Ingalls had the opportunity to study both music and language in Vienna and Paris, and she had a rich and varied career as a concert pianist, a nurse, a secretary, a ballet dancer, and an actress before learning how to fly in 1928, being the first woman to graduate from a U.S. government approved flying school. She then proceeded to accomplish a long list of aeronautic feats, establishing and breaking more aeronautic records than most of her contemporaries.
On May 3, 1930, Laura Ingalls performed 344 consecutive loops over St. Louis in her De Havilland Gypsy Moth. The previous loop record stood at a mere 46. After this feat, Ingalls told reporters that she was "terribly disappointed" that 66 additional loops could not be officially counted because she had to stop to pump gas from a reserve tank. Ingalls proceeded to break her own record with an astonishing 930 loops over the new Hatbox-Municipal Airport in Muskogee, Oklahoma on May 26. The loops performed while setting this new record averaged almost four and a half loops per minute for three hours and 40 minutes and they won her a prize sum of just above 1,000 dollars.
She also established a record for barrel rolls on August 14 that same year when she 714 consecutive barrel rolls. However, Laura Ingalls was not limited to aerobatics. On February 28, 1934, Ingalls took off from New York in a Lockheed Orion. She was headed to Miami, but she told reporters that she "just had a yen to fly the Andes." The trip to Miami was supposed to be via Charleston and Jacksonville, but she never landed at Jacksonville. Instead, Ingalls landed in Miami 24 hours after leaving Charleston. Reporters tried to find out what she had been doing during those 24 hours, but she refused to provide any information: "Now I can have one little secret, if I want to. Put it down to anything you like, but not to romance. That’s out! You see, a friend gave me a six-shooter when I left New York, so I just had to dip off someplace and use it. I knew I would never have a chance to use it on the South American trip, so I went off, looking for adventure!”
As it were, she had managed to become lost and had to land at Lake Butler just a few miles southwest of Jacksonville. The Florida Times-Union found out about the navigational error and wrote about what really happened: "While aviators scoured the coast between Charleston, S.C., and Jacksonville for some sign of Laura Ingalls, the ‘missing’ aviatrix was calmly eating roast beef in this tiny Florida town. Armed with her hefty six-shooter and a pot of coffee, she spent the night alone in the cabin of her trim plane at the airport near here. Late Friday an airplane circled the airport and made off, only to return some time later and land. Out stepped a young woman who was willing to talk about anything other than her identity. She had her plane refueled and then rode to the restaurant on the gas truck, asking Deputy Sheriff R. B. McKinley to keep an eye on the airplane . . . she told him she was en route from New York to Miami and had become lost.”
Next day, March 8, Ingalls took off for Havana. She then proceeded over the Caribbean to the Yucatan Peninsula, through Mexico and to Cristobal, Panama. The next leg of the trip started on March 13, when she flew to Talara, Peru, a trip of 1,296 miles out of which 460 were over open sea. Ingalls then continued along the west coast of South America to Santiago, Chile, and on March 18 she flew over the Andes at an altitude of 18,000 feet, through the Uspallata Pass to Mendoza in Argentina. The next stops where Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro followed by Trinidad and Tobago on April 17. She was back in New York on April 17, having completed a solo trip of some 17,000 miles. The trip won her the 1934 Harmon Trophy for the most outstanding aviatrix of the year. Her records for the flight included the first solo flight round South America in a land plane, the first American woman to fly over the Andes and the first woman to fly from North to South America. Ingalls effectively broke Amy Johnson's distance record of 10,000 miles.
By now Ingalls was quite the celebrity, and media followed her activities and undertakings with much gusto. Later in 1934 she ran a read light while heading to a dinner with Mayor LaGuardia of New York. Ingalls received a summons but did not appear before the court. When the magistrate announced that ignoring a summons was a “serious matter,” Ingalls responded, “Your Honor, if the officer who served me with the summons were as good looking as the judge, I would have remembered it.” A suspended sentence followed. In 1935, additional suspended sentences were awarded for operating an automobile without a license and parking in a restricted area.
She broke yet another record in 1935, this time flying non-stop from the Union Air Terminal in Burbank, California, to Floyd Bennett field here in Brooklyn on July 11, 1935. The flight took 13 hours and 34 minutes, which was fiva and a half hours faster than Amelia Earhart's record from 1932. In 1936 Ingalls flew in the Bendix Trophy Race. She finished second after Louise Thaden.
It was around this time that Laura Ingalls became interested in politics. She saw war looming in Europe, and she joined the America First Committee (AFC), a non-interventionist pressure group whose members included isolationist Charles Lindbergh.
After the outbreak of war in 1939, she flew over the White House and Capitol Hill for two hours on September 26, showering the buildings with anti-war leaflets from the AFC's Womens’ National Committee to Keep the United States Out of War. The Civil Aeronautic Authority (CAA) greeted her after landing at Washington Airport, and Ingalls was ordered to show cause why her pilot license shouldn't be revoked.
However, this setback did not intimidate Ingalls, and she appeared at a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee together with Ms. Catherine Curtis, the chairman of the Womens’ National Committee to Keep the United States Out of War. Media noted that Ingalls was dressed in a leather flying jacket, slacks and a black tam. Ingalls and Curtis demanded admittance to the proceedings, but they were turned back at the door. They left a message for the Committee's Chair, Key Pittman (D-NV), but they did not receive a reply. Media sources claim that Ingalls stated the following: "And this is the government of the United States! I can’t understand it. Imagine! Holding hearings behind closed doors! This is a dictatorship already."
Ingall's next meeting was with the CAA, and they had a "long and hard" talk on October 8. She claimed that the flight was prompted by "patriotic fervor", and since no real harm had been done, Ingalls argued that the case should be dismissed as an "unfortunate incident." Ingalls had yet another meeting with the CAA, and on December 22, 1939, the CAA announced that there were “disturbing deficiencies” in Ingalls’ knowledge of the Civil Air Regulations. In order to promote “safety in air navigation,” the CAA suspended Ingalls’ pilot certificate until she passed an examination dealing with aircraft certificates, pilot ratings and air traffic rules.
As increasing numbers of Americans favored intervention in World War II, Ingalls' celebrity status waned. There were also rumors that the AFC was sponsored by the Nazis, and that hardly helped her popularity. It is interesting to note that the search for Nazi spies and infiltrators in the USA had the FBI looking for suspects in many isolationist groups. Whereas there were both German sympathizers and outright National Socialists to be found in some of these organizations, the FBI also suspected that Elizabeth Arden's salons were covers for Nazi operations. Further FBI investigations found no such evidence, though.
Two years later, in December 1941, Laura Ingalls was charged with being a paid agent of the German Government and failing to register as such under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The public was astounded, but J. Edgar Hoover claimed that several months of investigations by the FBI had produced evidence that Ingalls had made frequent contacts with representatives of the Third Reich through Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, the second secretary of the German Embassy as well as receiving a salary from a German agent. Ingalls was unable to make the $7,500 bond, and she was eventually arrested. She claimed to be innocent, but a witness testified that Ingalls wore a swastika pendant, and that she regarded Adolf Hitler to be a “marvelous man,” while looking forward to the day when Hitler’s New Order would be introduced to America. A second witness testified along similar lines.
According to Ingalls, she had attempted to act as a double agent on her own behalf after not having been hired by the FBI. She claimed to have attempted to infiltrate German institutions in the USA to pry for information that might be valuable for American interests, and she confessed to accepting payments from Germany. The front-page trial was described by media as "one of Washington’s most spectacular trials.” as the “fashionably dressed” aviatrix testified that she thought of herself as a kind of “female Mata Hari” or “international spy.” being turned down by the FBI.
Ingalls was found to be guilty and she was sentenced to eight months to two years in prison on February 20, 1942. After receiving her sentence, Ingalls held a patriotic speech describing her actions, and she ended the speech by proclaiming “I salute the Republic of the United States.” Ingalls was sent to Alderson prison, the prison that later housed Martha Stewart. She was released on October 5, 1943, after 18 months in prison, and she applied for a presidential pardon. Her application was supported by World War I ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, but she never received clemency. She passed away on January 10, 1967, in Burbank, California.
l.aura Ingalls was a fearless and headstrong person in an age that was dominated by male aviators. Her records remain quite impressive to this day, despite her unfortunate and confused political leanings. She described the influence from her mother as follows: "My mother, partly through ill health, was extremely emotional and without adequate self-discipline; spoiled by her parents who thought she was wonderful and could do anything. Brilliant along certain lines, she possessed the trait I find most exciting in the American character, viz. the ability to hurdle difficulties and achieve the reputedly impossible. I grew up under such influence." However, it may very well have been that ego and self-obsession combined with her own particular perception of what the United States should be took her along an abyssal path to obscurity. During the trial against her, Ingalls’ attorney, James Reilly, told the jury his client was “a woman of daring initiative, ambition and a tremendous amount of egotism.”
Airmail postal cover signed by Laura
Ingalls with her famous logo, which she called "My Cresent and Cross",
a combination of her initials L.I. This cover was carried with Laura
Ingalls during her record-breaking transcontinental flight of 1935, as
shown by the cancels. Her logo was prominently displayed on the side of
her aircraft as shown in her picture above.
Sources:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19411219&id=vPdPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=J1UDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6383,3340139
http://20thcenturyaviationmagazine.com/o-capt-nancy-aldrich/laura-ingalls/
http://www.air-racing-history.com/PILOTS/Laura%20Ingalls.htm
http://www.pardonpower.com/2010/11/laura-h-ingalls-just-one-flight-too.html
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