(Not to mention that she knew John Wayne, General Jimmy Doolittle, Test Pilot Chuck Yeager, Aimee Semple McPherson, and many movie stars.Read on.)
The man who would pilot Richard’s biplane on their round-the-world flight, Moye Stephens brought Richard to Pancho Barnes' San Marino mansion. Stephens knew Pancho as a fellow pilot.
In a Sunday, November 20, 1932 letter from Hollywood, Richard wrote his parents that on Saturday afternoon he went to visit Pancho Barnes, “the woman flyer I’m so fond of, and she took me to Ramon Novarro’s, a lot of drunk movie people were there, so we left early.” Such a good boy, he. The line was clearly for mom and dad.
Stephens was about to marry an Italian contessa. Richard added that on December 4th he would be taking her to Moye’s wedding, although he would miss it, “an especially fine one.”Richard had already met Hollywood’s Roman Novarro, who became another romantic interest in his life.
On Thanksgiving he drove Pancho fifty miles “down the coast to her summer home, which was her Laguna Beach mansion overlooking the Pacific.” “We took off our clothes and pulled clams from the rocks, then put the clams in a big stew pan to steam, and had that for our thanksgiving dinner.” (Unpublished letters, Rhodes College archives.) One imagines his parents raising their eyebrows. Took off their clothes? What kind of woman is this? What had he become? Had the Southern California sun deranged him?
On November 30th he told them that “Pancho and 4 of her friends are coming in for dinner . I just tell my perfectly marvelous cook [Pancho] and forget it. All the big time movie people I used to know I’ve not seen this time, much prefer to sit quiet and do my job. They can wait.” (Unpublished letters, Rhodes College archives.)
Richard was smitten with Pancho. Nobody she met could be indifferent toward her. With thick neck and rounded face, she was not especially comely but she attracted admirers and lasting friendships wherever she went. Richard was one of them and we wonder what rousing stories he might have had about her if he lived to tell them.
Among aviators, she commanded respect as an able pilot. Moye Stephens said of her that she also wrote scenarios for Erich Von Stroheim, a famed Austrian director and movie star of her era who last appeared in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard with William Holden and Gloria Swanson.
She grew up on South Garfield Avenue in San Marino in a three-story thirty-five room mansion with eighteen foot ceilings. Its walls were paneled in wood with hand-carved moldings. From one ceiling a massive crystal chandelier hung. The family was summoned to dinner with a harpsichord chime. The upstairs baths were marble with spigots of silver. In the patio a large pool was decorated with water lilies. Guests could amble to the tennis courts for a few sets or to the stables, where they could ride around a mile course. The family also had a fine house on the cliffs above Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach. Next the Laguna Beach mansion she had a landing strip built for her biplane. In 1924 family friend Malcolm St. Clair directed The Lighthouse By The Sea in Laguna Beach, giving her a role as double for movie star Louise Fazenda. She lived on her own terms. Born wealthy, going slowly broke, in 1930 Pancho entertained lavishly at her San Marino mansion where Richard met her.
In his unpublished memoir, Moye Stephens wrote that he and his pals “would join the practically continual evening festivities at the San Marino home of Florence Lowe 'Pancho' Barnes.” Both the invited and uninvited had ready access to food, drinks, and fun. Hers was the high life, and the high life was Richard’s. They had things in common. At that period in her life, she and he had the same regard for money. They spent it. She wanted to live to the fullest. Richard felt the same. She and he both had a derring-do. Both were outgoing and charming when they wanted to be with the difference that she never suffered fools gladly.
Moye Stephens recalled one bash she threw for him and his pilot friends. Everybody was having a high time when the door chime rang. Opening the door, they found Frank Bell, a bootlegger. Bloody from several bullet wounds, staggering on his feet, Bell reached to push the door button again, but they grabbed him and helped him to bed upstairs. Pancho called a doctor who would not report gunshot wounds. Patched up, somewhat recovered, Bell explained what happened. Returning from flying lessons in Long Beach, “business competitors” pulled alongside his car and opened fire with a Thompson submachine gun. Bell crouched down and fortunately no bullet penetrated his heart or lungs. Bell was finally strapped into an electric chair by the State of Illinois, and there was no crouching in that.
Stephens said that “the lengths to which she went in protecting Frank Bell provided another demonstration of her big-heartedness. Her generosity extended to others, so long as they did not have big heads. One of her habitués was a strapping eighteen-year-old named Marion Michael Morrison who attended the University of Southern California on a football scholarship. Seeing that money was tight with him, Pancho helped him out.
Fifty years later, she sat in the Universal Studios cafeteria eating lunch when a big man walked up to her table. He asked if she remembered him. Grey-haired, bent over her plate, she sat back and paused to look at him and slowly sized him up. Yes, she did. “You are Marion Morrison,” she said. Of course she recognized Wayne but her response deflated him.
She was good friends with Aimee Semple McPherson, a media evangelist before Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Jerry Falwell, or Oral Roberts who told his audience that God would call him home if he didn’t raise $8 million in donations. Aimee was a national sensation, speaking on radio, featured in the news. In her unpublished biography, Pancho wrote about The Ambassador Horse Shows where Aimee rode her horse to “parade around and talk to people.” Then she rode fast around the ring, but that was not Aimee. She rode her horse into a kind of tunnel where she and Pancho changed places, both identically dressed. It was Pancho who rode so fast, her head hunched, that the crowd couldn’t tell. Back in the tunnel, Pancho jumped off and Aimee remounted to cool the horse down by walking slowly around the ring. The crowd clapped, and the limelight was Aimee’s though she paid Pancho well for the ruse.
Pancho recalled that McPherson asked the congregation “not to desecrate the Temple with the vulgar clinking of change” when the offering was passed. People meekly reached deeper and placed folded bills onto the plates.
McPherson led a double life. “She drank and smoked with the best of them,” said Pancho. On May 18, 1926, she went for a swim near Venice Beach, California and did not reappear. Newspapers shouted her mysterious disappearance and the public bought copy after copy as day after day the police found no sign of her. Had she been murdered? Kidnapped? At a service in the Temple her mother gave a sermon and announced that “Sister is with Jesus.” Parishioners cried. The devoted held vigils at Venice Beach. One parishioner swam out to sea to look for her and drowned.
Thirty five days later, on June 23, the press announced her found in Agua Prieta, Mexico, across the border from Douglas, Arizona. It had been horrible, Sister Aimee claimed. She had been kidnapped, drugged, and tortured. She had been imprisoned in a shack in Mexico, but she outfoxed her captors and escaped and walked thirteen hours across the desert to Agua Prieta. Desert?, asked the press. Her shows were not dusty, not worn. They had grass stains. She disappeared wearing a bathing suit and re-emerged fully dressed. A grand jury investigated but without evidence or credible witnesses all charges were dropped. Her parishioners never doubted her. Those not her parishioners had other opinions.
The most common was that she had slipped off with Joe Flores. Folk singer Pete Seeger wrote The Ballad of Aimee McPherson about her, singing “the dents in the mattress fit Aimee's caboose.” Pancho said it was obvious, “It was pretty well understood thing around Flores' barn that when Aimee made her disappearance act, Joe went with her.”
Pancho knew Howard Hughes. She taught corporation take-over tycoon Kirk Kerkorian to fly at her Happy Bottom ranch. In exchange for flying lessons, he herded her cows, milked and tended them. She was friends with philosophers and historians Will and Ariel Durant. Movie stars Susan Oliver and Richard Arlen became her friends. She knew Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Veronica Lake, Elizabeth Taylor, Roy Rogers, Buck Jones, Hopalong Cassidy (Bill Boyd) and Ronald Reagan. Silent film heart throb Ramon Novarro was a good friend. He and Richard Halliburton became the closest of friends, and through Pancho he met Richard.
Her grandfather was Thaddeus Lowe. Floating in the sky, visible to every Johnny Reb on the Confederate side her grandfather, Professor Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, had his picture taken by Civil War photographer Matthew Brady. The picture showed him in a spotting balloon observing the Battle of Fair Oaks on the north side of the Chicahominy River in Virginia. He became a favorite target of their marksmen, but fate favored him. Below him several soldiers held ropes to steady the balloon and kept it from floating over Confederate lines.
Professor Lowe became de facto pioneer of American military aviation. In a law suit against Edwards Air Force Base Pancho asserted that her grandfather founded the Air Force because Abraham Lincoln appointed him Chief Aeronaut of the Balloon Corps.
Pancho was born in 1901 as Florence Leontine Lowe and was supposed to have grown into a debutante whose coming-out would be into the best Southern California society. She was supposed to have married well and become a society matron. Her husband would be a wealthy developer, investment banker, or attorney whose family was old money and who had the proper connections.
Her children would play croquet on a great swath of San Marino estate during a lawn party while her servants walked about balancing silver platters with martinis, whiskeys, and gin as they paused politely before a guest, offering a drink. She would smile delicately at a gentleman describing his polo pony and while listening would raise her finger and give a slight nod to guests just arriving. She was supposed to have done all that but she did not.
She and her mother did not get along. Pancho was born to rebel while her mother wanted a young lady who conformed to social expectations. Pancho loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian but her mother thought that too common. The child was incorrigible. Some time around 1918 she attended the Bishop School in La Jolla, her fourth school in eight years. She roomed with Ursula Greenshaw (Mandel), who wrote an autobiography, I Live My Life, in which she said that life with “Florence was “never DULL!” “One night when I entered our room, I stumbled against a body. I switched on the light and there lay Florence on the floor in a pool of blood. Pinned to her chest with a dagger was a note saying that she had decided to end it all. I soon discovered the blood was red ink and the dagger wound faked.”
Florence was called on the carpet at the principal’s office another time. She led her horse, Dobbins, inside her building and up the stairs. The principal demanded to know the reason for the outrage. “She feigned innocent surprise and soon was expressing deep sympathy for the horse...'he must have been so lonesome that he even came upstairs to look for me...'.”
For a while, at least, her mother had the upper hand. But Frances disappointed her mother again when she married below her social station. In 1921 Pancho wed Episcopalian Reverend C. Rankin Barnes of Pasadena and ten years older. Three nights after the marriage, they finally slept together and begot a son, named William Emmert after her brother who died young of leukemia. William Emmert was born nine months later. After that night they slept apart. Her son grew up close to his mother.
Known as Bill Barnes he too was a pilot and died in 1980 in a WWII fighter, a P-51 Mustang which crashed at Fox Field not far from his mother’s Happy Bottom Riding Club.
The Reverend was of an academic bent and left his name on obscure books no longer available. One is A History of St. Paul's Church, San Diego. Another is Ethelbert Talbot, 1848-1928: Missionary Bishop, Diocesan Bishop, Presiding Bishop,. He also wrote The General Convention: Offices and officers, 1785-1950, as well as Practical Standards for Diocesan Social Service Departments. Theirs was not a match made in heaven.
In her unpublished autobiography Pancho wrote, “I had married a clergyman and that was to be my life.” She continues. “I taught Sunday school. I had a class of boys about nine years old. I bribed them with jackknives to learn the catechism.” She wrote that “in the meantime, I realized that the existence was almost intolerable. Every now and then I would get away and go over to my parent's house where my horses were and go for a ride. More and more I spent time with my horses.” She wanted a divorce but he didn’t want the scandal. She tried provoking him into it.
After she learned to fly, on Sundays she swooped her biplane low over her husband’s church and buzzed it, drowning out the choir and his sermon. He still refused. But no proper minister could remain married to a woman who publicly said “Flying is like being a sex maniac in a whore house,” one of Pancho’s celebrated quips. Years later, in 1941, he did grant a divorce.
She became called Pancho because of a whim. During a party at her Laguna Beach mansion she and friends decided to drive to San Pedro to catch the next boat for South America. She cut her hair short, donned baggy pants, and signed on a tramp freighter as Ordinary Seaman, taking the name Jacob Crane. She cussed and played poker with the crew . The crew was surprised when the captain raised a Panamanian flag when the ship was out at sea. They realized they were in for risky business. The ship would be running guns to Mexican revolutionaries. She met Roger Chute, also along for a lark. A Stanford-educated fisheries expert, Chute saw through her disguise as a man.
Neither wanted anything to do with gun-running so he proposed they jump ship and he would take her to visit the pyramids at Chichen Itza . At San Blas the ship dropped anchor and they slipped away. They bought a horse and a mule, Chute on the one, she on the other. The horse was white, which reminded her of the steed Rocinante in Miguel Cervantes' novel. She told Chute he looked like Don Quixote on it. He said she looked like Pancho. No, she said, You mean Sancho Panza, Quixote’s squire. Chute shrugged. It was all the same to him.
This, though, gave her the nickname. She liked it and kept it. It gave the raspberry to her mother. Pancho married again. And again. Three months after divorcing the Reverend she married Robert Nichols, Jr. It lasted a few weeks. He was in his twenties, about the same age as her son, Billy; she was approaching 40. After that marriage, she waited a bit longer and in 1945, she wed Don Jose Shalita. He left after four months. In 1953 she married her ranch foreman, Mac McKendry.
Her good friend Air Force base General Al Boyd flew cross-country in a B-47 for the wedding. He gave the bride away in the ceremony. Bell X-1 test pilot Chuck Yeager was her best man. Indian Chief Lucky blessed the union. Six hundred fifty people attended. Age slowed her down. It took fourteen years for her to divorce McKendry.
The Depression was not good to her. With only a Hollywood apartment left, in 1935 she sold it and bought eighty acres in the Mojave Desert. Almost out of money and flying her Lockheed Vega, one day she looked down on the land below, familiar land where many air plane movies were staged. She saw a lush, green alfalfa field, and it would be a good place to raise her son Billy.
March Army Air Base was there and next it was Muroc Field. She transformed a struggling alfalfa ranch, having bought out a dairy called Adair. She grew alfalfa, had a dairy herd of cows and goats, farmed pigs, raised chickens, grew corn, and even had a garbage business. She sold milk and eggs to the base and had a sweet deal. She fed her hogs on trash the base paid her to haul away and then sold pork back to it.
There she built the Happy Bottom Riding Club, also known as Rancho Oro Verde Fly Inn Dude Ranch, where she eventually built a dance hall with glamorous hostesses, a gambling casino, a swimming pool, horse stables, a championship rodeo stadium. The Air Force base officer’s club was usually empty. They went to Pancho’s. She was queen of her bar, where the flyboys came to have fun and kid with her. She said she hosted the fastest and bravest men on earth.
Pancho didn’t charge military test pilots for their drinks, but triple-charged the civilian test pilots because of their fat salaries. A 1948 Time magazine article described her place: “Pancho's Fly-Inn (or the Happy Bottom Riding Club)” has its own airport, lighted at night, “so that guests, friends and airborne wayfarers can fly in at all hours. The Fly-Inn is a much-buzzed place. Standing alone on the flat desert with only a few low trees, it invites the dangerous prank that all young pilots play, no matter what the threats of flying field managers or military C.O.s. Chuck Yeager has roared low over the ranch in every sort of airplane, including the fastest jets. When he buzzes the place in a jet plane, the slap from the zipping wing jounces the bar.” On the cover of the Time issue is pictured Yeager in his test pilot’s helmet. The magazine article was made possible because the government had finally announced that he broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947. They wanted it trumpeted far and wide. It had been a military secret until then, at least supposedly. But everybody, including Pancho, knew about it. For the folks at the air base and the Happy Bottom Ranch it was hard to keep a sonic boom and rattling windows a secret.
Al Boyd, the previous commander, had been an old school aviator, and had even given Pancho away in her wedding to McKendry but in the 1950s the new Edwards Air Force Base commander took an immediate dislike to Pancho and she was not about to change. With her what you saw was what you got. Brigadier General J. Stanley Holtoner felt she and her place were unfit moral examples for his young airmen and calling her a madam, her Happy Bottom Riding Club a cat house, and he placed it off limits.
This hurt. The pilots and air crews had been her boys. She had taken them under her wing, cared for them. The general also decided to expand the Base to make room for a new runway, which conveniently meant condemning Pancho’s land by right of eminent domain. The General low-balled an offer for her 380 acres.
No, said Pancho. Her land had not figured in any previous Edwards expansion plans. Besides, with her businesses the real estate was worth far more than the offer. “They picked the wrong gal to push around!, she said. She was David against Goliath, and Goliath had an unending supply of lawyers on its payrolls. Years could pass under judicial review and during those years a David could go bankrupt while Goliath played golf on Sundays and had well-paid lawyers. That may have discouraged and defeated others but not her.
She was joined at the hip to the Air Force for, as she would argue in court, her grandfather founded the United States Air Force. She went to a law library to study books and legal briefs. There, she met Shirley Hufstedler, an attorney who was impressed by Pancho’s generous spirit and real grit. Shirley, her husband, and a friend, both also attorneys, took on the case. Her case became a cause célèbre with the press following Pancho’s every comment. Everybody favored underdog Pancho. The news spread around the world as “The War of the Mojave.”
The courtroom was packed with people who came to attend the trial, spectators, reporters, military personnel. When both sides had rested their arguments, the jury retired to deliberate, and the courtroom atmosphere was tense as people waited for the jury, and waited, and still waited. After several hours, the jury returned with their verdict. They filed back into the courtroom, and everybody stood for them. Honorable US District Court Judge Gilbert Jertberg asked them, “ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you finally reached a unanimous decision?” “Yes we have your honor,” came the chairman’s reply. They found against the United States Air Force and The United States government. They found for Florence Leontine “Pancho Barnes. Cheers filled the courtroom. Judge Jertberg stated that Pancho was a courageous, forthright individual. In her compassion and concern for her military customers she had shown herself a friend of the Air Force. He awarded her a settlement of $414,500, much more than the $185,000 offered by the Air Force.
Today, little remains of The Happy Bottom Riding Club. While Pancho was away shopping a fire mysteriously started, destroying it. Just before the end of the trial, on November 13, 1953, it burned down. The fire marshal believed it a case of arson, but could not locate a proximate cause. The general had told Pancho that if she didn’t sell he could have her ranch “napalm bombed off the desert.” After the hullabaloo faded the Air Force took over her land for a runway.
The Happy Bottom ruins are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
She died in 1975, age 74. Scheduled to be keynote speaker at the annual Barnstormer’s Reunion of the Antelope Valley Aero Museum, she could not be reached when a friend called her. Pancho’s son, Bill, stopped by her little rock house in Boron, California to investigate and found her dead. The coroner concluded that she had died several days earlier of a heart attack. She had requested that her body be cremated, the ashes strewn from an airplane over the 380 acres of her Happy Bottom ranch.
To this day Edwards Air Force Base celebrates an annual Pancho Barnes Day. She said “We had more fun in a week than most of the weenies in the world have in a lifetime.” Perhaps most notable, she should be remembered for this: “If you have a choice, choose happy.” She took a very large bite out of life.
Leader of the B-25 raid on Tokyo, General Jimmy Doolittle learned that Pancho had died and thus would not appear as keynote speaker for the Barnstormers Reunion. He prepared a testimonial to her life. So many there, so many of her friends, from Hollywood to aviation. Susan Oliver, Richard Arlen, Chuck Yeager, Buzz Aldrin.
General Doolittle said this: “Good Evening. Ladies and gentlemen, we have recently lost a true friend. In this day and age, real friends you can depend on in a pinch are rare indeed. Florence Lowe Barnes left us late last month. She was an expert pilot and a good organizer. She had a fine mind, and was intensely loyal. When the going was rough, you knew that she would always offer a willing hand. There was no extent to which she would not go to help a friend who was in need . . . In a few words, she put great store by courage, honor and integrity. She despised dishonesty and cowardice. She was straight forward and couldn't abide dissimulation, abhorred sham. She was outspoken, and she said exactly what she thought and believed. You know, I can just see her up there at this very minute. In her inimitable way, with a wry smile, she is probably remarking to some old and dear friend who preceded her, 'I wondered what the little old bald-headed bastard was going to say. ' God love her. And may I now propose a toast: Ladies and gentlemen, to Pancho Barnes. Pancho Barnes!”
The Air Force has never built its runway on Pancho’s land.
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