April 23, 2012 • 29 mins
Amelia Earhart is the most well-known female aviator, but there were several notable female aviation pioneers. This episode talks about Raymonde de Laroche, Harriet Quimby, Jacqueline Cochran and Amy Johnson.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blieve a chocolate boarding and and we are
making good right now on our promise or threat, depending
on how you like this topic. To cover some more
(00:22):
female aviators as part of this little series that we've
had going in recent weeks, we've talked about Bessie Coleman
and Beryl Markham, both of whom were remarkable women and
accomplished aviators in their own rights. But probably what surprised
us most about these ladies and the others we researched
for today is just how little we knew about them.
Part of that has to do with just comparing them
(00:45):
to Amelia Earhart and how much most of us do
seem to know about her. In a short American heritage
article called Aviatrix written by Richard Reinhardt Um, he attributed
this fact her popularity, the fact that she's still so
well known, um to the fact that she had some
good marketing people behind her. The man who later became
(01:05):
her husband, publishing executive George Palmer Putnam, kept her in
the public eye constantly. Then there's also the inescapable fact
that she vanished at the height of her career while
attempting to fly around the world, something that was obviously
a pretty big news story. Reinhardt also sort of suggests
that the mystery surrounding this disappearance compounded her lasting fame.
(01:28):
Like the other stuff, the fact that she was in
the public eye so much might have still been forgotten
if it hadn't have been for the tragedy at the end,
which is still making headlines today. True, and it's not
only that it catapulted her fame, it maybe also eclipsed
the accomplishments of other female aviators. That's kind of just
(01:48):
a theory that's out there and one that we've pondered
on over the last few weeks as we've looked into
these Is it because she disappeared and there was so
much news around her that we don't remember some of
the others, As we've seen with Coleman and Markham, and
as we'll see with the ladies on this list today,
there were a lot of other women pilots who were
also aviation pioneers and not necessarily always just compared to
(02:11):
others of their gender. So we're going to start by
talking about one of the first of those pioneers. Yeah,
she was born Elite Raymond Darroche on August and then
changed her name to Raymond de Laroche and started out
as a stage actress. And it was really during her
time as an actress that she decided to change her
(02:33):
name to that more glamorous version. She was a dark
haired beauty. She was quite stylish, and according to an
article by Deborah and Pollock in Aviation History, she'd become
a fashion icon in France by her early twenties. That
she already had this very definite story before she became
a pilot. So de Laroche wasn't quite as tomboyish as
(02:54):
say previous podcast subject Beryl Markham, but she did have
an adventurous street tour and she liked to do a
lot of different things. She claimed to be everything from
a painter and a sculptor to a balloonist and a
race car driver. But none of these things quite compared
to the rush that she felt in nineteen o eight
when the Wright brothers were in France doing aerial demonstrations
(03:16):
at a race track near Liment. De Laroche witnessed the
demonstrations and even got a chance to go up in
a plane with Wilbur Wright, and after that she was
determined to learn how to fly herself, and so she
asked French aviator Charles Lassell, who somethink was also her lover,
to teach her. So with agreed and began giving Delaroche
lessons at the Chalan Airfield. His plane was a single theater, though,
(03:40):
so these lessons were not how you would imagine, with
the more experienced pilot sitting right there next to you
in case anything went wrong, he would yell at instructions
at her while she was alone in the plane, and
so her first lesson, according to Pollock's article, Delaroche did
a pretty poor job of following those instructions, because Zone
(04:00):
just wanted her to taxi around the airfield for a
little bit get the hang of things. But after just
one round of doing that, de Laroche hit the gas,
opened up the throttle, and actually lifted off about fifteen
feet into the air, first time flying all by herself.
She took lessons for a few months after that, having
her first crash along the way on January four, nineteen ten,
(04:22):
when her plane clips some trees as she was coming
in for a landing, but she managed to walk away
with relatively minor injuries, and she just went right back
to flying. This did not deter her at all. On
March eighth, nineteen ten, she became the first woman in
the world to earn a pilot's license when the Federal
Cition Aeronautique Internazional granted her pilot's license number thirty six.
(04:45):
The French press started calling her Lafemassau, the bird Woman,
and she gave herself the title of Baroness. How appropriate.
So after that she barnstormed all over the world, something
a lot of these pilots seemed to do, doing demonstration ends,
participating in competitions in place of like St. Petersburg, Russia
and Budapest, often in not so great conditions to like
(05:07):
storms and unstable air currents and reduced visibility. But late
in the summer of nineteen ten, she was the only
woman in a flying competition at Reims when she crashed
and broke both legs and an arm, and these injuries
grounded her for two whole years. In nineteen twelve, though
she picked herself right back up again, she started flying,
(05:30):
but was soon seriously injured again, this time in a
car crash. She and Voissant collided with another car while
they were driving near Leon, and Voissant died in that wreck.
So even after all that had happened, De Laroche could
not be deterred from flying. By late nineteen thirteen, she
entered the Couda Femina flying competition for women, which offered
(05:50):
a prize to the woman who flew the longest distance solo.
By the end of the year, De la Rouche won
the competition by flying a total of two hundred miles
in four wars, after which she was forced down finally
by a gas line problem, so for the next four years.
World War One grounded her for a little bit. Like
some other women, she wanted to fly for the war effort,
(06:11):
but she was turned down. But it didn't seem to
diminish her passion or her abilities, because when the war
ended in nineteen eighteen, she did go back to flying
right away. On June seventh, nineteen nineteen, she set the
women's altitude record by flying at fifteen thousand, seven hundred
forty eight feet. Her next goal, though, was to become
the first female test pilot, so on July eighteenth, nineteen nineteen,
(06:35):
she went to Lecati Airfield to co pilot an experimental plane.
The plane went into a spinning dive as it was landing, though,
and both Delaroche and the pilot were killed. She's still
remembered though, for her first and her pioneering spirit. There's
a statue honoring her at Paris's Laborger Airport, so you
(06:57):
can still pay homage to her today. I guess well,
de Laroche may have had a pretty significant first, being
the first woman to earn a pilot's license, but this
next aviator, Harriet Quimby, was close on her heels. Harriet
Quimby was born in Michigan in May of eighteen seventy five,
and her family moved to California near San Francisco when
(07:17):
she was only nine. Quimby's family was very poor, so
when their farm failed and they moved to San Francisco proper,
she had to work to help make ends meet. At
the same time, though, her mom encouraged her to go
to school and was really adamant that she pursued a
career and become independent. So Quimby chose journalism, and she
became a reporter for publications like the San Francisco Dramatic
(07:40):
Review and The Calibulletin and Chronicle by nineteen o one
in nineteen o two, respectively. Then in nineteen o three
she decided that she had moved to New York City
and try to make herself a journalism career there as well,
and ended up getting a good job at Leslie's Illustrated Weekly.
But much like De la Roche, none of this could
(08:01):
compare to the passion that aviation ignited in her Quimby
Thawn air show on Long Island in the fall of
nineteen ten, and after that she was just determined to
learn how to fly, so she started taking lessons the
next spring. At first, Quimby disguised herself as a guy,
since it was controversial for women to fly at this time.
(08:22):
It was controversial because fatal accidents were a very frequent occurrence,
as we've already seen in De Librocia's story, and women
were considered weaker, less capable of handling these dangerous situations
than men, and sometimes even considered less courageous than men. Soon,
The New York Times exposed her disguise, but Quimby turned
this into an opportunity. She got Leslie's to sponsor her,
(08:45):
and she started a series of articles on her aviation experiences,
which became super popular. So I guess the New York
Times wasn't expecting her to turn all journalists on them
and when they exposed her. But on August first, nineteen eleven,
b did earn her pilot license without ever having a
single accident in the air, something that really does seem
(09:06):
pretty remarkable when you start looking at a lot of
these aviators put together. She was the first woman in
the United States to earn a license and the second
woman in the world after Delaroush. She started flying in
air meets and in September became the first woman to
make a night flight. She kept writing about her experience
as the entire time. Two issues that had her articles
(09:27):
in them would completely sell out. In March of nineteen twelve,
Quinby took on her greatest challenge yet, an attempt to
become the first female to fly across the English Channel.
She planned this attempt in secret, though, so that no
one could jump ahead of her and try to make
the attempt before she did. She headed to Europe in
early March and met in France with Louis Blrio, an
(09:48):
airplane designer and one of the few men to have
successfully flown across the Channel. She bought a plane from
him that after finding out that it wouldn't be ready
in time, she ended up borrowing his own fifty horsepower plane.
She wanted to practice with it a bit before her
initial attempt, but the weather didn't cooperate yeah, so she
decided she was just gonna go for it and had
(10:08):
the plane shipped across the Channel to England, where she
wanted to start her flight from the weather didn't really
clear up until Sunday, April fourteenth, in conditions were just
perfect then, but she still didn't start her flight because
she had promised her mother that she wouldn't ever fly
on Sunday, so she had to wait a little bit longer.
It wasn't until the following Tuesday before Quimby could take
(10:30):
off from the Dover Airfield, and according to Jacqueline McLean's
book Women with Wings, Quimby later wrote, I was eager
to get into my seat and be off. My heart
was not in my mouth. I felt eager to realize
the project on which I was determined for the first time.
I was to make a journey across the water. She
took off April sixteenth, nineteen twelve, at five thirty am
(10:53):
and landed an hour and nine minutes later on a
French beach. She totally surprised some French fisherman when she
land did, but they were actually impressed by her accomplishment.
They realized, you know, what had happened, that she was
the first, and they gave her breakfast. They made breakfast
for her and there on the beach. Might be the
most charming of the different flights we've talked about or
(11:13):
are going to talk about, maybe because it is only
an hour in nine minutes and not some horrible like
twenty four hour harrowing journey. But the breakfast really adds
to it. It's a nice touch at the end. So
with these French fishermen being so excited about her accomplishment
and other people as well, I mean London reporters were
on top of this almost right away, and she, you know,
(11:35):
her accomplishment was publicized there. She thought that people in
the US would be really excited about her accomplishment as well.
But only a couple of days before Quimby's flight, the
Titanic had sunk. According to McLean's book. This, perhaps rightly so,
totally eclipse the significance of what Quimby had done. Still,
her reputation as an aviator was established. She was billed
(11:58):
as quote America's firstly of the air at the Boston
Air Meat that summer, and it was at this air
meet on July one, nineteen twelve, that Quimby set out
to break an overwater speed record over Boston Harbor, with
English pilot William P. Willard co piloting. During that flight, though,
of something and to this day nobody knows what exactly happened,
(12:19):
caused the plane's tail to pitch upward sharply and thus
make the plane perpendicular to the water. Both the pilots
ended up being thrown from the plane and both died.
Quimby was only thirty seven years old, but she'd just
received a permit from the US Post Office at the
time of her death allowing her to fly the mail
which would have made her the first woman to fly
(12:43):
mail plane, So in a way she was kind of
robbed of that achievement. A little bit our next Avia Tricks,
England's Amy Johnson didn't appear to be a natural in
the air right from the start, as some of the
others on this listed. Johnson was born in the seaport
of Whole in England and jul Live nineteen o three
and her father was a well off fish merchant. After
(13:04):
studying economics of Sheffield University for a few years, Johnson
took a typing course and moved to London in seven
where she got a job as a secretary. And it
was while she was living in London that she became
interested in aviation. Maybe because she rented a room near
an airfield at stag Lane. Most people would have that
maybe make them not like playing because you're always hearing them,
(13:24):
but not so with Amy. But since flying lessons were
really pretty pricey according to Explorers and Discovers of the World,
she volunteered as the secretary for the British Air League
in order to get a little discount on her lessons,
and as we alluded to, though she wasn't exactly at
the top of her class, it took her two times
as long as the average student to get her license,
(13:47):
but she finally did finish in July of ninety nine. However,
she'd also spent a little of that time while she
was trying to get her license learning a good bit
about repairing engine something we remarked, maybe I don't remember
if it was on a podcast about Bethie Coleman or
just between us, that that would have been a good
skill to have during these times, if you could examine
(14:09):
your own plane. And no, it was okay. So Johnson
became the first woman in Great Britain to qualify as
a ground engineer, which got her some publicity. While she
was getting this attention, she announced her intent to fly
solo from England to Australia, which would make her the
first woman to do so. Her goal was also to
beat the time of the only man who had done this,
(14:31):
who was Burt Hinkler. Hinkler did it in in just
fifteen days, but Johnson before she could get started. It
took a little while. She had to raise some money
to buy a second hand gipsy moth plane, which she
dubbed Jason, But by the time that she took off
for Australia on May fifty, she still only had about
seventy five hours of flying time under her belt and
(14:52):
she had never flown over the water. So pretty green,
definitely green, and people were really surprised that she was
trying this. I mean some obviously scoffed at her thought
it was a crazy thing to do. Johnson herself later said, quote,
the prospect did not frighten me because I was so
appallingly ignorant that I never realized in the least what
(15:13):
I had taken on. She was about to about to
find it out pretty soon, though. Her troop was really
an ordeal almost from the start, And one thing was
that she had to manually pump gas from a storage
tank to the tank in the upper wing. Acquired fifty
gallons per hour, and each gallon took forty strokes and
the process. You know, all of that, all those gas
(15:35):
fumes in the enclosed space made her feel nauseated. It
sounds like a bad task to have to do on
these long flights. By the fourth day, Johnson ran into
her first major trouble, which was a sandstorm over the
Iraqi Desert that forced her to land there. She had
to cover the engine and fuel tanks with a canvas
to try to keep as much stand out as she could,
(15:57):
and then she kind of perched on the wing of
the plane for three hours with the revolver in case
she was attacked by wild animals, and she had to
get back in her plane and get going again, because
after that she had to stop for repairs a couple
more times than by the sixth day. She finally reached Pakistan,
two days sooner than Bert Hinkler had so it seemed
(16:17):
like despite all these troubles, she was on pace. And
when news of this got out, suddenly the whole world
was paying attention to what she was doing. They thought
she might really do this, she might really beat his time.
From there, though, she ran into a series of mishaps,
including running out of fuel over John c getting into
monsoons between Calcutta and Rangoon, and getting lost between Bangkok
(16:41):
and Singapore. She just kind of realized that she was
going in circles. She didn't know where she was and
she was just going in circles between the two for
a while. And engine trouble was another problem that she had.
She had ran into engine trouble at Surabaya. On May
nine thirty, she finally landed in the northern Australian town
of Darwin. She was sunburnt, oil stained, and very disappointed.
(17:05):
By this time. It had taken her nineteen and a
half days to reach there. Four days longer than Hinkler.
But she was really in for another surprise because, much
like Beryl Markham, she thought she'd failed because she hadn't
reached her exact goal she was setting out to accomplish.
But she was nevertheless considered a heroine. She had made it,
(17:25):
she had done something that was really impressive, and crowds
cheered her on. She got congratulatory telegrams from everyone from
the King and Queen of Great Britain to Charles Lindbergh.
I mean, that would have been a pretty big deal
for an inspiring aviator like her. She was even called
the Queen of the Air, and there were songs written
about her, including Amy Wonderful Amy. I wish I could
(17:47):
have heard what that one sounded like. We'll have to
look it up, maybe spliced it into the podcast or
something like that. The London Daily Mail awarded her ten
thousand pounds, and an estimated million people turned out to
greet her when she find They returned to London by
ship on August fifth, nineteen thirty. After that, Johnson continued
to pursue flight records, becoming the first pilot to fly
(18:08):
from London to Moscow in under twenty four hours. She
also set two speed records for the trip from London
to Cape Town, South Africa, and a record for flying
from London to Tokyo along the way. She had a
short lived marriage to Scottish pilot Jim Mollison, whom we
mentioned in the Barrel Markham podcast. Also, according to an
article by Lisa Allardis in The New Statesman, they were
(18:29):
known as flying sweethearts and were kind of the posh
and becks of their time. I liked that comparison because
I think probably everyone now can relate to liberty couple.
During World War Two, Johnson needed cash and took a
flying job for the Air Transport Artillery of the Royal
Air Force, and on January five, n one, while delivering
(18:51):
an aircraft from Scotland to London, her plane went down
in the Thames and she was never seen again. There
is a little bit of mystery and controversy so rounding
her death though, and what exactly happened. So she was
supposedly still alive when she was in the water, and
according to a New Statesman article, she called out to
rescuers aboard the h MS Hasslemere, but then vanished and
(19:14):
over the years, according to an article by LaRue Scott
and British Heritage, people have suspected that she may have
staged her own death, or maybe that she was even
a spy on some sort of mission and needed to disappear,
But according to an h MS hassle Mere report that
came to light about a decade ago, there's actually a
good chance that the real reason was more horrific than mysterious.
(19:38):
She may have got caught in the propeller of the
ship and was killed that way, but the information was
kept from the public. The public was grieving so much
they didn't want to put it out there. The last
woman on our list, Jacqueline Cochrane, has so many aviation
accomplishments to her name it's nearly impossible to condense them
to a list entry size. So we're to focus on
(20:00):
a couple of major ones and leave open the possibility
that we may talk about her some other time in
the future, if we ever get to talking about aviators again,
if if you guys aren't sick of them by now already.
Cochran had kind of a sad childhood. She was born
sometime in the early nineteen hundreds, but it's interesting no
one really knows the exact date of birth, because she
(20:20):
was either orphaned or abandoned by her birth parents, according
to McLean's book Woman with Wigne. Some say that she
picked the name Cochrane for herself out of a phone book.
So her foster family was very poor, and Cochrane worked
in a cotton mill at a young age. Eventually, though,
she got the opportunity to train as a beautician, and
by the time she was about twenty years old, she
(20:41):
made her way to New York City and got a
job at a very fancy salon and Twins of sax
Smith Avenue, and she managed to impress and Twine enough
that he sent her on to run his salon sort
of offshoot Miami location, and she finally started making pretty
decent money. I think it's interesting too, we've had two
beautician female aviators such I don't know, professions that you
(21:05):
wouldn't necessarily link. Yeah, well, I guess you wouldn't suspect
it of a secretary either or an actress. But Cochrane,
even though she was finally making money, as you said,
she was doing well for herself, maybe because of her past,
maybe because she had been poor growing up. She wanted
more than that. She got the idea to start her
own cosmetics business, so taking this mutician career to the
(21:28):
next level. And she wanted to learn to fly so
that she could travel around the country to promote her company.
So she started taking flying lessons at Roosevelt Flying School
on Long Island in two and she earned her license
in just two and a half weeks. Like the other
women we've discussed, she just fell in love with flying.
I mean, that's just the common theme throughout this podcast,
(21:49):
this inexplicable passion for getting in a plane and taking flight.
She later said, quote when I paid for my first lesson,
a beauty operator ceased to exist and an aviator was born.
But as we discussed in the Bessie Coleman episode, there
weren't really a lot of opportunities in the nineteen thirties
for women who wanted to pursue a flying career. So
(22:09):
for a career woman like her, she needed something else.
So in the meantime, she went ahead and launched Jacqueline
Cochrane Cosmetics in ninety five, and the company did become successful.
After that, she started putting her profits toward flying, so
she kept a day job, and at first she entered
races and pursued records to advance her flying career. In
(22:33):
nineteen thirty eight, she entered the Bendix Cross Country Air
Race for the third time and placed first in it.
It had formerly been a male dominated race, and around
this time to Cochrane managed to break the women's national
speed record, the women's world speed record, the New York
to Miami speed record, and an international speed record, all
(22:53):
between the years of nineteen thirty seven and nineteen forties,
so just one after another for her. McLean relates an
interesting account of when Cochrane set a women's national altitude
record in nine. She writes that Cochrane flew a small
fabric covered biplane up to thirty thousand fifty two ft
and the air so thin and cold up there that
(23:14):
Cochrane quote ruptured as sinus flood vessel, got frostbite and
almost froze to death. She also got really disoriented up there,
so much so that she had to fly around a
little lower at a lower altitude for about an hour
after that until she could just focus enough to land
the plane. During the war, like others, Cochrane had to
take a break from setting records for a little while,
(23:36):
but she didn't take a break from flying completely. She
actually helped to train women for the U. S. Air
Force in a program called the Women's Air Force Service
Pilots WASP. And that's really quite the story in itself,
so we're gonna sort of skim over the WAFF section
and maybe consider covering that at some later date. But
(23:56):
after the war a new set of record possibile. These
really opened up to aviators thanks to a new kind
of plane, and that was, of course, the jet. The
only problem though, was that you had to be in
the Air Force to fly a jet in the United States,
and women weren't officially allowed to fly for the Air Force.
The WASP program that Cochrane had set up wasn't yet
recognized as a part of the military, so Krane found
(24:20):
a way her hound this though, as a lot of
these folks have. She learned to fly on a Canadian
owned jet and started pursuing speed records that way, and
then she started breaking into a new kind of territory.
She got her friend General Chuck Yeager to teach her
how to make a supersonic flight, so basically traveling at
such a rate that she would exceed the speed of sound.
(24:44):
It essentially involved climbing way high in her jet to
about forty five thousand feet and then heading straight down
towards the ground. On May nineteen fifty three, she did this,
and when she was diving towards the ground, she mentioned
heading for the airport as her target and watching the
reading on her mock meter as she went. When she
passed mock one the speed of sound, she became the
(25:06):
first woman to break the sound barrier, which is probably
the accomplishment she's best known for. She continued to pursue
records into her fifties and sixties, even though her health
started failing towards the end. In nineteen sixty two, she
became the first woman to fly a jet across the Atlantic. Ultimately,
according to Encyclopedia Britannica, she held more speed, distance, and
(25:27):
altitude records than any other pilot, male or female. During
her career. Cochrane was also honored for a lot of
those achievements and those records she had said. She became
president of the Federation aer Nautique Internaciale, and she became
the first woman inducted into the Aviation Hall of fame,
and I think that all of us are probably relieved
(25:48):
to know that she didn't die until nineteen eighties, So
one of these ladies lived to an older age and
didn't fall out of a plane or something like that.
It's it's just nice to see that why got to
continue her pilot's career and see different eras of flight. Yeah,
and we could get to end on a more positive
note in addition to that well. In describing her career
(26:11):
at one point, Cochrane said, quote, adventure is a state
of mind and spirit. It comes with faith, for with
complete faith there is no fear of what faces you
in life or death. In truth, I ended up living
a life of continuous adventure. And I think that's a
really good note to end on, since I think that's
probably what has fascinated us the most about these aviatricies
(26:34):
from the beginning, and that's their adventurous spirits and also
just their bravery and sheer determination to do what they
wanted to do despite the challenges and despite the dangers
in a lot of cases. So we'll leave this topic
behind for now, but there are plenty more that we
can cover in the future. We got tons of suggestions
from people, uh, Nancy Bird Walton and Maral Lindbergh, Pauline Gower, Um.
(26:58):
The list kind of goes on and maybe someday, probably
not anytime soon, since we've done a lot a lot
of time on aviators lately, but down the road will
I'm sure cover these well. I was thinking we have
quite a catalog now because we've of course done episodes
on Charles Lindberg already, We've done one on Antointa Santa Zuberi,
the more famous as the writer of The Little Prince,
(27:21):
and um a long time ago, we did one on
Bungled Flight Attempts, which is, oh, yeah, that's right. It
was a pretty fun podcast and I think there's an
article on it too. Yes. Then we have a very
old episode on Amelia Earhart too, which who knows, we
might have to update that someday because I think that
was from the Factor Fiction days when the podcast was
really short. So although we uh, we didn't exactly diss her,
(27:44):
but we we did say that you know, you probably
know a lot about her, So we didn't include her
in any of these um podcasts that we've that we've
done recently. But that's not to say that we won't.
If you're a big Amelia are heart fan to why
not branch out? Yeah, exactly, broaden your horizons. Find out
about some other cool aviators, other cool ladies to uh
(28:04):
to look up to if you're an aspiring pilot or
just an adventurer or just someone who you know has
goals and wants to wants to work toward him, and
to send us any suggestions that you may have for
future aviation related podcasts or other podcasts of any subject
in the whole world. We're at the grounded for a while.
We can be grounded for a while and do different things,
(28:26):
and I think we will in fact, and either way,
you can reach us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook and we're on Twitter at myston History.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
about these guys who are just dropping some wings on
lucking feathers and trying to fly that way, we do
have that great article on terribly bungled flight attempts if
(28:50):
you can search for it on our homepage at www
dot how stepworks dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House
to Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House of Works iPhone app
has a rise. Download it today on iTunes,
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blieve a chocolate boarding and and we are
making good right now on our promise or threat, depending
on how you like this topic. To cover some more
(00:22):
female aviators as part of this little series that we've
had going in recent weeks, we've talked about Bessie Coleman
and Beryl Markham, both of whom were remarkable women and
accomplished aviators in their own rights. But probably what surprised
us most about these ladies and the others we researched
for today is just how little we knew about them.
Part of that has to do with just comparing them
(00:45):
to Amelia Earhart and how much most of us do
seem to know about her. In a short American heritage
article called Aviatrix written by Richard Reinhardt Um, he attributed
this fact her popularity, the fact that she's still so
well known, um to the fact that she had some
good marketing people behind her. The man who later became
(01:05):
her husband, publishing executive George Palmer Putnam, kept her in
the public eye constantly. Then there's also the inescapable fact
that she vanished at the height of her career while
attempting to fly around the world, something that was obviously
a pretty big news story. Reinhardt also sort of suggests
that the mystery surrounding this disappearance compounded her lasting fame.
(01:28):
Like the other stuff, the fact that she was in
the public eye so much might have still been forgotten
if it hadn't have been for the tragedy at the end,
which is still making headlines today. True, and it's not
only that it catapulted her fame, it maybe also eclipsed
the accomplishments of other female aviators. That's kind of just
(01:48):
a theory that's out there and one that we've pondered
on over the last few weeks as we've looked into
these Is it because she disappeared and there was so
much news around her that we don't remember some of
the others, As we've seen with Coleman and Markham, and
as we'll see with the ladies on this list today,
there were a lot of other women pilots who were
also aviation pioneers and not necessarily always just compared to
(02:11):
others of their gender. So we're going to start by
talking about one of the first of those pioneers. Yeah,
she was born Elite Raymond Darroche on August and then
changed her name to Raymond de Laroche and started out
as a stage actress. And it was really during her
time as an actress that she decided to change her
(02:33):
name to that more glamorous version. She was a dark
haired beauty. She was quite stylish, and according to an
article by Deborah and Pollock in Aviation History, she'd become
a fashion icon in France by her early twenties. That
she already had this very definite story before she became
a pilot. So de Laroche wasn't quite as tomboyish as
(02:54):
say previous podcast subject Beryl Markham, but she did have
an adventurous street tour and she liked to do a
lot of different things. She claimed to be everything from
a painter and a sculptor to a balloonist and a
race car driver. But none of these things quite compared
to the rush that she felt in nineteen o eight
when the Wright brothers were in France doing aerial demonstrations
(03:16):
at a race track near Liment. De Laroche witnessed the
demonstrations and even got a chance to go up in
a plane with Wilbur Wright, and after that she was
determined to learn how to fly herself, and so she
asked French aviator Charles Lassell, who somethink was also her lover,
to teach her. So with agreed and began giving Delaroche
lessons at the Chalan Airfield. His plane was a single theater, though,
(03:40):
so these lessons were not how you would imagine, with
the more experienced pilot sitting right there next to you
in case anything went wrong, he would yell at instructions
at her while she was alone in the plane, and
so her first lesson, according to Pollock's article, Delaroche did
a pretty poor job of following those instructions, because Zone
(04:00):
just wanted her to taxi around the airfield for a
little bit get the hang of things. But after just
one round of doing that, de Laroche hit the gas,
opened up the throttle, and actually lifted off about fifteen
feet into the air, first time flying all by herself.
She took lessons for a few months after that, having
her first crash along the way on January four, nineteen ten,
(04:22):
when her plane clips some trees as she was coming
in for a landing, but she managed to walk away
with relatively minor injuries, and she just went right back
to flying. This did not deter her at all. On
March eighth, nineteen ten, she became the first woman in
the world to earn a pilot's license when the Federal
Cition Aeronautique Internazional granted her pilot's license number thirty six.
(04:45):
The French press started calling her Lafemassau, the bird Woman,
and she gave herself the title of Baroness. How appropriate.
So after that she barnstormed all over the world, something
a lot of these pilots seemed to do, doing demonstration ends,
participating in competitions in place of like St. Petersburg, Russia
and Budapest, often in not so great conditions to like
(05:07):
storms and unstable air currents and reduced visibility. But late
in the summer of nineteen ten, she was the only
woman in a flying competition at Reims when she crashed
and broke both legs and an arm, and these injuries
grounded her for two whole years. In nineteen twelve, though
she picked herself right back up again, she started flying,
(05:30):
but was soon seriously injured again, this time in a
car crash. She and Voissant collided with another car while
they were driving near Leon, and Voissant died in that wreck.
So even after all that had happened, De Laroche could
not be deterred from flying. By late nineteen thirteen, she
entered the Couda Femina flying competition for women, which offered
(05:50):
a prize to the woman who flew the longest distance solo.
By the end of the year, De la Rouche won
the competition by flying a total of two hundred miles
in four wars, after which she was forced down finally
by a gas line problem, so for the next four years.
World War One grounded her for a little bit. Like
some other women, she wanted to fly for the war effort,
(06:11):
but she was turned down. But it didn't seem to
diminish her passion or her abilities, because when the war
ended in nineteen eighteen, she did go back to flying
right away. On June seventh, nineteen nineteen, she set the
women's altitude record by flying at fifteen thousand, seven hundred
forty eight feet. Her next goal, though, was to become
the first female test pilot, so on July eighteenth, nineteen nineteen,
(06:35):
she went to Lecati Airfield to co pilot an experimental plane.
The plane went into a spinning dive as it was landing, though,
and both Delaroche and the pilot were killed. She's still
remembered though, for her first and her pioneering spirit. There's
a statue honoring her at Paris's Laborger Airport, so you
(06:57):
can still pay homage to her today. I guess well,
de Laroche may have had a pretty significant first, being
the first woman to earn a pilot's license, but this
next aviator, Harriet Quimby, was close on her heels. Harriet
Quimby was born in Michigan in May of eighteen seventy five,
and her family moved to California near San Francisco when
(07:17):
she was only nine. Quimby's family was very poor, so
when their farm failed and they moved to San Francisco proper,
she had to work to help make ends meet. At
the same time, though, her mom encouraged her to go
to school and was really adamant that she pursued a
career and become independent. So Quimby chose journalism, and she
became a reporter for publications like the San Francisco Dramatic
(07:40):
Review and The Calibulletin and Chronicle by nineteen o one
in nineteen o two, respectively. Then in nineteen o three
she decided that she had moved to New York City
and try to make herself a journalism career there as well,
and ended up getting a good job at Leslie's Illustrated Weekly.
But much like De la Roche, none of this could
(08:01):
compare to the passion that aviation ignited in her Quimby
Thawn air show on Long Island in the fall of
nineteen ten, and after that she was just determined to
learn how to fly, so she started taking lessons the
next spring. At first, Quimby disguised herself as a guy,
since it was controversial for women to fly at this time.
(08:22):
It was controversial because fatal accidents were a very frequent occurrence,
as we've already seen in De Librocia's story, and women
were considered weaker, less capable of handling these dangerous situations
than men, and sometimes even considered less courageous than men. Soon,
The New York Times exposed her disguise, but Quimby turned
this into an opportunity. She got Leslie's to sponsor her,
(08:45):
and she started a series of articles on her aviation experiences,
which became super popular. So I guess the New York
Times wasn't expecting her to turn all journalists on them
and when they exposed her. But on August first, nineteen eleven,
b did earn her pilot license without ever having a
single accident in the air, something that really does seem
(09:06):
pretty remarkable when you start looking at a lot of
these aviators put together. She was the first woman in
the United States to earn a license and the second
woman in the world after Delaroush. She started flying in
air meets and in September became the first woman to
make a night flight. She kept writing about her experience
as the entire time. Two issues that had her articles
(09:27):
in them would completely sell out. In March of nineteen twelve,
Quinby took on her greatest challenge yet, an attempt to
become the first female to fly across the English Channel.
She planned this attempt in secret, though, so that no
one could jump ahead of her and try to make
the attempt before she did. She headed to Europe in
early March and met in France with Louis Blrio, an
(09:48):
airplane designer and one of the few men to have
successfully flown across the Channel. She bought a plane from
him that after finding out that it wouldn't be ready
in time, she ended up borrowing his own fifty horsepower plane.
She wanted to practice with it a bit before her
initial attempt, but the weather didn't cooperate yeah, so she
decided she was just gonna go for it and had
(10:08):
the plane shipped across the Channel to England, where she
wanted to start her flight from the weather didn't really
clear up until Sunday, April fourteenth, in conditions were just
perfect then, but she still didn't start her flight because
she had promised her mother that she wouldn't ever fly
on Sunday, so she had to wait a little bit longer.
It wasn't until the following Tuesday before Quimby could take
(10:30):
off from the Dover Airfield, and according to Jacqueline McLean's
book Women with Wings, Quimby later wrote, I was eager
to get into my seat and be off. My heart
was not in my mouth. I felt eager to realize
the project on which I was determined for the first time.
I was to make a journey across the water. She
took off April sixteenth, nineteen twelve, at five thirty am
(10:53):
and landed an hour and nine minutes later on a
French beach. She totally surprised some French fisherman when she
land did, but they were actually impressed by her accomplishment.
They realized, you know, what had happened, that she was
the first, and they gave her breakfast. They made breakfast
for her and there on the beach. Might be the
most charming of the different flights we've talked about or
(11:13):
are going to talk about, maybe because it is only
an hour in nine minutes and not some horrible like
twenty four hour harrowing journey. But the breakfast really adds
to it. It's a nice touch at the end. So
with these French fishermen being so excited about her accomplishment
and other people as well, I mean London reporters were
on top of this almost right away, and she, you know,
(11:35):
her accomplishment was publicized there. She thought that people in
the US would be really excited about her accomplishment as well.
But only a couple of days before Quimby's flight, the
Titanic had sunk. According to McLean's book. This, perhaps rightly so,
totally eclipse the significance of what Quimby had done. Still,
her reputation as an aviator was established. She was billed
(11:58):
as quote America's firstly of the air at the Boston
Air Meat that summer, and it was at this air
meet on July one, nineteen twelve, that Quimby set out
to break an overwater speed record over Boston Harbor, with
English pilot William P. Willard co piloting. During that flight, though,
of something and to this day nobody knows what exactly happened,
(12:19):
caused the plane's tail to pitch upward sharply and thus
make the plane perpendicular to the water. Both the pilots
ended up being thrown from the plane and both died.
Quimby was only thirty seven years old, but she'd just
received a permit from the US Post Office at the
time of her death allowing her to fly the mail
which would have made her the first woman to fly
(12:43):
mail plane, So in a way she was kind of
robbed of that achievement. A little bit our next Avia Tricks,
England's Amy Johnson didn't appear to be a natural in
the air right from the start, as some of the
others on this listed. Johnson was born in the seaport
of Whole in England and jul Live nineteen o three
and her father was a well off fish merchant. After
(13:04):
studying economics of Sheffield University for a few years, Johnson
took a typing course and moved to London in seven
where she got a job as a secretary. And it
was while she was living in London that she became
interested in aviation. Maybe because she rented a room near
an airfield at stag Lane. Most people would have that
maybe make them not like playing because you're always hearing them,
(13:24):
but not so with Amy. But since flying lessons were
really pretty pricey according to Explorers and Discovers of the World,
she volunteered as the secretary for the British Air League
in order to get a little discount on her lessons,
and as we alluded to, though she wasn't exactly at
the top of her class, it took her two times
as long as the average student to get her license,
(13:47):
but she finally did finish in July of ninety nine. However,
she'd also spent a little of that time while she
was trying to get her license learning a good bit
about repairing engine something we remarked, maybe I don't remember
if it was on a podcast about Bethie Coleman or
just between us, that that would have been a good
skill to have during these times, if you could examine
(14:09):
your own plane. And no, it was okay. So Johnson
became the first woman in Great Britain to qualify as
a ground engineer, which got her some publicity. While she
was getting this attention, she announced her intent to fly
solo from England to Australia, which would make her the
first woman to do so. Her goal was also to
beat the time of the only man who had done this,
(14:31):
who was Burt Hinkler. Hinkler did it in in just
fifteen days, but Johnson before she could get started. It
took a little while. She had to raise some money
to buy a second hand gipsy moth plane, which she
dubbed Jason, But by the time that she took off
for Australia on May fifty, she still only had about
seventy five hours of flying time under her belt and
(14:52):
she had never flown over the water. So pretty green,
definitely green, and people were really surprised that she was
trying this. I mean some obviously scoffed at her thought
it was a crazy thing to do. Johnson herself later said, quote,
the prospect did not frighten me because I was so
appallingly ignorant that I never realized in the least what
(15:13):
I had taken on. She was about to about to
find it out pretty soon, though. Her troop was really
an ordeal almost from the start, And one thing was
that she had to manually pump gas from a storage
tank to the tank in the upper wing. Acquired fifty
gallons per hour, and each gallon took forty strokes and
the process. You know, all of that, all those gas
(15:35):
fumes in the enclosed space made her feel nauseated. It
sounds like a bad task to have to do on
these long flights. By the fourth day, Johnson ran into
her first major trouble, which was a sandstorm over the
Iraqi Desert that forced her to land there. She had
to cover the engine and fuel tanks with a canvas
to try to keep as much stand out as she could,
(15:57):
and then she kind of perched on the wing of
the plane for three hours with the revolver in case
she was attacked by wild animals, and she had to
get back in her plane and get going again, because
after that she had to stop for repairs a couple
more times than by the sixth day. She finally reached Pakistan,
two days sooner than Bert Hinkler had so it seemed
(16:17):
like despite all these troubles, she was on pace. And
when news of this got out, suddenly the whole world
was paying attention to what she was doing. They thought
she might really do this, she might really beat his time.
From there, though, she ran into a series of mishaps,
including running out of fuel over John c getting into
monsoons between Calcutta and Rangoon, and getting lost between Bangkok
(16:41):
and Singapore. She just kind of realized that she was
going in circles. She didn't know where she was and
she was just going in circles between the two for
a while. And engine trouble was another problem that she had.
She had ran into engine trouble at Surabaya. On May
nine thirty, she finally landed in the northern Australian town
of Darwin. She was sunburnt, oil stained, and very disappointed.
(17:05):
By this time. It had taken her nineteen and a
half days to reach there. Four days longer than Hinkler.
But she was really in for another surprise because, much
like Beryl Markham, she thought she'd failed because she hadn't
reached her exact goal she was setting out to accomplish.
But she was nevertheless considered a heroine. She had made it,
(17:25):
she had done something that was really impressive, and crowds
cheered her on. She got congratulatory telegrams from everyone from
the King and Queen of Great Britain to Charles Lindbergh.
I mean, that would have been a pretty big deal
for an inspiring aviator like her. She was even called
the Queen of the Air, and there were songs written
about her, including Amy Wonderful Amy. I wish I could
(17:47):
have heard what that one sounded like. We'll have to
look it up, maybe spliced it into the podcast or
something like that. The London Daily Mail awarded her ten
thousand pounds, and an estimated million people turned out to
greet her when she find They returned to London by
ship on August fifth, nineteen thirty. After that, Johnson continued
to pursue flight records, becoming the first pilot to fly
(18:08):
from London to Moscow in under twenty four hours. She
also set two speed records for the trip from London
to Cape Town, South Africa, and a record for flying
from London to Tokyo along the way. She had a
short lived marriage to Scottish pilot Jim Mollison, whom we
mentioned in the Barrel Markham podcast. Also, according to an
article by Lisa Allardis in The New Statesman, they were
(18:29):
known as flying sweethearts and were kind of the posh
and becks of their time. I liked that comparison because
I think probably everyone now can relate to liberty couple.
During World War Two, Johnson needed cash and took a
flying job for the Air Transport Artillery of the Royal
Air Force, and on January five, n one, while delivering
(18:51):
an aircraft from Scotland to London, her plane went down
in the Thames and she was never seen again. There
is a little bit of mystery and controversy so rounding
her death though, and what exactly happened. So she was
supposedly still alive when she was in the water, and
according to a New Statesman article, she called out to
rescuers aboard the h MS Hasslemere, but then vanished and
(19:14):
over the years, according to an article by LaRue Scott
and British Heritage, people have suspected that she may have
staged her own death, or maybe that she was even
a spy on some sort of mission and needed to disappear,
But according to an h MS hassle Mere report that
came to light about a decade ago, there's actually a
good chance that the real reason was more horrific than mysterious.
(19:38):
She may have got caught in the propeller of the
ship and was killed that way, but the information was
kept from the public. The public was grieving so much
they didn't want to put it out there. The last
woman on our list, Jacqueline Cochrane, has so many aviation
accomplishments to her name it's nearly impossible to condense them
to a list entry size. So we're to focus on
(20:00):
a couple of major ones and leave open the possibility
that we may talk about her some other time in
the future, if we ever get to talking about aviators again,
if if you guys aren't sick of them by now already.
Cochran had kind of a sad childhood. She was born
sometime in the early nineteen hundreds, but it's interesting no
one really knows the exact date of birth, because she
(20:20):
was either orphaned or abandoned by her birth parents, according
to McLean's book Woman with Wigne. Some say that she
picked the name Cochrane for herself out of a phone book.
So her foster family was very poor, and Cochrane worked
in a cotton mill at a young age. Eventually, though,
she got the opportunity to train as a beautician, and
by the time she was about twenty years old, she
(20:41):
made her way to New York City and got a
job at a very fancy salon and Twins of sax
Smith Avenue, and she managed to impress and Twine enough
that he sent her on to run his salon sort
of offshoot Miami location, and she finally started making pretty
decent money. I think it's interesting too, we've had two
beautician female aviators such I don't know, professions that you
(21:05):
wouldn't necessarily link. Yeah, well, I guess you wouldn't suspect
it of a secretary either or an actress. But Cochrane,
even though she was finally making money, as you said,
she was doing well for herself, maybe because of her past,
maybe because she had been poor growing up. She wanted
more than that. She got the idea to start her
own cosmetics business, so taking this mutician career to the
(21:28):
next level. And she wanted to learn to fly so
that she could travel around the country to promote her company.
So she started taking flying lessons at Roosevelt Flying School
on Long Island in two and she earned her license
in just two and a half weeks. Like the other
women we've discussed, she just fell in love with flying.
I mean, that's just the common theme throughout this podcast,
(21:49):
this inexplicable passion for getting in a plane and taking flight.
She later said, quote when I paid for my first lesson,
a beauty operator ceased to exist and an aviator was born.
But as we discussed in the Bessie Coleman episode, there
weren't really a lot of opportunities in the nineteen thirties
for women who wanted to pursue a flying career. So
(22:09):
for a career woman like her, she needed something else.
So in the meantime, she went ahead and launched Jacqueline
Cochrane Cosmetics in ninety five, and the company did become successful.
After that, she started putting her profits toward flying, so
she kept a day job, and at first she entered
races and pursued records to advance her flying career. In
(22:33):
nineteen thirty eight, she entered the Bendix Cross Country Air
Race for the third time and placed first in it.
It had formerly been a male dominated race, and around
this time to Cochrane managed to break the women's national
speed record, the women's world speed record, the New York
to Miami speed record, and an international speed record, all
(22:53):
between the years of nineteen thirty seven and nineteen forties,
so just one after another for her. McLean relates an
interesting account of when Cochrane set a women's national altitude
record in nine. She writes that Cochrane flew a small
fabric covered biplane up to thirty thousand fifty two ft
and the air so thin and cold up there that
(23:14):
Cochrane quote ruptured as sinus flood vessel, got frostbite and
almost froze to death. She also got really disoriented up there,
so much so that she had to fly around a
little lower at a lower altitude for about an hour
after that until she could just focus enough to land
the plane. During the war, like others, Cochrane had to
take a break from setting records for a little while,
(23:36):
but she didn't take a break from flying completely. She
actually helped to train women for the U. S. Air
Force in a program called the Women's Air Force Service
Pilots WASP. And that's really quite the story in itself,
so we're gonna sort of skim over the WAFF section
and maybe consider covering that at some later date. But
(23:56):
after the war a new set of record possibile. These
really opened up to aviators thanks to a new kind
of plane, and that was, of course, the jet. The
only problem though, was that you had to be in
the Air Force to fly a jet in the United States,
and women weren't officially allowed to fly for the Air Force.
The WASP program that Cochrane had set up wasn't yet
recognized as a part of the military, so Krane found
(24:20):
a way her hound this though, as a lot of
these folks have. She learned to fly on a Canadian
owned jet and started pursuing speed records that way, and
then she started breaking into a new kind of territory.
She got her friend General Chuck Yeager to teach her
how to make a supersonic flight, so basically traveling at
such a rate that she would exceed the speed of sound.
(24:44):
It essentially involved climbing way high in her jet to
about forty five thousand feet and then heading straight down
towards the ground. On May nineteen fifty three, she did this,
and when she was diving towards the ground, she mentioned
heading for the airport as her target and watching the
reading on her mock meter as she went. When she
passed mock one the speed of sound, she became the
(25:06):
first woman to break the sound barrier, which is probably
the accomplishment she's best known for. She continued to pursue
records into her fifties and sixties, even though her health
started failing towards the end. In nineteen sixty two, she
became the first woman to fly a jet across the Atlantic. Ultimately,
according to Encyclopedia Britannica, she held more speed, distance, and
(25:27):
altitude records than any other pilot, male or female. During
her career. Cochrane was also honored for a lot of
those achievements and those records she had said. She became
president of the Federation aer Nautique Internaciale, and she became
the first woman inducted into the Aviation Hall of fame,
and I think that all of us are probably relieved
(25:48):
to know that she didn't die until nineteen eighties, So
one of these ladies lived to an older age and
didn't fall out of a plane or something like that.
It's it's just nice to see that why got to
continue her pilot's career and see different eras of flight. Yeah,
and we could get to end on a more positive
note in addition to that well. In describing her career
(26:11):
at one point, Cochrane said, quote, adventure is a state
of mind and spirit. It comes with faith, for with
complete faith there is no fear of what faces you
in life or death. In truth, I ended up living
a life of continuous adventure. And I think that's a
really good note to end on, since I think that's
probably what has fascinated us the most about these aviatricies
(26:34):
from the beginning, and that's their adventurous spirits and also
just their bravery and sheer determination to do what they
wanted to do despite the challenges and despite the dangers
in a lot of cases. So we'll leave this topic
behind for now, but there are plenty more that we
can cover in the future. We got tons of suggestions
from people, uh, Nancy Bird Walton and Maral Lindbergh, Pauline Gower, Um.
(26:58):
The list kind of goes on and maybe someday, probably
not anytime soon, since we've done a lot a lot
of time on aviators lately, but down the road will
I'm sure cover these well. I was thinking we have
quite a catalog now because we've of course done episodes
on Charles Lindberg already, We've done one on Antointa Santa Zuberi,
the more famous as the writer of The Little Prince,
(27:21):
and um a long time ago, we did one on
Bungled Flight Attempts, which is, oh, yeah, that's right. It
was a pretty fun podcast and I think there's an
article on it too. Yes. Then we have a very
old episode on Amelia Earhart too, which who knows, we
might have to update that someday because I think that
was from the Factor Fiction days when the podcast was
really short. So although we uh, we didn't exactly diss her,
(27:44):
but we we did say that you know, you probably
know a lot about her, So we didn't include her
in any of these um podcasts that we've that we've
done recently. But that's not to say that we won't.
If you're a big Amelia are heart fan to why
not branch out? Yeah, exactly, broaden your horizons. Find out
about some other cool aviators, other cool ladies to uh
(28:04):
to look up to if you're an aspiring pilot or
just an adventurer or just someone who you know has
goals and wants to wants to work toward him, and
to send us any suggestions that you may have for
future aviation related podcasts or other podcasts of any subject
in the whole world. We're at the grounded for a while.
We can be grounded for a while and do different things,
(28:26):
and I think we will in fact, and either way,
you can reach us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook and we're on Twitter at myston History.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
about these guys who are just dropping some wings on
lucking feathers and trying to fly that way, we do
have that great article on terribly bungled flight attempts if
(28:50):
you can search for it on our homepage at www
dot how stepworks dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House
to Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House of Works iPhone app
has a rise. Download it today on iTunes,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.