It’s May 29th, 1926. It is an uninteresting day in the usual favorites (Washington Times, Evening Star, Milwaukee Leader), so instead I'm perusing the Mendocino Coast Beacon when one blurry photo catches my eye. A woman mid-transfer from a racing speedboat to a moving airplane over Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine, Florida. The caption is almost offhand about it: "She was the first woman to perform this feat."

Her name was Mabel Cody. I'd never heard of her. So I started pulling threads.

Go back five years. Miami Herald, March 27th, 1921. Full-page advertisement for Mabel Cody's Flying Circus, direction of Curley Burns, at Curtiss-Bright Ranch in Hialeah. Today. 3 p.m.

She is billed as the niece of Buffalo Bill. A daring woman aviator. The ad promises she will walk about on the wings of a moving airplane and drop from a parachute at a thousand feet. On a Sunday afternoon in Miami. You could take the Big Red Bus from Twelfth Street and Avenue B at one o'clock.

By 1924 she's in The Sentinel as "World Champion Aviatrix" making personal appearances at the Broadway Theater, doing trick flying over the city each afternoon, drawing crowds to watch her plane trail fire across the evening sky.

She had her own flying circus.

Mabel Cody wasn't the only woman doing extraordinary things in the air in this era. There was also Gladys Ingle. Another barnstormer operating in exactly the same world at exactly the same time. They were named in the same breath by aviation writers of the period. Whether they ever stood on the same airfield, shook hands, or watched each other work, I’m not sure. It would seem weird today for something like that to be true, but maybe not back then? In a barnstorming circuit that small, in a world where there were almost no women doing this at all, it seems almost impossible they didn't.

We covered Gladys recently, including the moment she changed a tire mid-air! If you missed that one, it's worth 5 minutes of your day.

This is where the story gets good.

In 1922, the Mabel Cody Flying Circus performed for prisoners at the Virginia State Penitentiary. The inmates couldn't get to the State Fair in Richmond, so Burns arranged for the whole troupe to fly over the prison yard instead. Bugs McGowan leaping from a Duesenberg to a rope ladder dangling from a moving plane. Mabel on the wings. Parachutes. Convicts watching from the exercise yard with the freedom of the grounds.

The government started making noise about shutting them down. There was, as the Atlanta Journal delicately put it in 1928, "a little misunderstanding with the federal government" over what Mabel and her crew were doing in the sky. That same paper called her "the most reckless woman in this world" and said that compared to Mabel, Amelia Earhart and Ruth Elder were "duck soup."

She fell into a pond in Meridian, Mississippi in June 1928, dropped from a plane's undercarriage during a show at the local waterworks. A parachute jumper named Bonnie Rowe dove twenty feet into the water from an airplane to pull her out. He was knocked unconscious on impact. Mabel escaped injury and was rescued. The headline the next morning: Diver Hurt Trying to Rescue Mabel Cody. Another Tuesday.

Then there's the collision.

At a Richmond fairgrounds, a pilot named Russell Simon was flying twenty feet below her during a plane-change stunt at 800 feet. Mabel climbed to the top wing and reached for the swinging ladder hanging from his landing gear. She missed the first time. The planes circled back. She caught the rung and began pulling herself up. As her weight left the lower plane, a gust pushed it forward and upward. The two aircraft met. Simon's tail shattered. His plane rolled into a steep spiral dive. Mabel watched from her own undamaged ship as it went in. There was no recovery. That collision is one of the reasons the government eventually banned planes from flying less than 300 feet apart.

And that photograph I found this morning in the Mendocino Coast Beacon, the one that went everywhere as proof she was the first woman to transfer from an aquaplane to an airplane — a 1991 investigation found it was taken after an unsuccessful attempt. It took her 113 tries over six days to finally make the climb. She was black and blue the whole time. The photo that made her famous was the one where she failed.

Her publicity manager Richard (one outlet writes “Robert”) C. Burns died July 21st, 1929. Age 35. A brain abscess following a botched mastoid operation. He'd had a violent headache for days before he'd agree to go to a hospital. It was too late and he was buried at Green Hill Cemetery in Greensboro.

When the papers asked about surviving relatives, it was Mabel who answered. She said she didn't know of any. A later account would describe her and “Curley” as married. But in 1929, quoting her directly, she was his employer. He was her publicity man. Whatever they were after nine years on the road together, she didn't claim him when he died.

But for Mabel, after that, the record goes dry. At least in the newspapers.

No death record. No grave. No confirmed maiden name. "Mabel Cody, niece of Buffalo Bill" was perfect billing. Richard C. Burns was a publicity man. That was his entire job. Whether Buffalo Bill was actually her uncle, whether Cody was even her real name, I’m not sure.

After a life in the air, she walked off the page and vanished.

Amelia Earhart got the statue. The airport terminals. The biopic. The postage stamp.

Mabel Cody got a three-inch column in a small California paper on a Saturday morning, one hundred years ago today. And a photograph… apparently of the time she failed.

I find her extraordinary.

See you tomorrow.

— Chris

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