As Miss Quimby has said,
that "something” almost
bannened whenever she
was among the clouds.
It was hard to keep that
maliciously playful giant
finger from flipping the
tail of her machine too
high for her safety—and
now, at last it gave a flip
with force enough to
make resistance useless!
It is not difficult for an imagine
five person to conceive how a n ob
session like this could, final Ir. so
operate on the mind and nerves of
1, ns to produce reactions
of the muscles used In guiding the
machine that would cause a catas
trophe identical with the one so
dreaded by Miss Quimby. Believing
that the gigantic cloud-finger was
tired of playing with her machine,
and had given its tail a final, fatal
flip, her hands on the guiding levers
unconsciously reversed their usual
procedure. '
Miss Quimby was a story writer,
a poet, a dramatist—in fact, a
dreamer with a mind extraordinarily
active on its imaginative side. Her
belief in that cloud-hand was no
stranger than the beliefs f the an
cient Greeks in the Immortal beings
which controlled all the manifesta
tions of nature.
When Icarus flew high above the
Mediterranean with wings made of
wax he knew that it was in the pow
er of Phoebus-Apollo, rolling the sun
across the heavens in bls chariot, to
bring disaster upon him by melting
his wax wings, which is exactly what
the sun did, and the ancient Greek
mythological aeroplanist took his
fatal plunge into the sea.
To personify mysterious forces far
above the earth, picturing in her
mind cloud forces concentrated in
an intelligent, all-powerful hand, wa«
a not unnatural obsession in one of
Miss Quimby's temperament and
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14 111 WML"- m t
_ v , Miss Harriet Quimby in a Favorite Conventional Costume, Which Shows Her to Have Been
.» —Apart From Her Career As An Airwoman—Essentially Feminine, Almost Frivolously So.
mental constitution, considering her
hazardous performances in cloud
land.
There was another superstition of
Miss Quimby's that had a certain
bearing on the catastrophe of her
career. She wore a number of Ori
ental decorations that, with her com
plexion, made her resemblance to
fabled queens of Egypt more than
merely fanciful. She had, in partic
ular, a string of weirdly colored
stones that she obtained from a Cairo
muleteer. Unless these were around
her neck she would not fly. Her own
narrative of how she got them is il
lustrative of the woman behind .he
girl.
“I had noticed a most peculiar
combination of stones which were
around the mule’s temples as part
of his head-stall. A number of queer
little Oriental gods and goddesses
were suspended irregularly from this
string of stones. A close examination
of them showed that they were all
■really the same god or goddess. I do
not know which, and that Ganesha
was the name. X think he is a Hindu
god of Luck.
“I offered the boy a guinea for the
string of stones, but ho wanted
three times that much. We finally
compromised for two guineas. And
my luck changed that very day. I
have never been so happy as since I
bought those little charms"
But Ganesha was to play a part in
Miss Quimby’s life that, all unfor-
seon was tragic almost beyond words.
In the office of a London newspaper
which had financed her flight across
the Channel,' she met with a large
replica of Ganesha. The strange
idol, with its elephant head, three
legs, and three arms, ail on a human
body, hud been sent to the news
paper office to be destroyed. The
newspaper had collected from its
readers a number of unlucky talis
mans, and Ganesha was among
them.
Miss Quimby, seeing that he
matched the smaller idols which had
hung on her Cairo mule’s headstall,
begged so hard for Ganesha that the
figure was reluctantly turned over
to her. And here is Miss Quimby’s
version of what happened.
•Aiiy one would suppose that after
I had rescued Ganesha from such an
untimely end as burning he would
be grateful and would behave like
his little children did. But almost
immediately I began to have bad
luck.”
When Miss Quimby returned to New
York after her triumphal crossing
of the Channel, Ganesha kept on
misbehaving .and she decided finally
that she would guillotine him So
she had his head cut oif and put the
head in a desk drawer, while she
used the body of the idol for a
paper weight. The day that Miss
Quimby was killed in Boston a
friend of hers was near her desk
and saw Ganesha, with his cut-off
head resting again on his shoulder!
and still grinning horribly. Miss
Quimby bad replaced the head th®
day she went to Boston.
It was Miss Quimby's oft repeated
statement that "happy people ad bfl
long to the same generation,” and
she did everything she could to
make people happy. She was al
cheerful as could be, and in a letter
which she posted on her way to too
aerodrome the day she met het
death she laughingly quotes Omar
to show how little she fears that any
thing will happen to her and yet
how she refuses to take herself ser
iously. The quotation, which evi
dently answered some entreaty to M
careful, toid how improbable it wai
"That Youth’s sweet-scented manu
script should close.”
Miss Quimby's ambition was to
earn enough money before she was
thirty-five so that she might retits
from dally work to write one ii?
book or one big play. The resi
dents of Hardelot. the faslilonan.®
French resort on the English 1 <• < n ‘
nel, had presented her with a bun
galow and a large piece of ground
for her cross-channel flight, 'b®
wanted to go there In the Summ
when site retired from business at
fairs, and to live her Winters io
southern California, where sM
owned an orange ranch.
But the cloud-hand was too strong
for her. It lifted the tail of iiaf
monoplane once too often.