The Irrepressible Pancho Barnes

AirSpace Transcript Season 10 Episode 10: Pancho Barnes

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Emily: ​Welcome to AirSpace from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. I'm Emily. 

Matt: And I'm Matt. Pancho Barnes is a familiar figure to those who study the barnstorming era of flight, or anyone who's familiar with Edwards Air Force Base in the 1940s and 50s. But outside of that, she's not as well known.

Emily: Pancho was an air racer, stunt pilot, party instigator, generous to a fault, larger than life character who lived far outside the norms for women of her era and social class.

Matt: We are going through her life from indulgent childhood to lonely desert death today on AirSpace sponsored by Lockheed Martin.

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Emily: To help us understand Pancho's life, we talked to one of her biographers.

Lauren: I am Lauren Kessler. I live in the Pacific Northwest. I am a writer. Author of 15 books, one of which is the biography of Pancho Barnes.

Matt: So Pancho Barnes is an interesting character, right? She was born right, uh, at the turn of the 20th century in 1901. She wasn't actually born and given the name. Pancho, which you might imagine, she was actually Florence Leontine Lowe. Her grandfather was an inventor and a balloonist who's credited as something like the great grandfather of the Air Force.

Emily: So if you're a balloon nerd like we are wannabe balloon nerds, Thaddeus S.C. Lowe was one of the first balloonists in the Civil War, and he would take his balloon up with a tether and he would telegraph the confederacy's movements to the Union Army. And he liked to call himself the most shot at man in the War.  

Matt: By the time Florence was born, the Lowe money was gone, but her mother's family, the Dobbins, were still very rich. So she was raised in the lap of luxury in San Marino, California, just outside of Pasadena, where her family were part of the upper class that ruled society.  

Lauren: Actually, the thing that that really fascinated me about Pancho was that given when she was born, the, the culture in which she was born, especially the, the female culture in which she was born, the economic class in which he was born that the expectation for her life was so different than how she made her life become.

So she was, um, born into wealth, Pasadena, California wealth. And she was destined, I think, to have that kind of privileged protected female existence. Her, her grandfather was a great adventurer and, uh, an aviator and they had a very close relationship at the beginning, and I think that, that, that ignited, absolutely ignited her love of being in the air and taking risks.

Emily: So Thaddeus, I think we can blame Thaddeus, Matt for Pancho's sense of adventure. Her grandfather really kind of instilled that sense of adventure into Pancho and he was the one that took her to her very first air show, where she was introduced to planes for the very first time in 1910.

Matt: And you know, we've talked about these early days of, of flight and how adventurous they were. If you were going to an air show, you were seeing people in small planes doing really cool acrobatic things, right?

Emily: Totally. And her grandfather, Thaddeus and to some extent her father really treated Florence, soon to be Pancho like the son in the family. Um, Pancho did have an older brother, but he was sickly and he died of leukemia when Pancho was just 12. And I think this is really interesting the way this kind of era really likes to ensure gender roles are upheld to a certain point, right? When kids are really little, it doesn't matter nearly as much as when they get older.

Matt: Yeah. She was taught to ride horses very young. She was taught to shoot. She was allowed to ride and shoot all over her parents and grandparents' estates. And she basically did what she wanted when she wanted to, and was cared for by servants and nannies and never had to really learn anything domestic.

Her education began with private tutors. She spent some time at the local public school, but after her brother died, her mother realized she would need more handling

Lauren: She was sent away and, and went through a few private schools. The curriculum at those schools for girls would certainly not have been anything, um, that would prepare one to, um, get in an airplane or, or understand flight or physics or anything like that. It was leading a quiet domestic life and taking care of a family.

She misbehaved. I mean, she was sort of genetically, I don't know, uh, destined to misbehave from an early age. And so she did kind of get kicked out for pranks that I don't know that we would kick out anybody these days, but she, she didn't fit into the private school, quiet girl, well-dressed niche that her parents and her society would want her to.

Also note that, um, they married her off at 18 to, um, a minister.  Laughs Which anybody who reads about or knows about Pancho's life would think is beyond ironic.

Emily: His name was C. Rankin Barnes, and he was her mother's choice. And though Florence had little interest in being society's idea of a ‘good wife,’ she did want to please her mother.

And while Barnes wasn't rich, he was respectable and he was a calming influence. And Florence's mother really hoped that that would rub off on her daughter.

Matt: Well, it didn't.

Emily: Surprise, surprise. You all saw that plot twist coming. 

Matt: Yeah. Right. That's not a surprise. Spoiler, not spoiler. Whatever. Both laugh

Following the wedding, Florence got pregnant on their honeymoon. They returned to the rectory where she found life stifling, lacking in the comforts and the servants that she was used to, and also having none of the freedoms that she was used to.

So she decided to go out and spend her time the way that she always had with the horses on her parents' estate. So she kind of left the rectory, went back to the horses.

Emily: So after her son Billy was born, Florence tried to play the part of the wife and mother, but it just… not her vibe. Right? And she discovered this new big adventure that she was looking for in Hollywood. 

Matt: She started hanging around movie sets as you do, and found out that her well-trained horses and skillful riding meant that she was welcomed and paid. This was the era of the horse opera, the Western. So horses were playing a pretty big role in cinema.

Emily: Working in Hollywood meant that Pancho had her own money from which she was able to pay for a nanny and move out of her husband's house, basically allowing her to do whatever she wanted and so she would never again live with Barnes, her husband, though they would spark a sort of odd kind of distant friendship for many years after that. And being married, but not having to take care of a wife, seemed to suit her husband Barnes, just fine.

Matt: And this is in many ways where the adventure of Pancho Barnes begins, right? Because now that she's free from her husband, she can actually become Pancho. So she spends a lot of time going on whatever adventure is sort of in front of her at that moment, including dressing as a man and signing on as a sailor on a Mexican banana boat, which wasn't in fact really a banana boat, but a gun running boat that was bringing guns to Mexico, which was in the midst of a civil war at the time. 

So, you know, not just small adventures like a road trip across America, but like running guns to Mexico type of adventure here. 

Emily: These are epics. 

Matt: Eventually she had to leave the ship with one of her friends and find her way back to California over land,

Lauren: And according to her, traversed the width of Mexico, from the, uh, Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico most of the times on the back of a donkey.

So according to her, this guy friend said, you look just like Sancho Panza. Except for he mispronounced it and said, Pancho Sanchez. So Pancho became her adopted name from that time, f-f-forever. She never really called herself Florence again.

Emily: And this is the beginning of Pancho Barnes, which I love this story because she was already on her way to becoming Pancho, but like this is kind of where that whole persona is born. So I really love this story. And of course, she was onto her next adventure off of a boat into the air. 

Horses aren't an inexpensive hobby, Pancho has expensive taste, and when her mother dies in 1923, Pancho was left as the heir and inherits an awful lot of money and a whole bunch of real estate.

And so now that she's really got all this extra money and she's looking yet again for a new adventure. Pancho follows a cousin who was interested in taking flying lessons at a local airstrip, and she took one look at that airplane and decided she had to do it too. 

Lauren: And the first time that she was taken up, the pilot in question did all kinds of moves to make her sick. Like throw up sick, uh, whatever you would do, I would be, uh, I'm sick, even just thinking about the barrel rolls and all this kind of stuff.

And she, you know, just according to her, just loved it and was, you know, enjoying herself and laughing and proved herself in that moment to this, cantankerous, curmudgeonly pilot who said, sure, now I'll give you lessons.

Matt: But as we said, you know, she has the money. So once she actually takes the lessons, she spends some of her inheritance on one plane, then another plane, and then another. And you know, pretty clearly she is hooked on aviation.

Emily: And this is kind of a brilliant time to be getting hooked into aviation because just like she used her expertise in horses and riding to get involved in Hollywood. She then takes this new skill, flying, into Hollywood and really leverages her connections there and her interest in being part of the silver screen’s world to get jobs flying in the movies.

She also saw firsthand the dangerous conditions and the miserably low pay that her and her fellow pilots were receiving as part of this really dangerous work. And so she founded the Association of Motion Picture Pilots, which is the first stunt pilots union in 1930. 

Matt: And outside of the movie work, she was also flying in races. At this time. She was a member of the 99s. We've talked about them before on this show, and she flew in the 1929 Women's Air Derby, which was the first of those derbies. She crashed out early in that race, but returned in 1930 to win the whole thing.

She also set the Women's Air Speed record in 1930, taking that from Amelia Earhart, America's Sweetheart.

Emily: And at this time she was also sponsored by an oil company and making money test flying airplanes for various companies, mostly Lockheed. The manufacturers got the best of both worlds with her, a highly competent and accomplished pilot, and a woman who would shame men who were afraid to fly by her mere presence.

I love this part of the story, Matt. I love this. I love this. ‘Hey guys, if she can do it, let's get…’ come on. Come on.

Matt: And we know that this was kind of a tactic at the time. Margaret Weitekamp has a chapter about this in her book, Right Stuff Wrong Sex, right? If you can get a woman to fly an airplane that men are afraid to fly 'cause they think it's a death trap, then it kind of, makes them feel ashamed for being afraid to fly the thing they did. 

The same thing with the B29, right? If a woman can fly it, then what are you so scared of? Right? Um, it's totally sexist, but it was great propaganda to get men to fly these planes that were in fact dangerous. But you know, these skilled women pilots could pull it off.

Emily: I just, I just envision Pancho Barnes just like showing up to work one day, like laughing all the way to the airplane because she's just smug and brave and is like, ‘what's the big deal boys?’ Like, ‘let's get it together.’ Like ‘let's get it done.’

Matt: So she's really enjoying flying. She's spending all the money that she'd inherited, buying planes and throwing more or less constant parties for her aviation and Hollywood friends on her several properties. She was kind of the Great Gatsby of the aviation world in a sense here, she's generous to a fault and would feed, water, and put up just about anyone who she liked and considered a friend. 

Emily: But when the Depression hit, Pancho's free spending ways started to become a strain.  She was out of money. She was forced to sell most of her properties, and she decided to move to the desert, which I can't say I blame her. I really like the desert

Matt: I like that idea. Yeah.

Emily: Although you're from the desert, so I can see why you might be nostalgic for it.

Matt: I am, yeah

Lauren: So she sold those properties probably at a loss that, and these are the properties that are part of her inheritance, and that was what funded this… I was, I'm going to say God-forsaken chunk of land out in the Mojave Desert. 

Matt: So it wasn't that she was moving somewhere completely unknown to her. She had actually done a lot of flying over the Mojave Desert and had seen from the air, a dry lake that looked like the perfect place to set up an airstrip. So that's what she did. In 1935, she bought an alfalfa farm in Muroc, California and established a ranch and an airstrip there.

Emily: So over the next six years, Pancho raised horses, obviously, dogs, pigs, and cows. She built buildings, alienated her neighbors, and built Rancho Oro Verde. The guest ranch and restaurant was popular with Pancho's aviation and Hollywood friends. 

Lauren: She had an airstrip, so her Hollywood friends and her, uh, flying friends could fly in. And then there was a restaurant and she had some girls there who were offering more than food.

It was called the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Ri-ding as in horse. And the ‘happy bottom’ part you would think would be, you know, some sort of a sexual reference. And maybe it was for her, a double entendre. I don't know. But it was explained as when you rode one of her horses, you, you got a happy bottom.

Matt: And the Happy Bottom Riding Club was also very popular with the servicemen at nearby Muroc Army Airfield. There was literally, like, nothing else around for the Army flyers to do, and Muroc itself was just tents and an airstrip in those days. So the men spent a lot of their time at Pancho's. 

She fed them, got them drunk and rented them horses to go riding in the desert. Hopefully not when they're drunk, but you know, the drinking maybe came after the horseback riding. 

Emily: We, we can hope Matt. 

Slowly Pancho's place grew and so did the airfield. The army hired her to haul away their garbage, which she fed to her pigs. We love a reduce, reuse, recycle moment, and also provide milk and meat to the base. She was friends with many of the flyers and the commanders and was very popular.

And then Pearl Harbor happened and the airfield got very busy.

Matt: So the busyness of the war to come brought Pancho a lot of business. By 1941, Pancho had developed her land into a combination airport, inn, club, restaurant, and ranch, and the many, many trainees that passed in and out of Muroc kept business steady for Pancho during the war.

Emily: But, this is a theme, Pancho was very bad with money and constantly just ahead of her bills. She had also gotten divorced in the later war years and she would marry and divorce three other men throughout her life. 

By the end of the war, Muroc Army Airfield was a sprawling hub of army flying activity. And in addition to basic flight training and bombing, the base was also home to a top secret rocket plane development and testing program.

[gets excited] So then this is where we get to talk about The Right Stuff!  

Matt: That's right. Yeah. So if you've seen the movie The Right Stuff,  

Emily: I've seen it, Matt. 

Matt: …then this is where things start to get familiar for you because after the war, the club and the other business thrived and it, was thriving, thanks to test pilots, the ones that are featured in The Right Stuff. And in 1946, the base was transferred to the brand new Air Force, and throughout the forties and fifties, many records were broken. And new planes were tested and Pancho's was the center of celebration for all of the test pilots. 

Emily: So the movie, The Right Stuff is when I first met Pancho Barnes, but I didn't know that I was meeting Pancho Barnes until we did our episode on the 99s. So I'd known about Pancho Barnes a long time, I just,  I didn't know that I knew Pancho Barnes. 

Test piloting has to be an incredibly stressful, but also like adrenaline pumping kind of job. And so they used Pancho’s to blow off steam before and after test flights and to celebrate or mourn the lives of many test pilots that quote unquote ‘augered in’ to the hard ground of the desert. 

And ‘augered in’ here means maybe what you think it might mean, which is essentially crashing and dying. Like we said, test piloting is an incredibly dangerous job, and so having a community space like this where test pilots can congregate and pay tribute to their colleagues was a really valuable and important role that the Happy Bottom Riding Club played.

Matt: One pilot who was a lifelong friend of Pancho's was Chuck Yeager, who in 1947 broke the sound barrier. But the night before that history-making flight, Chuck and his wife were enjoying Pancho's hospitality.

Lauren: The night before he was going to go up in the airplane to try and break the sound barrier. He was on one of Pancho's horses and he might've been inebriated a little bit or maybe he just is not a good horseback rider. I don't know.

But the horse collided with a fence on the way back to the corral and Chuck broke one of his ribs and he did not want to tell anybody because that would've grounded him. So he had maybe a private doctor or a friend or somebody tape him up.

And this is the story he tells and he gets in the plane and he can't actually torque his body to close the door of the plane. So he has a little stick that he brings with him and closes it up. And so with his broken rib, gotten on a horse given to him, rented to him by Pancho Barnes. He breaks the sound barrier.

Emily: The way Chuck tells it, he and his wife were racing back to the barn and he didn't see the gate was closed until it was too late. It was a local veterinarian who taped up his ribs. I mean, ribs are ribs, right? Matt? Laughs 

Matt: Sure, why not?  Laughs So this was all during the Golden Era for the Happy Bottom Riding Club. But then in the late 1940s, a new commander was determined to bring the newly renamed Edwards Air Force base into military decorum and efficiency. Discipline, right? He detested Pancho and the feeling was mutual.

It took him a few years, but the days of the, by-the-seat-of-your-pants test pilots and the club where they felt at home were fast disappearing. 

Also, I mean, we could say there's a difference in the culture of test pilots at this time too, which is that at the, in the days of Chuck Yeager, test pilots were cowboys, right? They weren't necessarily people who were trained in engineering. They were flying the planes to make sure that they, you know, worked and to look for problems. 

Later the test pilots that… especially the ones that kind of go on to become astronauts, this new generation of test pilots, most of them have backgrounds in engineering. They're flying much more sophisticated airplanes where you have to have that kind of expertise to troubleshoot what's happening in the plane.

So the culture of the test pilots changed too. Not that they don't still like to drink and have a good time, but they're not quite the same as the cowboys of the Chuck Yeager days. 

Emily: So even though Edwards Air Force Base was huge at this time, the Air Force was looking to expand even more and hoping to build a very long runway for experimental nuclear planes that went right through Pancho's land.

Matt: And in the early 1950s, ranch after ranch around Pancho's was being bought up by the government through eminent domain. Eventually, the government came to her with an offer, and for her 360 mostly developed acres with water and buildings. They offered her $205,000. Which she felt was insulting.

Emily: I mean, I can kind of, I see the point though, right, Matt? Like if somebody said 360 acres, that's a lot of land. And if you think about everything that had built there, this wasn't. This wasn't 360 acres of, of desert. This was 360 developed acres, which means it's not just about the land, it's about everything that's on the land and all the investments she's made. 

Lauren: But she was a major thorn in their side. I mean, bigger than a thorn, whatever is, whatever is a, a big thing in their side. And they could not wait for her to, um, to leave. 

Matt: Yeah, an eminent domain allows the government to buy the property, and the property owner really has to go along with it, but they're also supposed to get a fair market value for that land.

Emily: So Pancho sued and she argued that her land was much more valuable than what the government was offering and that the government was ruining her business and her livelihood and that she should be compensated for that.

But while waiting for the courts, several of her buildings were lost in a fire of unknown origin. Signs were pointing to arson, but it was never fully determined. And if it had been arson, there was no signs pointing to a particular culprit.

Lauren: You can see where some of the buildings were. There's some foundation there and there's a little bit of rubble every once, you know, you can see that something was there, but pretty much everything burned.

And that was it. I mean, first of all, she couldn't rebuild because there was no money. And also she couldn't rebuild because the Air Force wanted to take over the land. 

But she, she wanted to try again. And she had a plan that was come, you know, sort of a harebrained plan to do, do some other kind of not Happy Bottom Riding Club, but some other kind of horse thing someplace else.

Matt: And so Pancho got some money against the initial government offer and was forced to leave the land. She moved all of her animals and her planes and her fourth husband to an even more desolate stretch of desert called Gypsy Springs.

Emily: Eventually through court cases, Pancho got more than $400,000 from the government for her land in 1956. She used that money to buy more land in and around Gypsy Springs and farm equipment and airplanes and horses to put on it. 

Matt: But unfortunately, Gypsy Springs was not a lot like Muroc. She had no farm. The land wasn't fertile, and she had nowhere to stable her horses and nothing to feed them with. She no longer had contracts with the military and she had no customers in the form of bored service members. And despite all her generosity, she had no friends at this point.

Emily: She was also deeply unwell. She had had high blood pressure most of her life, and now she had breast cancer, which had been treated. Then she had a thyroid problem, which you could eventually treat through medication, and she had been living large and rough her whole life.

Matt: So she had had all these issues. A lot of them had been treated, but now she's living in a shack that has no running water. She has no domestic skills to feed herself or keep a place clean. And you know, she was also lacking the social life that she was used to. There was hardly anyone around and Pancho much preferred the company of others. So this was not ideal for her.

Now, eventually people did come and find her. She was rediscovered by aviation enthusiasts around 1970. Um, many of the folks who found her then thought that she had already died, but in fact she was still alive and she was welcomed into their club meetings and they loved hearing her tell her stories.

Despite everything, Pancho remained a real character all the way up until the end, right? Her stories were outrageous. She liked to shock people. She, you know, was just like the life of any room that she walked into, but eventually she died of a heart attack that maybe was due to complications from breast cancer in 1975.

And she was not found for at least a week. 

Lauren: She moved into a little house eventually that is the alpha and Omega of her life. When you think of the, the Pasadena mansion she was born into and the shack that she died in. That, that's a narrative arc for you. And in between that are all kinds of ups and downs. It's not a, it's not a pure arc. There's lots of, of valleys and, and, um, peaks, many valleys and peaks in that life. But that's, that's the beginning and the end of it.

Matt: And the few friends that had helped her out in those last years of her life did get permission to fly over and spread her ashes at the ruins of her old club. 

Emily: You know, this kind of feels like a really sad ending to a really big story, Matt, but I don't know if I think that it is, 

Matt: I mean, every story has to end, right? 

Emily: Every story has to end, but I think she's got a really strong legacy. And I think the story that we're telling is the reason that hopefully people can understand why she's still an enduring figure.

Matt: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of legacy here. And, you know, one of the things about Pancho is that the way we've learned about her has been through sort of stories about test pilots who went to her bars or, you know, through her inclusion in The Right Stuff. And also there's a Pancho's Bar in Captain Marvel.

But in those stories, she's kind of on the periphery of the main story and. She deserves to be the center of the story, right? Definitely the center of her own story. Laughs 

You know, it's very fitting that there's now a Pancho Barnes Day celebration on the site of the old Happy Bottom Riding Club. It's a barbecue, began in the 1980s with, you know, drinking and dancing that goes on long into the night, right? The very fitting sort of tribute to this woman who herself would've drank and danced all through the night, and then probably gone for a horseback ride.

Emily: Matt, we should put that on our bucket list along with the hot air balloons in um, New Mexico. 

But I do think that if you have any question about what cements her legacy, I think in addition to folks really continuing to celebrate. Her life, the way she lived her life. I think it's also really poignant to remember that there is now a room at the officer's club at Edwards Air Force Base that bears her name.

So even after all of that animosity and all of those challenges fighting over her land with the Air Force base, somebody at that Air Force Base still acknowledges and recognizes her place in history. 

AirSpace theme up then under

Matt: AirSpace is from the National Air and Space Museum.

It's produced by Jennifer Weingart and mixed by Tarek Fouda, hosted by Dr. Emily Martin and me. Dr. Matt Shindell. Our managing producer is Erika Novak. Our production coordinator is Sofia Soto Sugar, and our social media manager is Amy Stamm.

A big thank you to our guest in this episode, biographer Lauren Kessler. Her book, The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes was invaluable for this episode. Also, the PBS documentary, The Legend of Pancho Barnes and The Happy Bottom Riding Club.

Additional thanks to Dorothy Cochrane at the National Air and Space Museum for help with research and resources.

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AirSpace is sponsored by Lockheed Martin and distributed by PRX.