Richard Halliburton Lived Several Lives in One

 This art-deco image of a pilot, scarf flying over a vintage biplane, evokes for me an entire era, and one man helps capture that era.  A while back I found a book in a used book store.  It was about Richard Halliburton, written by his father, Wesley.  I bought it and set it aside for reading on some day when I had both free time and the inclination.  When I did read it I was hooked.  I learned Richard Halliburton was a travel-adventure writer and wrote many books.  I bought them all and read them all.  I could go on but that would not compare to the life I read about.  Instead, I provide a summary from my book.

Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten. He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

He was a maverick and couldn't see himself fitting into the America of his youth, although he was very much its product with his can-do attitude and things-will-get better belief.  For all that, he was a round peg with nothing but square holes awaiting him as he reached adulthood. He could not see things the way most people saw them. His parents wanted him to play by the rules, to live an even tenor, and he scorned the rules, especially the phrase "even tenor."  He said no to their even tenor and in doing so he turned his back on an America that held those values.  Despite having little respect for rules, he became wildly successful because his life was wildly improbable as a travel-adventure writer.  Because he dared, he became an icon of his era, more famous in his day than Amelia Earhart, with farmers' wives in Topeka, factory workers in Detroit, and newspaper boys in Cleveland buying his books.  

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Pain & Pleasure: The Lobster Reconsidered & David Foster Wallace

A few years back I read about George, a 140 year-old lobster that did not wind up on somebody's dinner plate. Instead, he was returned to the ocean at Kennebunkport, Maine. Lobster age is calculated by weight and this one weighed 20 pounds. George would have provided a dinner at over $100 in a good restaurant. Because of his age, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals asked the restaurant, City Crab and Seafood, that the lobster be returned to the ocean. After holding George in a tank for ten days, restaurant management released him to the animal-humane organization.

Then I read about this more recently:  Fish "sensors flare when . . . a hook rips through their scales and into their flesh. In the lab, when trout lips are injected with acid, the fish do not merely respond at the site. They rock their entire bodies back and forth, hyperventilating, rubbing their mouths against their tanks’ sides or gravel bottoms. These behaviors cease when the fish are given morphine. Such actions call the ethics of the research itself into question. But the experiences of lab fish are nothing compared with those endured by the trillions of aquatic animals that humans yank, unceremoniously, out of oceans and rivers and lakes every year. Some fish are still alive, hours later, when they’re shoveled into the sickly lit, refrigerated intake tubes of the global seafood supply chain."

Those items item led me to some thoughts about pleasure and pain.

Mercedes de Acosta Met Ramana Maharshi: Here Lies The Heart

Descended from the legendary Dukes of Alba, daughter in a wealthy Cuban family, Mercedes de Acosta was born in 1893 in New York, raised near Fifth Avenue, and had a beautiful sister Rita de Acosta who was
a model for artists John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini. Married to painter Abram Poole, Mercedes was socialite, poet, playwright, Hollywood set and costume designer as well as script writer. She knew many of the greats of her day: Bessie Marbury, Rodin, Edith Wharton, Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Elenora Duse, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, Elsa Maxwell, and Krishnamurti. Near the end of her life, she met and befriended Andy Warhol, and introduced him to many of the people who would count in his career.

Consuelo (Hatmaker) Sides, whose husband had been the World War I French flying ace Charles Nungesser, accompanied Mercedes on her passage to India. After arriving, de Acosta met former President Woodrow Wilson's daughter, Margaret, a devotee at Sri Aurobindo's ashram.

In 1960, she published an autobiography, Here Lies The Heart, dedicated to Maharshi, in which she wrote, To Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, the only completely egoless, world-detached, and pure being I have ever known. She spent three days with him and remembered them as the most significant of her life.

The Revolt of Pancho Barnes

Born to immense wealth, Pancho had an arranged marriage to a minister. Newspapers proclaimed the marriage of a socialite to a pastor. Tired of the marriage, she couldn't get a divorce so each Sunday morning she climbed into her biplane and dove down over the steeple, buzzing his church during his sermons, drowning out the service. While a school girl she led her horse into her dorm. Called on the carpet, she "sweetly" explained to the headmistress she thought the animal was lonely. In the depth of the Great Depression she spent the last of her money to help fellow aviators but, broke, became a capable business woman, building The Happy Bottom Riding Club and Rancho Oro Verde Dude Ranch in the Mojave Desert and was a surrogate mother to test pilot Chuck Yeager. Years later, using her usual colorful language she told off the commanding officer of Edwards Air Force Base and he got back by trying to bulldoze her Happy Bottom Riding Club.

Pancho Barnes is included in Don't Die in Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton.
She grew up on South Garfield Avenue in San Marino, California in a three-story thirty-five room mansion with eighteen foot ceilings, wood-paneled walls with hand-carved moldings ,and a massive crystal chandelier hanging from one ceiling.  A harpsichord chime summoned the family to dinner.
Silver spigots serviced upstairs baths of marble.  Water lilies decorated a large patio pool.  Guests ambled to tennis courts for a few sets or to the stables, where they rode a mile course.  In Laguna Beach stood another fine mansion on the cliffs above Emerald Bay.  Next it she had a landing strip for her airplane.

Born In 1901, Florence Leontine Lowe was supposed to have grown into a debutante whose coming-out would be into the best Southern California society. But 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. Pancho took after her grandfather and father, both of whom doted on her.

Her grandfather was Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, photographed from below by Matthew Brady as Lowe floated in a balloon at a Civil War battle. He spied on Confederate troop movements while Union soldiers held ropes to keep the balloon from drifting over Johnny Reb’s ranks.

Abraham Lincoln appointed Lowe Chief Aeronaut of the Balloon Corps and Pancho claimed this made him founder of the US Air Force because he was de facto pioneer of American military aviation. In his balloon he became a favorite target of Rebel sharpshooters but fate favored him to grow old and become rich.

Around 1918, Florence 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, saying 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 one day because 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.” She sweetly said, “He must have been so lonesome that he even came upstairs to look for me.”

Florence continued to rebel but for a while, at least, her mother had the upper hand and decided that an arranged marriage would cool her daughter’s spirit. In 1921, Pancho wed Episcopalian Reverend C. Rankin Barnes of Pasadena and ten years older. The newspapers announced that a society aviatrix married a Pasadena reverend.

Three nights after the marriage, they finally slept together and begot a son. After that night they slept apart. William Emmert was born nine months later and grew up close to his mother, dying in 1981 when his WWII fighter, a P-51 Mustang, crashed.

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 tried to make it work. “I taught Sunday school. I had a class of boys about nine years old. I bribed them with jackknives to learn the catechism.” But Pancho after all was Pancho, not Florence. She wrote that “More and more I spent time with my horses.” She wanted a divorce but he did not 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.

Florence became Pancho in an adventure wholly typical of her. When friends decided to hire on as seamen on a banana boat, Pancho, the only woman, decided to join them. She cut her hair short, donned baggy pants, and signed on a tramp freighter as an ordinary seaman, Jacob Crane. There she met Roger Chute. She cussed and played poker with the crew but Chute, a Stanford-educated fisheries expert, saw through her disguise. They became alarmed when at sea. The captain hoisted the Panamanian flag—they discovered the ship ran guns to Mexican revolutionaries. At San Blas, she and Chute jumped ship before it became caught between revolutionary forces and sunk.

Deep in Mexico riding horses, Chute on a white steed, she said he reminded her of Don Quixote. He said she looked like Pancho, Don Quixote’s squire. No, she said, you mean Sancho Panza, but she liked the name and kept it because there was nothing dignified about it and because it gave the raspberry to her mother’s proper lady.

The Depression was not good to Pancho. 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 and saw a lush, green alfalfa field and thought it would be a good place to raise her son Billy. March Army Air Base was there and next it was Muroc Field.

She bought a struggling alfalfa ranch and transformed it, having also bought out a dairy called Adair. She sold milk and eggs to the base. She grew alfalfa, had a dairy herd of cows and goats, farmed pigs, raised chickens, grew corn. She had a sweet deal with her garbage business, feeding her hogs on trash the base paid her to haul away and then selling pork back to it. She was an able businesswoman and with profits from her ranch she bought more land.

Near her ranch she built the Happy Bottom Riding Club, because General Jimmy Doolittle once told her he had a happy bottom. It was 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, and a championship rodeo stadium.

Fellow aviator Moye Stephens recalled that among aviators she commanded respect as an able pilot, and she flew as a test pilot for Lockheed. She, in turn, respected other pilots and gravitated to them.

Pilots went to Pancho’s where she could talk airplanes with them. She was queen of her bar, and the fly boys came to have fun and kid with her. She said she hosted the fastest and bravest men on earth. Pancho did not 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. . . . 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.” The Time cover shows Yeager in his test pilot’s helmet as the man who broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1.

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, a handsome performance dancer. He left after four months. In 1953, she married her ranch foreman, Mac McKendry, thirty-two to her fifty-one. 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 for a fifty-eight second wedding. Age slowed her down. It took fourteen years for her to divorce McKendry.

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 called 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.  The dairy barn below is among the ruins that remain.

Don't Forget This: The Triumphal Parade of Ancient Rome

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In ancient Rome, a general, many to become emperors, presided over The Triumph (Triumphus), a victory parade through the streets of the city with throngs watching him pass by.  In a chariot he lead the parade, and heard the ovations of the masses. He wore a purple tunic, for purple was a rare dye only the nobility and powerful could afford.  Behind him walked all his army, his men and women captives, soon to become slaves, followed by his other spoils of war.  A slave held his golden crown, but the main role of the slave was to occasionally whisper in his ear,

Memento mori, memento mori.

Translated it means, Remember, you will die.

I dedicate this story to all politicians of power and high station.

Meditation, The Narrator, and Self-Therapy

The years have piled up on me and through them I have at times been happy, have been sad, have suffered, have been calm.  Over the years and as a lesson hard-won, looking at mind with its ups and downs, I find one thing stands out.  If mind identifies with a narrator, somebody who tells his or her story, then dukkha, suffering, is greater.  The narrator is a voice, a series of thoughts, or images, that seems to have continuity, but in fact it comes and goes.  I also found that a narrator impartially takes credit for bad feelings as well as good ones when in fact either kind of feeling doesn't depend on a narrator.  They just happen. They arise and fall away, just as the narrator arises and falls away.  There is no continuous stream.  The continuity is ego's necessary fiction.  Yes, in life we have a story-line.  We were born at a certain place. Went to school somewhere. Married.  Etc.

But all that is in what we call the past.  The narrator needs the past (and the future) to maintain itself.  We have only now as our thoughts and feelings arise and pass away.  We can add something to them or just watch them happen. The narrator thinks they're you but in a moment they disappear as it does also.

We can't get rid of the narrator but we can see through it.  Seeing through it helps relieve us from suffering. ( I distinguish suffering (mental) from pain (physical).)  

We can see through it by noting when we feel good.  The feeling doesn't need a narrator to increase it.  It's just there, sometimes with a narrator. When we feel bad, the feeling doesn't need a narrator.  Indeed, when a narrator is added the bad feeling worsens.  ("Nobody understands me."  "It's all hopeless."  "This is the story of my life."  These are just examples.  Each of us can choose our own favorite story line.)

I don't know much about Taoism but a phrase resonates.  The Tao that can be seen is not the true Tao.  What you are is what mind cannot grasp.  Maybe you want to save that for later in your investigations, though.  I'll just ask you to think about this: Are you your brain? If so, where does the "me" thought come from?  Can you find it?  Are you in your body?  Etc.  The point here is that whatever you can identify is itself another object, physical or mental.  Are you an object? Or are you that which sees objects? Similarly you see objects in space but not space itself.

A few people grasp all that without ever meditating.  I am not one of them.  It took many years of meditation for me.  So that's my advice.  In the beginning five minutes of meditation daily can help.  Over time the five can be extended to ten, the ten to twenty, etc.  Whenever it is neglected the mind wants to take over, get itself back in control with thoughts such as "I have no time for this," or "This is a waste of time," or "It just isn't my cup of tea," etc. Notice that the ego is involved in each denial.  Meditation, as it deepens, reveals the folly of clinging to egoic assertions.