Bobbi Trout

I looked for an article in which a woman dressed with flair for the career she wanted, and found record setting aviator, Bobbi Trout.

Whether hers is a story unusual to her family, or to her era, I can’t genuinely answer.  One grandfather, Henry Grant Trout, had a career making brooms, yes, brooms, and moved from Chicago to Denver to Huntington Beach. The other, William O Denman was a doctor, banker and real estate investor who lived most of his life in Greenup, Illinois, population less than 1000.

Her father George Everett Trout, was taking care of a farm and his wid
owed grandmother and sickly aunt in Greenup when he’s 13 while also attending school in 1900. From there his life is like Frank Abagnale’s (con artist portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Catch me if You Can).

By 21, he’s married and sells a drug store he founds in Greenup, so he can buy a farm in Greeley, Colorado.  Then two years later he’s running a grocery store in Denver, and Bobbi mentions a butcher shop in a third Colorado town. His wife insists they separate, in 1915 and so he’s in Nashville studying for General Electric, while his wife is in St. Louis running a hat store. He later gets a job with Bell Telephone in California and moves in with his parents. Bobbi is sent to live with them to recover from influenza.

Reading Bobbi’s encyclopedia entries, I believed that George was a great influence on how her life turned out. But I don’t feel that way after reading an article on Airport Journals dot com from 2001 titled Just Plane Crazy. It’s clear that she couldn’t have had the same success if born ten years earlier or ten years later, or had she not moved to Huntington Beach at 14, or if she relied on the Trout family for money.  Still, she was special.

Evelyn was a precocious teen influenced by her proximity to Hollywood.  She loved breaking new ground and telling stories, and like her father’s, many of them were true and many of them she worked hard to make true. Evelyn was dubbed “Bobbi” after she copied the hairstyle of actress Irene Castle which was a short “Bob” haircut.

She was excited by machines, but wasn’t allowed to take manual arts training courses “with the boys” in high school and lamented having to take a “sissy” cooking class for the rest of her life.

She was 12 the first time she saw an airplane aloft and said, ‘That’s what I’m going to do some day,’ Her first airplane ride was at 16 in a Curtiss Jenny.

At 16, Evelyn asked her parents to buy a service station for her to run, Her mother, Lola, said, “I should say not!” but her father thought it was a good idea, and convinced Lola to buy it.  After high school, she followed her mother’s advice to enter USC to study architecture, but had to drop out when her parents separated again to put in more time at the service station.

By 1928, at 21, she had saved enough money to pay for flying lessons. Her mother bought her an International K-6 (Otherwise known as a F-17H Sportsman powered by a Curtis K-6 engine, made by Catron & Fisk of Long Beach). Her mother read in the LA Times about her flight instructor crashing them during one of her lessons, sending Bobbi to the hospital and asked her to give up flying. Instead of listening to her mom, weeks after her solo, she added a $35-a-week job demonstrating a new high-wing monoplane called the Golden Eagle, which eventually included working to build the airplanes as well. 

On Jan. 2, 1929, Trout took off from Van Nuys Airport. When she touched down after circling the airport for 12 hours and 11 minutes, she had broken the previous women pilots’ solo endurance record of eight hours.

Her triumph was short-lived -- Elinor Smith beat Trout’s time by an hour a few weeks later. But Trout proceeded to set a new record of 17 hours and 24 minutes. In the process, she logged the first all-night flight by a woman.

In a 1990 interview with The Times, Trout recalled rubbing her neck and singing to pass the hours. But engulfed in darkness and bored by the monotonous drone of her plane’s 60-horsepower engine, she said: “I went to sleep a few times, and when I went into a dive, the engine awakened me.”

In 1929, Trout also broke the woman’s altitude record for light-class aircraft by climbing to 15,200 feet. And teamed up with Smith, she set yet another world endurance record in 1929 of 42 hours, 3 1/2 minutes in what was the first women’s in-flight refueling operation: Trout leaned out of the plane to catch bags of food, motor oil and a 25-foot rope attached to a gasoline hose lowered from the refueling plane.

In a second effort, with silent movie star Edna May Cooper in 1931, Trout set a new women’s refueling endurance record: 122 hours, 50 minutes. And in 1930, Trout became the fifth woman in the U.S. to earn a transport license, allowing her to fly for hire. However, airlines at the time didn’t employ women pilots.

In 1929, Trout joined Earhart, Barnes and 17 other participants in the first All-Women’s Transcontinental Air Race from Santa Monica to Cleveland. Humorist Will Rogers dubbed it the Powder Puff Derby and the name stuck. Trout made it to Cleveland, although her engine quit twice and she was forced to make emergency landings that put her out of the running. After the race the participants and many of their friends formed the association of female pilots called The Ninety Nines.

With a scarcity of flying jobs during the Depression, Trout became a flying instructor and, in the late ‘30s, a commercial photographer.

With Barnes, she formed the Women’s Air Reserve to transport emergency supplies and personnel in disasters. She also served in the Civil Air Patrol and started two aviation-related businesses to aid the war effort: She invented a machine to sort unused rivets that were being scrapped by aircraft companies, and she developed de-burring equipment for smoothing the edges of machined metal.

Trout, who never married, later sold real estate in the Palm Springs area. She retired to Carlsbad in 1976.  (7512 Viejo Castilla Way, Carlsbad, CA 92009 – an apartment in La Costa near the third hole of the Legends course.)  And bought a red Porsche 914 which she drove over 200,000 miles—much of them over the speed limit. She died at Scripps Encinitas, January 24, 2003. She was 97.