If Pancho Barnes and her Happy Bottom Riding Club hadn't existed, life would have been quite a bit duller at Muroc AFB, that's for sure.  Pilots would have had to find another watering hole and place to congregate.  Most likely that place would have been the establishment owned by Vemba Greene, better known as "Ma" Greene.  Back in the 1940s, Ma and her husband Angus opened a restaurant and liquor store located very close the air base that everyone referred to as "Ma Greene's".   You can see what it looked like, by taking a peek at the Walter Williams production journal entry -- the book cover is a shot of the place.  Not much to look at, but apparently a fairly cheery place that was out of the sun.

"Ma's was the nearest place to the base to get food," Chuck Yeager told us when we asked, "that you didn’t have to wait in the mess hall for. It was almost like a railroad car, you know, diner. And she served quick food, you know, hamburger and things. But," he continued with a laugh, "Pancho had good steaks!" Indeed, the Greene's little dining establishment couldn't really hold a candle to Pancho's, which had a hotel, gambling hall, airport, dairy, riding stables, swimming pool, and all those cute gals too!

Photo: trade token from Ma's place.  The sign for the establishment still exists, and you can see it at this link.

There are some really interesting parallels between Pancho and Ma.  Clearly they both were strong women, and good business people too.  As Vemba's 1977 obituary in the Desert News put it, "the Greenes, like Pancho Barnes, were sort of surrogate parents to the many G.I.s stationed at Edwards. Mrs. Green always wore a broad-brimmed straw hat and was a formidable woman with a heart of gold which she usually carefully concealed."  Like Pancho, the Greenes nearly lost everything when the U.S. Government condemned their place in the 1950s for an expansion of the air base.  They relocated and operated the "Muroc Jug Factory" which operated until 1970.  One of the main hangars at present-day Edwards now sits on the original "Ma Greene's".

It's amazing what you can find on the Internet if you look hard enough ... a few years ago while doing research on the film I stumbled across a wonderful electronic book entitled Recollections of Dryden History, The Early Years edited by Curtis Peebles and published in 2003.  You can download it for free at this link: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/history/Publications/index.html

This collection of oral histories features discussions with twelve or so "old timers" who worked at NACA from the years 1946-1958, when the organization formally became NASA.  Among those interviewed are test pilots A. Scott Crossfield and John Griffith, and perhaps most interestingly the "father of NASA Dryden" Walter Williams (1919-1995).  Williams recalled that when he first met Pancho and saw her hotel, she commented that she "didn't want families around" because "people come here to raise hell."  On page 17 he expands on this a bit (!), explaining that at one point he attended a party there where "quite a bit of drinking" was taking place, and some of Pancho's girls decided to disrobe and model for photographs.  "There was this one guy," Williams remembered, "a Texan who had on a blue gabardine suit, coat and tie and everything.  One of the girls was sitting across the pool, and he walked down the steps into the pool and walked over to her, fully dressed."  Needless to say, that was a memorable evening.  Another interesting entry you may stumble across, is the evening after first flight of the X-4 Bantam, during which an inebriated Scott Crossfield ended up in this same swimming pool -- only it was December and there were no girls around, and it was freezing cold water thank you very much!

Photo below: Walter Williams (right) poses with Captain Charles Chuck Yeager, USAF pilot and Gerald Truszynski, Head of Instrumentation circa 1948.

While stories like the gabardine suit are hilarious, the most interesting part of Williams' oral history is far more serious.  It concerns Williams' recollections of Pancho's defamation case against the commander of Edwards AFB General Stanley Holtoner.  It's quite a chilling tale that gives some insight into the ugly atmosphere that existed at Edwards AFB as a result of Pancho and Holtoner's dispute.  Here it is in a nutshell: it turns out one of Williams' aide was Cliff Morris.  Cliff had a sideline at Pancho's place as a bartender and helper.  In fact he's the dapper, thin fellow in the photo below left, cutting his wedding cake at, where else, Pancho's restaurant (note Pancho in the left side of frame).  Anyway, despite his lightweight appearance Morris apparently had some huge cajones, and he did Pancho an enormous favor.  Holtoner spent quite a bit of time successfully dodging Pancho and her husband Mac's attempts to serve him legal papers, by simply denying them access to the base.   Morris then decided to help by taking the papers and served Holtoner himself.  Needless to say, that did not endear Morris to Holtoner, and Williams recalls flat out that "they wanted me to fire him."  Williams declined, and managed to show that Morris had been technically on leave when he served the papers, so he had done nothing wrong.   Holtoner persisted, at one point apparently intimating that Morris was a communist.  Back in that era such words might have ended Morris' career, but Morris' immediate boss Paul Bickle saw right through the accusation and refused to do anything, either.

It's the kind of scary story that underscores how Pancho, by taking on a ranking Air Force officer, really put herself in the crosshairs.  If Williams' comments are true, then the commander of the base would certainly have been guilty of abusing his rank and office in a misguided attempt to punish Pancho.

Barbara Rowland, a good friend of Pancho's, once told me that Pancho had confessed to her that the "big love of her life" was a stunt pilot who died in a plane crash.  It's a mystery exactly who she meant -- Pancho had affairs with a lot of stunt pilots and carried on quite a bit with famed flier Ira Reed -- but I'd wager ten dollars to petunias that the fellow in question was Frank Clarke (below, pictured in the cockpit).   Clarke, Pancho wrote in her unfinished autobiography (printed as The Lady Who Tamed Pegasus -- see Nov. 29, '09 entry), was "the most talented and colorful" of all the stunt pilots.  He was a "diabolical soul" who could fly her airplane and "make it talk". Blessed with such good looks that people often compared him to Clark Gable, Frank Clark ran rum during Prohibition days, and got his adrenalin satisfied by flying stunts, getting into fights, and running wild.  "I adored him," Pancho says in Pegasus.  "I was his shadow.  He was the most exciting man in my life.  He was not boy friend or sweetheart but someone I loved and wanted to be around all the time."

Clarke (pictured with another friend of Pancho's, Paul Mantz at left) answered to the nickname "Spook", because he seemed to know a lot of things simply by intuition or instinct.  "If I called him on the phone," Pancho recounted, "He'd always answer 'Hello Pancho' before I said a word."  Like all the stunt pilots, he drank, gambled, caroused, and played rough. Once, he and a friend named Hugh Kimmel were drinking heavily and got into a fight.  According to Pancho, Kimmel landed a punch that broke Clarke's jaw, and Clarke then promptly bent Kimmel's arm back until it broke.  "Then they both cried," Pancho recalled, "and, arm-in-arm, went to the hospital."  Another time Clarke got miffed at fellow pilot Roy Wilson, who accidentally flew to close and clipped his plane while performing a stunt.  Wilson didn't make things right, so the next day Clarke flew a head-on game of aerial chicken with Wilson, recklessly chased him, and then managed to lock wings with him.  Needless to say, Wilson kept a wide berth after that.  

His peers called Clarke the "greatest living stunt pilot" and "The King of Hollywood" for many reasons.  Much of his reputation came from his work on Hell's Angels.  He built "Caddo Field" where the production took place, and served as lead pilot and co-ordinator for dozens of planes and pilots.  According to Don Dwiggins, who profiled Clarke in his magnificent book The Air Devils, Clarke learned to fly in 1918.  Supposedly the same day he soloed, he took up "twelve passengers at ten dollars a head".  He later took up wing walking and made a career out of doing wild stunts like plane-to-plane mid-air transfers while crowds watched, bedazzled.  Then there was the bit of madness where Clark would climb out on the tail, and have his co-pilot dive the plane so that he could then leap forward into the cockpit. It was the type of insanity you just don't see today, not at the X-Games, the Red Bull Air Races or even in the movies.  "I never heard of a man saying 'I want to be a wing walker'", Clarke once told a reporter.  "Flying stunt men just appear."

(Photo at right: Clarke stands at upper left, while Pancho sits at lower right in this official membership snapshot of the Motion Picture Stunt Pilots.)

Once Clarke broke into Hollywood, he cemented his reputation rather quickly.  For the movie Stranger Than Fiction with Katherine MacDonald, he had his Jenny biplane assembled atop the roof of the 13-story Los Angeles Railway Building (photo below), then under construction in downtown Los Angeles.  In a bit of daring right out of James Bond, Clarke flew the plane off the roof using sheer guts and a small wooden ramp that provided some lift assist.  Not only was it a spectacular stunt, but an amazing publicity grab.  Clarke barely escaped being arrested -- it turned out anxious officials were moments away from seizing his plane when he took off!  The headlines were splashed with news and photos of the stunt, and it became the stuff of legend.  Clarke's career was full of these kind of stories.  Who knows how much of what you read in these accounts is really true?  Supposedly Clarke once flew by a hotel in Tucson and threw a love letter through the window of the woman he was romancing.  He also allegedly once distracted a passenger on his plane, and then ducked into the depths of his cockpit unnoticed and started flying it using the control cables.  The terrified passenger, producer Jerry Fairbanks, was convinced Clarke had actually bailed out.  Of course it was all just in good fun ... and no one was hurt although I am sure Fairbanks lost a year or two out of his life that day. 

Clarke crashed many planes during his storied career, both intentionally and unintentionally.  One time he got distracted by a pretty actress on the set of a movie and flew right into a tree.  That time and many others he managed to walk away.  The last, and fatal accident, occurred in 1948 when he was making a visit up to his and Pancho's old friend Frank Tomick at a remote silver mine.  According to Dwiggins' book, Frank Clarke decided to have some fun with Tomick and for that purpose loaded a sack of manure into his BT-13's cockpit.  He intended to dump it on Tomick but the manure bag slipped and jammed behind the plane's control stick, locking it.  The plane slammed into the ground and exploded right in front of a stunned Tomick. According to Dwiggins, "all the old timers showed up at Clarke's funeral, but there were not many tears.  Clarke had died the way he would have wanted to go, pulling off a gag for a friend."  The one nasty aspect of the incident, Dwiggins noted, was that Clarke's passenger also died that day.  That was something Clarke would have been upset about.

It is a shame Clarke didn't live a longer life, but so few of the early stunt pilots achieved longevity.  For Pancho his loss was obviously deeply personal.  One has to wonder, had he not been killed, could Pancho have convinced Clarke to marry her.  Now that would have been quite a stunt!

On a side note, we used a lot of footage from a wonderful old public domain stunt flying film The Air Maniacs in the documentary.  The featured pilot in that movie is none other than Clarke, and in fact when you're watching our film and you see Pancho buzz her husband's church -- you are in fact seeing her good friend Frank Clarke, fly one last final stunt.  Appropriate, isn't it?

Pancho's Going to Osh Kosh! The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club will be screening at the world's largest aviation event, the EAA's AirVenture -- also known as "OshKosh".  We'll be presenting the film as part of An Evening of Champions on July 25th at the famous Theater in the Woods.  The open-air pavilion has seating for 3,500 people under its spacious roof, and we expect many more to watch sitting on lawn chairs and blankets. Obviously it will be a record crowd for us, and should be a truly amazing evening.  We'll make an announcement on our website when we have all the details in place.  Special thanks to Diane Titterington and the Aviation Speakers Bureau for making this possible.

There will be additional screenings of the film at the EAA's SkyScape Theater during the week.  We don't have the full schedule yet, but as soon as we do we'll let you know.