At many of the fields there was no place to rest, no more than a table to sit on. At other airports there were banquets to be rushed to and back from. On the good days AE was happy to find luncheons served at the field and hotels to go to for the night. Many fields provided soap and water, clean towels, cold cream, powder, combs.
At the luncheons and dinners Amelia chuckled at some of the names the speakers used for the women fliers: “sweethearts of the air,” “flying flappers,” “angels,” “sunburned derbyists.” All they wanted to be called, AE insisted in vain, were “fliers,” and, if necessary, “women fliers.”
The press called the race “Lipstick Derby,” “Petticoat Derby,” “Powder Puff Derby.” The last one stuck and has continued to the present time.
At El Paso, the fourth stop, the women waited for a storm to pass, rather than risk some of them not having enough fuel to fly around it; for the next leg, to Fort Worth, was the longest and most hazardous—600 miles, much of it over mountains.
At Pecos they stopped for food and fuel. All the planes landed safely except one. Florence Barnes, wife of a San Morino minister, misjudged her landing roll, overran the runway, and crashed into an automobile. She was rescued, unharmed, from the wreck.
On the night of the fifth day they stayed in Wichita, Kansas; of the sixth, in St. Louis. When they landed in Columbus, Ohio, the last stop before Cleveland, sixteen of the original nineteen had made it.
The morning of the eighth day broke clear. Amelia and Ruth Nichols, her friend from Rye, had been running neck and neck during the entire race. AE had landed just two minutes ahead of Ruth at Columbus and looked forward to the last lap to Cleveland. It would be nip and tuck between them all the way. The girls started their engines and waited for the signal to move out in interval.
Ruth Nichols, poised at the far end of the runway, gunned her motor for take-off. Just as she broke from the ground, the right wing dipped, then hit a tractor parked at the edge of the runway. Amelia blanched. Ruth’s plane struck the ground, flipped over three times, and stopped in a shrieking scrape along the pavement.
AE stopped her engine, climbed out of the Vega, and ran toward the crash. Ruth Nichols was not hurt, but the wings and landing gear of her plane were smashed beyond immediate repair. The private race between the two friends was over.
Louise Thaden of Pittsburgh won the race. Gladys O’Donnell, the mother of two children, from Long Beach, came in second. AE, just nosing out Blanche Noyes, was third. In the light-plane class, Phoebe Omlie was the winner.