Hometown Heroes: Pancho Barnes and Donald Douglas Sr.

March 30, 2012

SUSAN CLOKE

Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror

Pancho Barnes
Photo by George Hurrell
Copyright Estate of Pancho Barnes

Pancho Barnes (1901- 1975) joined 19 other women pilots, including the most famous woman aviator of the time, Amelia Earhart, as they took off from Santa Monica Airport.  The women were flying in the first Women’s Air Derby. 

It was 1929, nine years earlier women had won the right to vote, there were approximately 2000 licensed pilots in the U.S and fewer than 30 were women.  It was a sign of the importance of the race that so many of the woman pilots were competing.   Among the celebrities attending the event was humorist Will Rogers.  He dubbed it the “Powder Puff Derby” and the race is still known by that name.

Pancho Barnes, born Florence Lowe to socialite Pasadena parents, went with her grandfather to the first national Aviation Meet held in Dominguez Hills in 1910.  He told her that someday she would be able to fly and she believed him.  The adventurous and self-named Pancho became the first woman stunt pilot in Hollywood and flew in Howard Hughes’ film “Hell’s Angels”, she organized the stunt pilot’s union, was a founding member of the Ninety-Nine’s, a close friend of Chuck Yeager, and a test pilot herself.   In 1930 Pancho challenged and beat Amelia Earhart’s speed record of 184 mph, flying her beloved plane, the Mystery Ship, at 196 mph.

It was the golden age of flying in America.  It was the time of Lucky Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis and America was in love with flying and fliers.   Pancho Barnes exemplified the spirit of adventure and the daring of the early aviators.  Airplanes were the stuff of dreams.  There were no commercial passenger planes.  But all that was about to change.

Donald Douglas Sr.
Boeing Archives via Wikipedia

The same year Pancho and her grandfather went to the Aviation Meet in Dominguez Hills, Donald Wills Douglas (1892-1981) was in Virginia, watching as Orville Wright qualified the Wright Flyer for the U.S. Army.  Douglas wanted to know everything there was to know about planes, but he never learned to fly one.    That didn’t stop him from designing and building some
of the most famous airplanes of the 20^th century at his company, Douglas Aircraft, located in Santa Monica, California. 

Douglas came to Los Angeles in 1920, rented his first office on Pico Blvd and formed the Davis-Douglas Company to build the Cloudster for Davis.  When the Cloudster didn’t fly as expected, Davis left the company and Douglas continued as the Douglas Aircraft Company.

With an early commission from the Navy for a new folding-wing torpedo plane (the DT-1) and funded with the help of LA Times publisher Harry Chandler, the Douglas Aircraft Company was on its way.  By 1924 he had relocated Douglas Aircraft Company to the old Herman Film Corporation building on 24^th and Wilshire Blvd. in Santa Monica.

Under contract to the Army Air Corps, Douglas Aircraft debuted the open-cockpit Douglas World Cruisers, the first planes designed to circumnavigate the globe.   The first 4 World Cruisers tool off in March of 1924 from Clover Field.   (Clover Field was the original name of Santa Monica Airport, in honor of WWI pilot Lt. Greayer Clover.) 

In September of 1924 two of the World Cruisers completed the 28,945-mile journey.  Over 200,000 people were at Clover Field to watch them land and to celebrate.

Douglas aircraft went on to build mail carriers, army cargo planes, medical evacuation planes and even the first successful plane that could take off and land on water, the Douglas Dolphin. 

Then, in the 1930’s, came the Douglas Commercial (DC) planes: the DC-1, a 12 passenger plane, followed by the transcontinental, 14 passenger DC-2, and the iconic, 21 passenger DC-3.  Before the beginning of WWII over 800 DC-3 airplanes were flying in the U.S.   Built in Santa Monica, these planes first flew out of Santa Monica Airport.  The DC planes led the development of the national aircraft industry and the City of Santa Monica changed to accommodate the new industry.

A sign Douglas had posted at the DC-1 construction site in Santa Monica read, “When you design it, think how you would feel if you had to fly it!  Safety first!”

WWII transformed the airline industry and Douglas Aircraft was at the center of that change.  Douglas became President Roosevelt’s go to man for warplanes. Thousands of warplanes took off from the Santa Monica Airport on their way to join the U.S. and Allied Air Forces.

During WWII Santa Monica Airport was hidden under a raised “town” with houses, streets, trees and farms with barns and animals.  Movie studios became part of the war effort and created the camouflage to protect the airport from being visible to enemy aircraft from the air.

Donald Douglas was a brilliant engineer and a visionary person.  He built a company that changed the world and the world recognized his contributions. 

Did Pancho Barnes and Donald Douglas know each other?  I think they must have, but I couldn’t find any record of that.  What I do know is that Pancho Barnes and Donald Douglas are emblematic of our history and the skill and vision each of them brought to their work is an essential part of the ethos of Santa Monica.

Links:

Visit the Museum of Flying at the Santa Monica Airport to learn more about the history of aviation, and the important role it played in the history of the Santa Monica.   Information, www.museumofflying.com

Pancho Barnes has been memorialized in the film, “The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club.” http://www.legendofpanchobarnes.com/film/index.php

and in the Lauren Kessler 2000 biography, “The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes.”

She is also portrayed in “The Right Stuff” a 1979 book by Tom Wolfe about the U.S. manned space program and in the 1983 film  “The Right Stuff” based on the book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28film%29

Donald Douglas has been memorialized in the Wilbur H. Morrison 1991 biography, “Donald W. Douglas: A Heart With Wings.”

and in the PBS series
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/chasingthesun/companies/douglas.html

Greayer Clover: for more information and for his writing
http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Clover/SuzanneTC.html

What Say You? 710 Wilshire Boulevard

710 Wilshire Building.  Arthur Harvey, Architect

SUSAN CLOKE

Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror

For all its life 710 Wilshire Boulevard, “the Santa Monica Professional Building,” has housed small businesses and professional offices.  Now it is the subject of public debate in the City.  The owner, Alex Gorby of Maxser and Co. Ltd., is proposing the retention and adaptive reuse of the landmark building and the building of a 285-room hotel, with ground floor retail and restaurant uses, to be located on the existing parking lot immediately to the south of the Santa Monica Professional Building.

 A Spanish Colonial Revival style building and a City Historic Landmark the 710 Wilshire building is easily recognizable and well liked.  Designed by Los Angeles architect Arthur E. Harvey, who also designed the Embassy Hotel Apartments on 3^rd Street.  In 1928, the year 710 Wilshire was built, at six stories and 40,638 square feet, it was the largest building in the neighborhood.

If developed as proposed the old and new buildings together will total approximately four times the size of the existing, approximately 40,000 square foot 710 Wilshire building.  A development of the size proposed would not be allowed under current zoning.  In materials submitted to the City in 2010 Maxser and Co. stated: “The alternative of building a smaller 135-room hotel consistent with current zoning is not economically viable.” 

So, in order to apply for development rights over the current zoning, the 710 Wilshire Boulevard project opted to go the Development Agreement route through the City approval process. They are one of 14 major developments currently in the City’s Development Agreement queue.  In the downtown area the Development Agreement applicants include, among others, the Miramar Hotel and a Marriott Hotel.

A Development Agreement (DA) is a contract negotiated between the City and the developer.  The City Council Members are responsible for representing the interests of the City as they have the final say on the terms and conditions of the DA.  The premise of a DA is that the benefits the City would achieve would justify the breaking of the City Zoning Code.  Additionally, in a DA, deal points can be very broad.

In the case of 710 Wilshire one deal point, the preservation of the Landmark Building was not negotiable and is included.  But there are other issues to be negotiated:  the size, the height, the massing, the scale, the aesthetics of the proposed design, all are up for discussion.  Parking, bicycles, transportation funding are on the table.  Local hiring programs, student internships, and more – a list of conditions the City finds to be of sufficient importance and benefits to offset the additional benefits to the developer. 

The City is addressing, but has yet to resolve, many of the issues listed above and the plan for review by a joint committee composed of members of the Landmarks Commission and the Architectural Review Board is a good idea.

Where the 710 Wilshire DA is weakest is on the terms of a living wage requirement.  In fact it’s downright off in its wage proposals and it includes a provision which gives the City Manager the authority to reduce the required wage standards, under certain conditions, instead of meeting of going through a public process at City Council.

Elsa Mercado

I spoke with Elsa Mercado, who currently works at the Viceroy, and is a shop steward for the hotel union.  Born in El Salvador,  she lived in a beautiful area with mountains and rivers and was surrounded by her extended family.  She and her many cousins were very close to each other and saw each other every day.  She dreamed of becoming a nurse. 

One day a man came to the house of one her cousins and asked for help changing a tire.  After getting help with his tire the man let them know he was an investigator for the government of the then president.  Her cousin had organized against the president, as had Elsa Mercado.  The man took her cousin away and for fifteen days no one knew where he was.  Some agriculture students found him lying in a field, he had been badly beaten and they brought him home.  Shortly after that war broke out and life was in danger.  Finally, poverty and war and family problems made her decide to try for a better life in the United States.  Elsa Mercado had dreams for herself and her three daughters.

For thirteen years Elsa Mercado lived in California without her daughters.  At first she worked in factories where the wages were very low and the work very hard.  Places we would call sweatshops.  When she got a chance to work at a hotel, she jumped at it.  Of working at the Viceroy Hotel she said, “We have rights, we have a dignified wage, we have health care and other benefits, and we have the liberty of saying what is right and what is wrong.”

Now her daughters are here in California, all are working and, at the same time, one is studying to be a teacher, one is studying to be a lawyer, and one is studying to be a nurse.

Elsa Mercado said, “I believe my plan is to continue to work at my job and also to work for the union in the defense of people who work.  We are asking for a dignified wage of $15/hour and rights and respect from all the hotels that will be opening in Santa Monica.”

Setting livable wages and requiring reasonable benefits is allowable in a Development Agreement.  Santa Monicans made it clear that they support the concept of a dignified wage, that it is important, during the time the City discussed and passed the Living Wage Ordinance.

I join in asking the City Council Members to require that the Development Agreement for 710 Wilshire include requirements, for as long as the hotel is in business of, in Elsa Mercado’s words, “a dignified wage and rights and respect.”   

What Say You?

Hometown Heroes: 21st Century Abolitionists

SUSAN CLOKE

Columnist, Santa Monica Mirror

Human trafficking is unthinkable but, tragically, not impossible.  Human trafficking, the buying, selling, and smuggling of people—most often women and children; exists in the year 2012.  It exists around the world and it exists in the United States.

This was a hard column to write.  Every person I spoke with, every report I read, brought fresh horror to mind.  Thirteen year-old girls forced into prostitution under the threat of having a sister tortured and killed.  Men and women, desperate in their own countries, lured by fraudulent promises of a better life in America, the land of opportunity, locked in basements and only let out to do forced work.  Children who are kidnapped and sold for profit, their families desperate to find them. 

The FBI reports (http://www.fbi.gov/) “Victims are controlled physically, through beatings, burnings, rapes, and starvation; emotionally, through isolation, psychological abuse, drug dependency, and threats against family members in home countries; and financially, through debt bondage and threat of deportation.”

Thankfully, there are 21^st century abolitionists willing to come to the aid and defense of the victims of human trafficking.  One such is Valerie Martinez, organizer of the Santa Monica Bay Woman’s Club March 30 event to benefit organizations that work with victims of human trafficking. (www.smbwc.org/forfreedom) 

The organizations are: CAST, A21, and Saving Innocence.  All three organizations are local.  For Ms. Martinez this work started when she was in school in Australia and heard, Christine Caine, founder of A21, speak about human trafficking.  “I didn’t even know human slavery still existed.  I knew then I would do almost anything to help even one girl who had been forced into being a sex slave,” said Ms. Martinez.

CAST (Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking http://www.castla.org/about-us) was started in 1998 after their work in breaking the 1995 El Monte Sweatshop case where more than 70 Thai laborers were held captive behind razor wire, under twenty-four hour guard and forced to work 18 hour days.

CAST provides trafficked persons access to safe shelters, medical services, job training and education.  CAST is actively working with other organizations and government to prosecute traffickers and to promote legislation and regulations to end human trafficking and to protect victims of human trafficking.

The A21 Campaign, (http://www.thea21campaign.org/) calls for the “abolition of injustice in the 21^st Century.”  A21 has their first shelter in Greece, as it is the gateway to human trafficking in Europe.  A21 workers are the first people the Greek police call when they suspect a person is a victim of human trafficking. 

A21 workers go to detention centers and let the girls know that help is available.  They bring in food, clothing and hygiene products, provide legal representation, offer shelter programs, and repatriate girls who want to go home.  A21 works to provide each girl with the help she decides she needs.

Saving Innocence, http://www.savinginnocence.org/ officially founded in January of this year, began as a result of Kim Biddle’s volunteer work with child victims of human trafficking here in Los Angeles.  Ms. Biddle has so far been able to help 16 girls, ranging in age from 11 to 17, who were victims of human trafficking.  Most were arrested for prostitution but were, in fact, forced sex slaves. 

She follows the girls starting with when they are put in to juvenile hall, acting as their advocate as they go to court, live in group homes and begin to re-establish paths to safe and more normal lives.  Ms. Biddle said, “I feel I’m fortunate to be able to go to some of the darkest places in society and bring light to those places.  I’m committed to walking with these girls on their journeys.”

The work to abolish human trafficking is becoming stronger as the traffickers become a stronger force in the criminal world.  The actress Mira Sorvino, a Goodwill Ambassador to combat Human Trafficking for the UN Office on Drugs and Crimes said, “human trafficking is tied in 2^nd place with illegal sale of arms as the most profitable criminal enterprise in the world with an estimated illegal profit of 32 billion dollars per year and second only to the drug trade.”

In her role as a Goodwill Ambassador Ms. Sorvino has traveled the world attending conferences and working with governments to end human trafficking, but her focus is on the United Sates.  She said “people in the U.S. are not aware, and find it hard to believe, this is happening here and yet the numbers of victims of human traffic in the United States are as high as 300,000 persons.  I have spoken about human trafficking to legislators, attorneys general and police departments.  We need to pass strong laws and to provide education that will protect victims, prosecute traffickers, and end human trafficking.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is a world leader in the fight against human trafficking, estimates “it is likely that somewhere between 12 million and 27 million human beings are suffering in bondage around the world. Men, women and children are trapped in prostitution or labor in fields and factories under brutal bosses who threaten them with violence or jail if they try to escape.

“I have seen firsthand the suffering that human trafficking causes. Not only does it result in injury and abuse—it also takes away its victims’ power to control their own destinies. In Thailand I have met teenage girls who had been prostituted as young children and were dying of AIDS. In Eastern Europe I have met mothers who lost sons and daughters to trafficking and had nowhere to turn for help.” http://www.state.gov

As a nation we believe that all people deserve, in Secretary Clinton’s words, “to live free, work with dignity, and pursue their dreams.”  Yet, today we face dangerous, criminal organizations trafficking in human beings.  They are the new slave traders.  May we all be the new abolitionists.