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.

Lost at Sea: Richard Halliburton's Wildly Improbable Life and Some Who Knew Him

Richard Halliburton's Wildly Improbable Life

In the human scheme of things, some are born lucky, some less lucky, and some unlucky.   None of us chose to be born nor did we choose the circumstances of our birth.

By accident Richard was born with a predisposition he valued highly, knowing he was lucky.  Of his "restless nature" he wrote, "I'm very grateful, because I wouldn't take $1,000,000 for it."  It was precious to him because he had visions of the possible where others saw only walls.

He was extraordinarily gifted in disposition—his life attests to that, as it is one that few are able to parallel.  People could only read about all he did and saw because they were bound to the morning coffee and evening newspaper of their days.  In Halliburton they found somebody who had slipped the bonds holding them and with sometimes wild energy delighted in a life that for them was not only improbable but impossible.

In the 1920s and 1930s Richard Halliburton was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.

Pancho Barnes' Wildly Unusual Life, Her Battle With US Air Force, & Richard Halliburton

(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.

Richard Halliburton's Storm and Stress and The 1920s

Excerpt from an unpublished version of Don't Die in Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton

Although it had gone to war, America returned to isolationism. By 1920, the Bolshevik Revolution had struck fear in American minds.

An Excerpt From Don't Die in Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton

HALSEY’S TYPHOON

For an idea of what Halliburton and crew encountered, Halsey’s Typhoon offers an example. On December 17, 1944 Admiral William “Bull” Halsey’s Task Force 38 met a typhoon that claimed many lives and sank ships. Looking through windows of pilothouses, helmsmen saw water in the air, air in the water. They could not tell where sea ended and sky began. Piles of sea drove horizontally against wheelhouse windows. Wind roared through the rigging. Flags hauled down, only a tiny battle ensign flapped raggedly in the storm. Beaten by the typhoon, some ships were locked in irons, the vessels helpless in the eye of the storm and could not come about to a new direction. Ships could not see one another and a captain’s mind was fraught with only one idea—keep to the weather. The bows of small ships, destroyer escorts, plowed into mountains of sea that came crashing down on the wheelhouse.

On aircraft carriers, fighter planes down in the hangar bays tore free of lashings and were hurled into other planes, rupturing fuel tanks and igniting fires. The light carrier Monterey was set ablaze at 0911 with fire so intense despite seas washing over the flight deck that it spread below and she quickly lost steerage. On Monterey eighteen planes were destroyed or thrown overboard by wind. Another sixteen were almost destroyed. Her ventilation system was badly damaged.

Lieutenant Gerald Ford―one day a US President, then a young officer on Monterey―was almost swept overboard. He volunteered to lead a damage control team below. In the bowels of the ship all night, Ford and his men braved stifling smoke and intense heat to put out fires. He had been assigned as athletic officer, assistant navigator and gunnery officer and this, he might have joked years later, was not in his job description.

USS Langley rolled through seventy degrees. A plane broke loose in San Jacinto’s hangar and crashed into several other planes. On Cape Esperance the flight deck erupted in flames. In heaving seas, the damage control team risked their own lives to put it out and they did. Kwajalein rolled so far to port that when she righted, her catwalks came back washing with green water. Flat on the flight deck, crewmen crawled inch by inch to three aircraft torn loose and the men tried to push them from the flight deck before they could do more damage. The men worked and struggled against the storm, expecting any moment to be washed overboard but an hour later they had jettisoned the planes into the ocean.

E.Allen Petersen and Hummel Hummel: A Forgotten Story of Escape and Survival

Of all the true stories lost to popular history, this one is of a remarkable and dangerous escape in the prelude to WWII.

Elly Beinhorn, The Most Famous Aviatrix You Never Heard Of

Mention Elly Beinhorn to somebody today and he or she will look at you blankly.
Not so, in the era between World Wars One and Two. During the twenties and thirties, hers was a household name on many continents. She was an aviatrix, a daring young woman in the mold of Amelia Earhart. Like other such women of her time, her goals were not properly feminine. Yet as she became famous, people said her flying skills were exceeded only by her femininity. That was it, a most unwomanly thing. She wanted to fly an aeroplane around the world. Alone. Her mother wept and her father threatened to send her to a psychiatrist, but an aunt had died and left Elly a little money.

Richard Halliburton at Nineteen and for the Rest of His Brief Life

He was the popular icon of an era, the handsome, debonair Princeton man, the admirer of Rupert Brooke and Lord Byron.  He found adventure and exotic lands while others slaved for the dollar.  He fulfilled his dream and his fame spread.  Today, his books are still found in libraries—pages brown and tattered, perhaps—but they remain on shelves.

Richard Halliburton's Personality

"I'm very grateful, because I wouldn't take $1,000,000 for it." Richard Halliburton

In the human scheme of things, some are born lucky, some less lucky, and some unlucky.  None of us chose to be born nor did we choose the circumstances of our birth.  Among many possibilities, we could have come into the world as American, Canadian, Scottish, French, Mexican, Afghan, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, African, or Mongolian.  We could have had wealthy, middle-class, or poor parents.

We are born into chance.

Richard Halliburton, Pancho Barnes and John Wayne

In his life Richard met many unusual people but maybe the most remarkable was Pancho Barnes and she is worthy of note because of her personality and character.  She had two precepts in life: When you have a choice, choose happy, and Nothing exceeds like excess.  She lived on her own terms and cussed like a test pilot. Unable to get a divorce from her minister husband, each Sunday she climbed into her plane, took off, and dove down over his church, buzzing it with the engine’s roar drowning-out morning services.

Richard Halliburton Lost at Sea

On October 5, 1939, the Chancery Court in Memphis, Tennessee declared Richard
Halliburton officially dead. “Lost at Sea,” newspaper headlines declared of him, his crew, and his Chinese junk, Sea Dragon. This was big news. Another famous adventurer had disappeared. The year before, Amelia Earhart, with her navigator Fred Noonan, had ditched a Lockheed Electra somewhere in the Pacific.