Florence Lowe was born in 1901 into a life of wealth and privilege, living her early life in a 32 roomed mansion in San Marino, near Pasedena, California. Although it was soon obvious that she would never be a beauty she was raised and educated to have all the advantages of a society lady. Her father instilled in her a love of the outdoors, of horse riding, hunting and dogs. Her grandfather was a pioneer baloonist and took Florence to an airshow when she was nine. A 1910 airshow would be fascinating to modern observers! Florence aquired an interest in aviation that would later dominate her life.
Aged 18 she married the Reverend C. Rankin Barnes. A son, William, her only child was born. In later life Florence would bawdily claim that William was the result of the one and only time that she and the hapless Reverend actually 'got it on'! William was to develop a love of flying, run an aviation business at Lancaster, California and die in 1980 in a P-51 Mustang near the site of his mother's ranch. I have been unable to find any details of this accident.
The future course of Florence's life appeared set when she married the Reverend but she had a burning desire for adventure and in 1928 she abandoned home and family, disguised herself as a man and signed on as crew on a ship bound for Mexico. She spent four months roaming revolution-torn Mexico with another sailor and, reputedly, turned her hand to gun-running. She would certainly have had the contacts and money to do it. Her life of privilege gave her the confidence and the ability to be very good at what we now call 'networking'. Throughout her life she had a remarkable talent for gaining a wide circle of friends at all levels of society. In Mexico she took to travelling by donkey and her companion dubbed her 'Pancho', a name that she loved and kept from then on. Pancho took to wearing men's clothing, smoking cigars, scorning her appearance and developing a paint-blistering vocabulary that could shock the most hardened cursers. Later observers said that Pancho had the foulest mouth they had ever heard.
Late in 1928 Pancho returned to San Marino and family but with no intention of settling back down into being a clergyman's wife. She bought an aeroplane and despite her instructor's misgivings turned into a serious, hardworking student and eventually an expert flyer and mechanic. She learned aerobatics, set up 'Pancho Barnes' Mystery Circus of the Air' and went barnstorming around the country. She took up air racing and entered what were then called 'Powder Puff Derbys'. She had the money to buy a suitable aircraft and at one stage owned one of the hottest racing aircraft available, a Travellair Mystery Ship that is reputed to still exist and be currently under restoration.
She went to Hollywood and worked as a stunt pilot. She had previously worked there as a script girl, animal trainer with horses and dogs, scriptwriter, researcher, technical adviser and also as a stunt double for Louise Fezenda in horse riding scenes for Rin-Tin-Tin movies. She made friends, then or later, with many Hollywood identities including Veronica Lake, Roy Rogers, TV personality Spade Cooley (later convicted for murdering his wife), Shelley Winters, Robert Taylor, Brian Donlevy, Edgar Bergen, Elizabeth Taylor and hotelier husband Nicki Hilton, Robert Mitchum, Robert Cummings, Dick Powell, Dean Jaeger, Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn and Bob Weatherwax, the owner of canine star Lassie. Rumors abounded about romances with Ramon Novarro (who had the lead role of the 1926 version of "Ben-Hur) and Duncan Renaldo (the "Cisco Kid").
Pancho set up her own company and had three pilots working for her. She worked as a stunt pilot in several movies including Howard Hughes's 'Hells Angels'. She helped to found the Associated Motion Picture Stunt Pilots to improve the lot of professional pilots and became friends with Paul Mantz and most of the stunt pilots of the day.
The depression affected every part of American life and Pancho was not immune. Hollywood work dried up and Pancho's inheritance rapidly dwindled. An accrimonious rift in her own family hastened the decline in her fortune and in 1935 she took her remaining assets and with her son William she left the long-suffering Reverend Barnes and bought an 80 acre property with the intention of setting up a ranch halfway between the tiny hamlets of Muroc and Rosamond in the California high desert.
Ranching might have looked a strange career choice for Pancho but she had boundless energy, a flair for organization and a great talent for 'networking'. she soon employed a foreman and hands and started raising alfalfa, cattle, hogs and her beloved horses. She was soon trading her produce to the nearby settlements.
Pancho laid out an airstrip and Hollywood friends and flying buddies would often drop in by private plane. She was a good entertainer and soon built guest accommodation to cater for the increasing number of visitors. She set up a dude ranch type riding club to allow guests to unwind on horseback. A satisfied customer, reputedly Jimmy Doolittle, said that his horse 'gave him a happy bottom'. And so The Happy Bottom Riding Club was born.
Film makers would sometimes hire parts of the ranch for location filming, a nice little earner for Pancho. If they wanted to film in an area that Pancho didn't own that was no problem. Pancho would rent it out to them anyway and pocket the money. Pancho called the property the Rancho Oro Verde and it became so successful that it eventually expanded from the original 80 acres to 368 acres.
Pancho was never good-looking and the harsh desert climate, coupled with the total neglect of her appearance was to wreak utter havoc in her later years. Friends would have good-natured arguments as to whether Pancho was the ugliest woman they had ever seen, or just the second ugliest. Despite this she was to be married four times and have a string of lovers including, reputedly, at least two Hollywood leading men, which just goes to show that looks aren't everything. Photos of Pancho usually show a fairly thick-set woman with long, wavy dark hair, a large head and a heavy, solid face that was usually lit by a cheerful expression.
Meanwhile, a few miles to the East, something was stirring:-
Rogers Dry Lake has been called the World's best natural airfield. The lake was dry for most of the year and utterly flat. It made a natural runway over nine miles long and up to five miles wide. The Army Air Force soon realised its potential and set up a bombing range at the South end. A tent city soon arose at Muroc on the Western shore of the lake. Over time and the Second World War this settlement would grow hugely and become Edwards Air Force Base, the Nation's premier flight test centre. And Pancho's ranch was right on the doorstep. Pancho was soon trading produce with the Muroc base and realised that the base personnel were starved of entertainment in that remote area. She built a restaurant, coffee shop and bar and servicemen flocked to Pancho's, despite the several miles of cruel dirt road they had to drive.
Pancho soon made friends with a young Air Force Captain named Chuck Yeager. They shared a love of the outdoors, of hunting and fishing and went off on hunting trips in Pancho's plane, sometimes down to Mexico, where the young Chuck was surprised to see Pancho treated like visiting Royalty by old revolutionaries. Chuck and Pancho had been friends for years by the time Chuck made the sound barrier flights and they remained friends for the rest of Pancho's life.
As the Muroc base grew Pancho's ranch grew with it. The base added permenant runways to the North of the lake and in the South-West corner. During WWII the base became home to thousands of servicemen and Pancho made the ranch a place for them to let off steam. Pancho loved flying, loved pilots and loved the Air Force. The ranch continued to grow. The airfield was expanded and lit, a dance hall, another bar and a 20 room motel was built. The motel forecourt was dominated by a remarkable four-tier fountain in the shape of the Army Air Corps insignia and topped by a statue of a female nude. A swimming pool was added, the only pool for many miles around. When the first pool was destroyed by an earthquake (!) Pancho had another built. It was circular with a ramp on one side so that Pancho could take her horse down to cool off after a hard ride. What other guests thought to sharing the pool with a hot, sweaty horse has not been recorded. The pool was lit from below and at night flyers could use its blue-green glow as a marker beacon that was visible for miles. I have duplicated this effect in this scenery file.
A highly illegal gambling den was set up in the dairy shed and was frequented by characters so tough looking that the pilots usually left them well alone. Pancho would fly liquor up from Mexico in her own plane, keeping the good stuff under lock and key. It was always party time at Pancho's and many a rowdy evening developed into a head-splitting all nighter. But young men have remarkable recuperative powers and they loved the life provided by Pancho.
The ranch had another attraction for the servicemen. It was full of young, pretty girls called 'hostesses'! Now, some people will tell you that the hostesses were actually prostitutes and that Pancho was running a common whore-house. Others will hotly deny this. The hostesses, they say, were just fun-loving young girls looking for a good time and who knew that Pancho's was the place to find it. Well, O.K., there are the two versions. You choose. Either way, the title 'The Happy Bottom Riding Club' began to gain a more jocular inference.
If people have only come across Pancho by reading Tom Wolfe's book 'The Right Stuff' or seen the movie made from the book it is easy to gain the impression that Pancho's was just a small, tumbledown wooden shack out by itself in the desert but although this made for good myth-making it was far from the truth. The ranch was a large complex with many buildings, some quite luxurious although contemporary accounts usually say that the constant dry heat and blowing dust gave the whole place an aura of faded 'desert chic'. Quite good articles on Pancho and the ranch can be found in 'Yeager', Chuck's autobiography and in 'The Lonely Sky' by William Bridgeman.
After the War Edwards became the main research centre investigating flight at high mach numbers and high altitudes. A new breed of test pilots arrived to fly the rocket powered X-series of research aircraft. The pilots lived a highly stressful life and Pancho's provided the place to relax and unwind. After Chuck Yeager made the first supersonic flight in 1947 it seemed only natural to go to Pancho's to celebrate. The Government withheld news of the flight for security reasons and Pancho became one of the first people outside the Air Force to learn of Yeager's feat. Pancho rewarded him with a free steak dinner with all the trimmings and so started a tradition for pilots making their first supersonic flight.
If pilots are not flying the thing they like best is to talk about flying and Pancho's bar became the unofficial de-briefing room for pilots in the first years of supersonic flight. For a few heady years Pancho's was at the very centre of the flight research world. The bar contained a piano and trolling the net will sometimes unearth photos of a group of the best-known test pilots having a sing-song around it. Chuck Yeager, Jack Ridley, Bill Bridgeman, Bob Hoover, Frank Everest, Scott-Crossfield - These are the some of the names now associated with Pancho's bar. The walls of the bar were covered in memorobilia from Pancho's Hollywood days and the current test flying days. Autographed photos were everywhere. The bar became the hangout of what Pancho proudly proclaimed were the fastest and bravest men in the World.
But in 1952 it all went horribly wrong. The Air Force had built a new main runway to the North of the old South Base, the current Edwards 04-22, and it pointed like an arrow directly at Pancho's airfield. Aircraft were becoming bigger, faster and heavier and needing longer final approaches to land and the Air Force was not keen on having a private airfield with its attendant private aircraft within four miles of the threshold. If you fly a standard three degree glideslope into runway 04 you will pass directly over Pancho's and 1,000 feet above the ground. On airspace grounds alone it appeared that Pancho's airfield, if not the whole ranch, was doomed. But there was more. On the drawing board but thankfully never to be built were huge bombers powered by atomic reactors and the Air Force wanted the option of extending the runway to an incredible sounding length of up to 27 miles! Moves were set up to aquire the ranch.
But it got worse. A new Base Commander disapproved of Pancho's and declared the ranch off limits on moral grounds. A war of words erupted that rapidly degenerated into name-calling and a string of lawsuits. In 1953 at the worst possible time a still mysterious late night fire burned half the ranch complex to the ground, destroying an irreplacable treasure-trove of Hollywood and aviation memorobilia. It was the end, and within a year the Air force had compulsorily aquired the ranch and moved the base boundary several miles to the West.
Pancho moved to Boron On the North side of Edwards and tried to start again but it was not to be. It is possible that the loss of the ranch along with her lifetime's collection of memorobilia and the rift with her beloved Air Force had broken her spirit. Although she was eventually to receive a substantial compensation settlement the inevitable lawyer's fees had bitten huge chunks out of it. No surprises there.
There is an aura of tragedy about Pancho's last years, living in a trailer home in the desert, in virtual poverty and being treated for cancer. Pancho died in 1975, alone in her trailer. It was a week before anyone discovered her body.
THE RANCH TODAY:-
The remains of the ranch are now within the Edwards small-arm practice range and visits are prohibited. Possibly because of this there are quite substantial ruins still on the site. The swimming pool is intact, the double sided fireplace in the dining room is still there, as is the four-tier fountain in the motel forecourt, although it now lacks the nude statue that once graced the top. The ruins of the dairy that housed the gambling den still exists and most of the other building foundations and some ruined walls still stand. Many people know that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier nursing a shirtfull of broken ribs sustained the previous night when one of Pancho's horses threw him onto a wooden gate. Incredible as it may sound, the gate is still there, to the East of the main ruins.
Once a year the Edwards staff hold a barbecue at the ranch site to commemorate the old days, although I doubt that any current Edwards staff member is old enough to remember the heyday of the Happy Bottom Riding Club.
I recently found out that it is possible for the public to visit the site, although being a retired pensioner and living in Mebourne, Australia means that the information won't do me any good. The site is open to the public for one day each September.
Information about visiting the remains of the Happy Bottom Flying Club for the annual "Pancho Barnes Day" can be obtained by writing the Flight Test Historical Foundation at P.O.Box 57, Edwards, California 93523 or by calling (661) 277-8051.
