Page:The Fun of It.pdf/199

Rh small field at St. John, New Brunswick, I suspect it is only a matter of time before she tries again.

I think Miss Nichols is probably the only woman in captivity who has delivered by plane one brother to an army air training station. Recently, she fer­ried the elder of her two younger brothers to Kelly Field where he is completing his training. By the way, the other one is working at one of the Long Island airports and is earning his license there. Her sister is secretary for a flyer, and that puts the whole family into aviation as far as the younger generation goes. The others only ride.

Ruth Nichols always dresses with charm and dis­tinction. Even in the air she is apt to be garbed in her favorite color, which happens to be purple, and she owns a specially made purple leather flying suit and helmet.

Another well known flyer is Elinor Smith. Be­fore Miss Nichols captured it, she held the altitude record for women with a mark of 27,418 feet. After it was taken from her, she promptly went up to get it back. In this attempt she fainted at 25,000 feet, when her oxygen tube broke, and fell four miles through the air before she regained consciousness. She was only two thousand feet above the earth at that moment, yet managed to get control of her plane and land in a vacant lot. Then, just to show she hadn’t lost her nerve, she tried again for the al­titude record the following week.

It has been said of Miss Smith that she learned to fly almost as soon as she learned to walk. Be