Through it all, Phoebe was a popular subject for newspaper columnists. These hard-boiled men of the Fourth Estate maintained an attitude of male condescension toward women pilots. For example, they dubbed the Aerosol Trophy Race the ‘Powder Puff Derby’ — a term that remained prominent in the journalistic lexicon throughout the decade. Phoebe may not have had the polish of Amelia Earhart, a Smith College alumna, but she was a bright, articulate, attractive woman who was also an excellent pilot. The cynics in the nation’s city rooms were convinced that ordinary people loved reading about the paradox of a slip of a girl excelling in a field thought to be a male preserve.

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By 1932 Phoebe’s feats had received so much publicity that she was asked by the Democratic National Committee to fly a woman speaker around the country, stumping for Franklin D. Roosevelt. She flew her assigned speaker 5,000 miles during the campaign, and often joined her in a ringing personal endorsement of Roosevelt.

After FDR won the election, Phoebe flew to Warm Springs, Ga., and asked the vacationing president-elect for a job. Soon thereafter she moved to Washington, D.C., and became the first woman government official in aviation. In 1935 Eleanor Roosevelt named her ‘one of the 11 women whose achievements made it safe to say the world is progressing.’

Phoebe’s job with the Roosevelt administration was acting as a technical adviser, serving as liaison between the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics and the Bureau of Air Commerce. In this position she worked with Amelia Earhart to come up with an air grid to cover the nation, making flying safer.

For his part, Vernon Omlie kept a much lower profile, but he was just as busy and active, staying in Memphis teaching and running the flying service. His skill as a teacher was widely acknowledged — a reputation that was enhanced by his emphasis on air safety and meticulous flight plans. More and more successful young business and professional men joined his legion of students.

In 1933 one of his students was author William Faulkner, whose reputation as a writer would wax and wane several times before he achieved icon status two decades later. Faulkner was already a local celebrity at the time, and his choice of Vernon as a flying mentor must have enhanced Vernon’s franchise in the eyes of other students. Faulkner and Vernon became good friends in the process, and the writer may have used Vernon and Phoebe as very loose models for the protagonists in his novel Pylon.

Although Phoebe’s governmental duties meant she was based in Washington and had to travel throughout the country, she and Vernon remained a devoted couple. When in Memphis they would often dine in the Venetian Room at the Peabody Hotel. From contemporary accounts, it seems they were as dazzling a pair as any F. Scott Fitzgerald could have wished for.

In 1936 Phoebe left government service and rejoined Vernon in their expanding aviation operation. Tragedy struck a few months later, on August 5, when Vernon was killed in the crash of a commercial airliner in which he was flying as a passenger to Chicago. The fatal crash occurred near St. Louis in an airplane owned by Chicago & Southern, an airline that had never before had a fatality. It seems ironic that Vernon was killed in an airplane he was not flying himself. Vernon, who had died at age 40, had always flown with the utmost caution — never flying at night and, if unsure of the length of a field, getting out of his plane to pace the distance.

Phoebe, who was devastated by Vernon’s death, never remarried. In the years that followed, she busied herself operating the aviation club and service business Vernon had worked so hard to nurture during the depths of the Depression. One of her most successful extracurricular efforts helped persuade the Tennessee Legislature to enact a law allocating a small amount of the aviation tax collected by the state to aviation instruction in Tennessee schools.

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