Avionics News April 2012 - 36

phoebe fAirgrAve omlie
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and water tanks at 15-square-mile intervals to identify the locale, distance and direction to the nearest airport. As part of the Works Progress Administration, air marking provided thousands of jobs for unemployed men and was an unqualified success. Within a year, 58 percent was completed. Phoebe received well-deserved credit for both an innovative idea and effective execution; she was featured in Time and Newsweek magazine. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt honored Phoebe as one of the 10 outstanding women of the year. Unfortunately, personal tragedy overshadowed the joy surrounding Phoebe’s achievement. On Aug. 5, 1936, Vernon Omlie died in a plane crash in St. Louis. He was only 40 years old.
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In 1937, while on leave from Washington, Phoebe and W. Percy McDonald authored the Tennessee Aviation Act, which called for dedicating aviation fuel tax to be split between maintenance and improvements to state airports and aviation education for Tennessee’s youth. Under this act, Phoebe set up a system of schools for training civilian pilots, which became a model for the national Civilian Pilot Training Program, a federal program that ultimately trained 10,000 pilots in 460 colleges and universities. Throughout her federal career, Phoebe worked on safety issues, aircraft design, flight training methods and a host of other projects under the auspices of a series of agencies that eventually became the Civil Aeronautics Administration. She left government service in 1952, and bought a cattle farm in Como, Miss. Five years later, she traded it for a hotel and
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cafe in Lambert, Miss., which was soon tragically destroyed by a tornado. The lady daredevil who had attained the heights now fell to the depths. She was broke. She had lost everything. During the next dozen years, she lived in more than a dozen different places in Alabama, Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Illinois, sometimes staying with old friends, occasionally working as a companion for elderly ladies. In 1970, she landed in Indianapolis, where she lived in a transient hotel for five years. She died July 17, 1975, at age 73, a victim of poverty and lung cancer. In 1982, the control tower at Memphis International Airport was designated The Omlie Tower. q

The author, Janann Sherman, is professor and chair of the history department at the University of Memphis.

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Avionics News April 2012

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