by Paul R. Spitzzeri
For the second and final part of this post on the only two women aviators included in a photo depicting a gallery of sixty masters of the air, we turn to (Mary) Neta Snook, who, like André Peyre, profiled in the first part, had a brief career in the flying field, but made a memorable mark here in greater Los Angeles and broadly, with most attention given to a famous student of hers. The photo, however, incorrectly lists her first name as “Anita.”
Snook was born in 1896 in Mount Carroll, Illinois, in the western part of the Land of Lincoln near the Mississippi River and almost directly west of Chicago. The oldest of two girls of Adella Sisler and William Snook, who was a barber, carpenter and contractor, Snook had a fascination with mechanical vehicles dating to her interest in her father’s automobile.
In the Teens, the family moved to Ames, Iowa, north of Des Moines, and Snook enrolled at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) and, while she was a home economics major, she took engineering, mechanics and other courses, as well. An early reference to her aviation interests came in early June 1917, just after America’s entry in World War I, when the Davenport Democrat and Leader of the 4th reported that “the first girl in Iowa to enter an aviation school in the Hawkeye state to be taught flying” arrived in town.
As she completed her second day of instruction, the paper added, “and think of it! She wears overalls and big, horrid looking work gloves during labor hours!” Obviously, Snook was engaged in something anathema to prevailing ideas of what women could and should do and the article went on to note that
Miss Neta contends that she has an ulterior motive in entering upon this man’s work in the air—a most patriotic one—for she desires to fly one of Uncle Sam’s war planes in the fight against Germany!
After adding that her red hair somehow explained Snook’s fascination with flight, the Democrat and Leader commented that it took a considerable amount of persuasion to get the young woman to have her photo taken. It ended with the comment that the program was about two months and that she was to learn assembly as well as flight.
The goal then became to become an accredited pilot, a substantial achievement for any woman at the time, so Snook left Iowa to go to Virginia and attend the flight school of aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss, though she first raised money for expenses by building planes in Davenport and Chicago, though both crashed, while she traveled east on a freight, rather than a passenger, train.
Because the Curtiss school was near a government aviation academy at Hampton Roads, however, an private flight was curbed and Snook was denied an opportunity to get her license. Her next stop was Miami for some flying experience. While she sought to find a position with the American Air Corps during the war, this was rejected, so she went to Elmira, New York where she was a parts and engine inspector for the British Royal Flying Corps. For her services, she was given a commendation by the English government.
Following the war’s termination, Snook did some barnstorming, including in California, and, in July 1919, it was reported that she intended “to fly across the Pacific in a land plane, with pontoons as her only protection.” She was to head to the coast with her parents, but, it seems that the idea was soon discarded as impractical, and she returned to Iowa in 1920.
Acquiring a broken-down Canuck (obviously of Canadian manufacture!) training plane, she, listed as an “aviatrix” in the federal census that year, attracted crowds while she worked on its renovation and then flew it from a road in Ames. Her mother recalled her anxiety as Snook took her much younger sister, Vivian, on a flight (the sibling ended up getting her pilot’s license in 1929).
By the end of 1920, Snook was back in greater Los Angeles, with the Long Beach Telegram publishing a photo of her as a pilot conveying humidifiers through the air. Over the ensuing Christmas holiday weekend, reported the Pomona Progress of the 24th, 100-mile free-style and 60-mile handicap air races and a balloon race were to be held in Long Beach. There was also consideration of having a special contest between Snook and Aloysia McLintie, a resident of the beach city, this to have been “the first of its kind to be held in America.” It is not known, however, if this race transpired.
On Washington’s Birthday 1921 and in conjunction with auto races at the Los Angeles Speedway in Beverly Hills, the Los Angeles Record of the 14th reported that “all records of commercial aviation have been shattered by the local list of entries.” This included 31 pilots, some of whom are depicted in the featured photo (Hubert Kittle, Emery Rogers, Earl Dougherty, Winfield B. Kinner, Wally Timm) for a 250-mile race to San Diego and back; 42-mile and 36-mile sprints over the Speedway; and a second 36-mile race for commercial pilots, including Snook, Rogers, Kinner and Kittle. These contests, however, do not appear to have been held.
In early March, Snook was slated to go on a flying exhibition tour in Hong Kong and Japan and applied for a passport for that purpose. While she’d been in Los Angeles for at least several months, she listed her permanent residence as her parents’ house in Ames with her occupation given as “aviatrix.” The trip, however, was postponed.
At the end of March at Santa Monica, Snook took on a major challenge, with the Progress of the 26th observing that,
Miss Neta Snook, aviatrix and one of the fifteen women to be awarded an official pilots license by the Aero club of America was scheduled to attempt to set a new Southern California altitude record this afternoon. The present record is 16,529 feet and was made by Pilot Frank Clark of Los Angeles.
It was later reported that Snook “broke the world’s altitude record for a 60 horsepower motor in Los Angeles recently when she reached a height of 15,000 feet.” As noted in the first part of this post, Peyre achieved that height on a later flight. On April Fool’s Day, the Telegram noted in its following day’s edition, Snook engaged in an impromptu tandem flight with Dougherty who was heading to an “airplane luncheon” at the estate of Glendale developer Leslie C. Brand and passed over the Kinner air field when she took to the air and headed to the event.
When the national convention of the Elks fraternal order was held in Los Angeles during mid-July 1921, a series of air races were held at the Speedway and the Record of the 13th commented that “Miss Neta Snook, one of the few women to hold an international pilot’s license, will race against forty men in the International Air tournament.” The paper further observed that “the intrepid woman flyer is now flying to Los Angeles from the east to take part in the big aerial program.” The aviator later recalled that she finished fifth in the crowded field.
The Des Moines Register of 3 October cited news from Ames the prior day that,
Neta Snook, Iowa’s premiere [sic] aviatrix, has added a new one to the possibilities of flying. From her work as a passenger carrier in California, an airplane deer hunt was evolved, with Miss Snook as pilot and hunter both.
A letter to her mother was cited as the aviator explained how “the deer are scared out [of hiding] by the hum of the motor” and a passenger tracked the “travel of the frightened deer.” It was added that Snook then guided her craft “into one of the flats between ranges of mountains” and then sought to “hasten to the foot of the canyon out of which the deer will run” so it could be shot down. This use of the airplane for aerial hunting naturally sends shudders through the body of any animal rights advocate.
By early 1922, Snook was living in Huntington Park, the suburban town southeast of Los Angeles and she met William I. Southern, who had an interest in aviation. When she learned she was pregnant, the couple quickly married in Santa Ana and they welcomed their son, William, whose middle name Curtiss was in honor of Neta’s instructor from five years before. She quickly sold her plane and, evidently, did not fly in a plane for another half-century. The Snooks, who divorced for a brief time and remarried, raised fruit and exotic birds near San Jose and Palo Alto.
In June 1928, however, another woman aviator received significant attention when Amelia Earhart flew, as a passenger, on a flight across the Atlantic, piloted by two men. The Los Angeles Express of the 20th ran an Associated Press feature that commented,
The woman who taught Amelia Earhart, first woman to fly across the Atlantic, to fly, closely watched the progress of the “Friendship” on its history-making dash.
Mrs. W.I. Southern followed her pupil’s progress at her little farm near [Los Gatos]. She have [sic] given up aviation. In speaking of Miss Earhart’s student days she told of how in 1921, when she was known as Neta Snook, she leased an airport site on Long Beach boulevard, near Los Angeles.
It was at this airport [that] she first met Miss Earhart, who pawned her fur coat and jewelry to buy and airplane and take lessons. Miss Earhart’s father, Mrs. Southern said, was bitterly opposed to his daughter’s ambition to fly and strictly forbade it.
The airport was that of Winfield B. (Bert) Kinner, one of those pilots featured on the photograph and who was featured in a prior “From Point A to Point B” post here. In later years, as Earhart’s fame grew, Neta was occasionally contacted to discuss her early instruction of the legendary aviator, who vanished during a trans-Pacific flight in 1937.
Generally, though, Neta kept a low profile, though in September 1953, during a visit with her mother and sister in Ames, she was featured in that city’s Tribune. While she protested that “it’s all been so long ago,” she did provide much of her aviation history and, when it came to Earhart, she said, “she was wonderful” and “soon knew lots more than I did” about flying. She added that she’d spoken to the lost flyer’s mother and “is conviced [sic] that Miss Earhart went down at once.”
In 1974, after much prodding from friends and others, given her important tie to Earhart and after taking writing classes in Los Gatos, Neta published an autobiography called I Taught Amelia to Fly. Three years later, the 81-year old gave an interview that received national attention and affirmed her view that women should be allowed to fly jumbo jets, asserting that “there are just more sophisticated instruments that’s all.”
She went though some of her history, including the comment that “she made a bargain with a businessman in Glendale [Brand] to test his planes in exchange for the use of his airfield,” the private airport located at his estate, El Miradero, near the base of the Verdugo Mountains in the northwestern part of the city. Neta recalled that she sewed linen for the fuselages of Navy craft, conducted aerial ads, and gave Sunday rides to the public.
She added, “Amelia did her first four or five hours in my Canuck. Then she bought a Kinner airster, and I gave her seven more hours in it.” When Neta sold her craft, it was for a lot with a house on it in Manhattan Beach and a $500 Liberty bond issued during the First World War. Tellingly, she continued that “Amelia had lots of accidents—but then all my friends of the old days nearly killed themselves in lots of accidents.”
When it came to her pioneer achievements, Neta, commenting during the height of the feminist movement, was blunt in her views on that topic, stating, “I’m not interested in that at all,” with the devout member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses continuing, “The Bible says the man is the head of the family” and “I did things because I wanted to,” while stressing “I didn’t want to be portrayed as a hippie.”
Her son stated, when Neta died in 1991 at the age of 95—the same longevity, by the way, as Andrée Peyre—that she gave up flying when he was born because she saw so many of her aviator colleagues die in crashes and assumed that her good fortune would soon end in the same way. Her obituary While she was remembered, inevitable, as Earhart’s teacher, Neta Snook was far more than that, as a woman aviation pioneer in her own right.