Stan McClain has earned a tremendous reputation (and a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Operating Cameramen) as an aerial cinematographer. His credits include TV shows and commercials, industrials, and feature films from Rambo to Passenger 57, Dropzone to The Doors, and more (see: this link for more on Stan's career ). Stan has always been passionate about flight and the history of aerial photography. In fact he wrote an article about the birth of the motion picture cameramen which traces all the way back to Pancho's grandfather, Thaddeus Lowe. You can read it at this link here

Stan is an enthusiastic supporter of our project. He contacted us and offered the use of an interview with aviatrix Bobbi Trout, which he shot a number of years ago. Now, he and his wife Kim have made a generous donation to KOCE-TV in support of the film, through their company FilmTools. We're grateful for the gift, for as we enter the post-production phase of the project, financial support is critical.

Incidentally, FilmTools is a terrific company that supplies all sorts of expendables and camera equipment support for the motion picture industry. Based in Burbank, it's well worth a visit if you're in need of tape stock, grip and lighting equipment, or heck even a matte box...they've got it all there. Check it out at:

Filmtools

Tonight on "The American Experience" (and April 12th on our sponsor station KOCE-TV, PBS of Orange County) is "Sister Aimee". This documentary, which I have not yet seen, is about Aimee Semple McPherson, an evangelist who made her mark in the Los Angeles of the 20's and 30's, and the founder the Four Square Church. A visionary woman who lived her life by her own rules and who defied her first husband's wishes, Aimee had something in common with Pancho. It's no surprise then to learn that Pancho and Aimee were friends, and that Pancho visited Semple's Four Square Church (and possibly later, the Angeles Temple).

Florence Lowe (later "Pancho") was practically born on a horse. Supposedly she rode a pony at age three. By the time she was a young lady, she was an accomplished horsewoman who had trained her gelding "Platinum King" to do all sorts of tricks. "P.K." ended up getting Florence into the motion picture business, because trick horses and riders were needed for the early Westerns. "He would gallop up to a stagecoach and get a cowboy off the stagecoach," Pancho wrote in a never-published autobiography," with perfect timing in front of the camera."

Florence's riding skills caught the attention of Aimee Semple McPherson. (The two may have even met as a result of horses; two photos in the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive appear to show McPherson at Florence's stables.) According to Pancho, this led to an offer to ride "Radiant" at the Ambassador Horse Show ring. It was a bit of classic showwomanship, McPherson style, with a bit of deception thrown in for good measure!

"Aimee was quite a girl," writes Pancho, "She would come to the shows dressed in side-saddle attire with ahigh silk and parade around and talk to people. She would ride Radiant out around the exercise ring... There was a kind of tunnel that went into the entrance of [the ring]. She rode him into the tunnel and we changed places. I was dressed in an outfit exactly like hers...I used to ride that ring so fast with my head hunched down between my shoulders that nobody could tell I wasn't Aimee. We changed again in the tunnel, I dismounting (sp) and she getting on the horse and she took him out and cooled him off. All the people gathered around that admired Aimee and she took her bows happily."

Pancho enjoyed her part in the ruse quite a bit, and noted that Aimee paid her well for her performance. "I remember how [Aimee] used to beg the audience not to desecrate the Temple with the vulgar clinking of change," Pancho noted with a wink of admiration, "and to quietly put folded bills and money into the plates when they passed them."

Pancho also admired McPherson for another reason: like herself (as Florence Lowe Barnes she was the wife of an Episcopal minister), the evangelist led a double life, one on the edge and full of romance and adventure. "She drank and smoked with the best of them," Pancho recalled. She also noted, attempting to explain Aimee's scandalous disappearance (which she explained as a kidnapping), that "Joe Flores who is an old horseman...spent a lot of time with her. They were very gay between each other. It was pretty well understood thing around Flores' barn that when Aimee made her disappearance act, Joe went with her."

Wonder if these details made it into the documentary?? Stay tuned!

Barbara Hunter Schultz's house speaks volumes about her character: the rear part of the spacious home is not a garage, but an airplane hangar. In it are five or six aircraft in various states of repair — but at least three are flyable and Barbara goes aloft regularly, often with her husband Phil who is a professional pilot.

Barbara lives near Fox Field in Lancaster, California, and has been in these parts for over thirty years. When she first came to the area, the name "Pancho Barnes" was still on the tip of everyone's tongue, especially around Fox Field where Pancho's son Billy maintained his hangar. Billy and Phil worked for several years, in fact, to restore Pancho's Travelair "Mystery Ship" to flight status, before Bill was killed in an airplane crash in 1980.

Being an adventurous woman herself, and one fascinated with aviation, it seemed natural that Barbara would feel a bond with Pancho. That's the reason, back in the 1980's, that she began to seriously think about the idea of writing a Pancho Barnes biography. The task ended up taking roughly ten years.

The result is a great book, one that not only tells Pancho's story in an entertaining fashion, but does a great deal to separate fact from fiction. In Pancho's case, there seems to be a lot of fiction about what she said and did ... and who she did it with!

One of Barbara's biggest breaks in writing the book, she explained to director Amanda Pope during our recent interview, occured when she met Gertrude Marya Caraman. Marya had been Pancho's social secretary during some of her most formative, and riotous, days — during the late 1920's when she the world was her oyster. Marya helped plan many of Pancho's wild Hollywood parties, and started helping Pancho write an autobiography (one of many attempts she would make during her lifetime!) Barbara Schultz quotes a terrific letter from Marya to Pancho in her book, recalling Christmas 1929: "You gave me your travel case and a huge bottle of toilet water you had bought for Ramon (Novarro) and decided wasn't good enough for him...I remember sitting by the bed and you sitting up IN the bed and thoughtfully (philosopher style) scratching your legs and telling me that you were a genius and I admitting that you might be."

Writing the biography might have taken nearly a decade, but Barbara enjoyed the task thoroughly, as it allowed her to meet a cast of fascinating characters. "Every now and then, the human races produces unique, one-of-a-kind characters who become our celebrities, menotrs and the stuff of which legends are born," Schultz writes in her book's introduction, "Florence Lowe 'Pancho' Barnes was a character among characters."

If you're interested in the book, you can find it on Amazon.com or other internet booksellers. You can also buy it directly from Barbara's amazing internet shop, PlaneMercantile. While you're there, you can also take a look at some of the other neat merchandise she carries, from Amelia Earhart Luggage to books and jewelry.

here is a link

Some of the things you get to see when you do this kind of research are quite neat! For instance, if you travel up to Edwards Air Force Base and visit the Flight Test museum, you get to see the door to Pancho's ranch pick-up truck (above). It's displayed in a corner. Neat...but not necessarily that important from the standpoint of making a film. More important are the materials preserved in the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive, whose caretaker is Dr. Lou D'Elia. In Lou's collection you'll find thousands of items ranging from Pancho's personal papers, to photos, a painting painted by Pancho when she was a young lady, and . . .well would you believe it? Another door (left) from Pancho's pick-up truck!

Sometimes chasing down a "lead" on some Pancho-related materials can be quite exciting. A great deal of the work takes place over the phone and email, but of course it's a lot more interesting when there's a local connection. A recent example, is that in early January I visited with the Los Angeles Public Library's photo curator, Carolyn Cole. A true renaissance lady, Carol has the enviable job of presiding over a collection of something like a zillion (well okay maybe just a half million or so) rare photographs that tell the story of Los Angeles. In fact you can visit their database on-line, at this site:

LAPL Photo Collection

The database on the site is growing every day, as Carol and her staff digitize photos and make them available for the public. Meanwhile, if you want to really peruse the collection and see what's not yet on the website, you have to make an appointment.

Anyway, my visit was simply thrilling. It turns out a number of years ago Carol helped set up a special exhibit featuring images of aviation in Los Angeles. Not only did she know all about Pancho, but she took time out to sit with me as I went through some of the photos in the Security Pacific Bank Collection. Some of them are terrific, including several I'd never seen before. There was Pancho, posing in front of a Lockheed Vega before doing some maximum load test-flights...and there she was with Bobbi Trout dressed in a "Betsy Ross Corps" flying uniform. Truly exciting stuff, and getting to meet Carol and see some of her favority photos was worth the price of admission. There really are some amazing photos in the L.A. Public Library but. . . no car doors! At least that's what I thought. Then Carol pointed out that if I did a search on the website I might be surprised. Sure enough, the search terms "car door" brought up this delightful photo (below). The subject? The driver's side car door on gangster Mickey Cohen's Cadillac, showing off the bullet proof glass!

A great deal of attention is always focused on the relationship between young Florence "Pancho" Barnes and her eccentric grandfather, Prof. Thaddeus Lowe. Lowe was after all a prodigious inventor who flew balloons during the Civil War for the Union Army, developed gas works and gas patents, and the builder of the Mount Lowe Railway. It's easy to forget that the other side of Pancho's family — her mother Florence was from the Philadelphia Main Line Dobbins family — was equally accomplished and celebrated in their time. Her grandfather Richard Dobbins was a famous architect who designed many of the buildings for the 1876 Centennial celebration. Caroline Dobbins, her grandmother, was a philanthropist who left much of her estate to endow CalTech. Their son (and Pancho's uncle) Horace was a shrewd investor and developer who became mayor of Pasadena. One of the things Horace is best known for, is building the "California Cycleway" in the late 1890's. An elevated wooden tollroad that ran through the heart of Pasadena, the Cycleway was a freeway for bicycles.

The cycleway was celebrated in a 1900 article as "an elevated perfectly adjusted road running from the heart of Pasadena to the Plaza of Los Angeles. In appearance it somewhat resembles the elevated road in New York, being apparently as high in places; but it is built of wood instead of iron..." The article concluded that the cycleway would have an income of approximately $20,000 a month "if half of the wheelmen in two cities patronize the road once a month". Unfortunately, these figures did not hold true, as the emergence of the automobile greatly decreased interest in the bicycle. In the end, the Cycleway was never completed, and portions of it were torn down to make way for commercial development. It's worth noting that four years after the "bicycle freeway" opened, a pair of bicycle mechanics named Orville and Wilbur Wright became the first men to perform powered flights in their home-built airplane!