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PROFILES
Marge Mitchell
Race Pilot and Saleswoman Superb
July 23, 1997
The year Marge Mitchell was born Lt. Pytor Nikolaevich Nesterov looped
the world’s first loop in a Nieuport Type IV, Adolphe Pegoud
flew the first sustained inverted flight in his Bleriot, Maurice Prevost
broke the world speed record by exceeding 126 mph in his Deperdussin
monoplane and Guissepe Bellanca was a brand new aircraft designer.
It was 1913.
Modern aviation was barely ten years old, but it had to grow up before
Marge took notice of it. “I was not a child prodigy,”
she says, at least not in flying. Her first love was music and she
worked at that from an early age, performing publicly with a half-sized
violin from 4-years old onward. She was always involved in something
that fully engaged her--hunting, fishing, almost 62 years of marriage,
motherhood, choral groups, her daughter’s five horses, writing,
directing and producing yearly music shows. She did all that before
she took her first flying lesson.
Meanwhile Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in a Bell X-1, James
Gallagher circled the earth non-stop in a Boeing B-50A and Frank Everest
reached 71,902 feet before his Bell X-1 swapped ends and headed home.
This was 1950, and Marge’s husband, who was in the oil business
sold a lot of gas to a man who couldn’t pay for it, so they
struck a deal. The man gave Gene Mitchell his fairly new Aeronca Champ,
so Gene, Marge and three of their friends learned to fly in it. “My
husband and I took our private flight tests 15 minutes apart,”
she says. “The examiner was a gentleman so he took me up first.”
Flying was fun, but ten years passed before Marge got serious about
flying, earned all her ratings and discovered that she had a genuine
knack for airplane sales, public relations and precision flying.
In 1960 Miller Flying Service, in Plainview, hired her to sell Bellancas
and to promote their business. By 1965 she was so successful they
offered her a partnership. Thirty-seven years later, she still going
strong, at the airport seven days a week, flying, chatting and selling
airplanes. Anyone who has ever seriously considered buying a Bellanca
Viking probably knows her and James Miller--the Dynamic Duo, one of
the greatest sales team on the planet. He demos the airplane and she
handles the ten miles of red tape that preface every sale. During
the 1970s, the true heyday of general aviation, Marge and James averaged
an airplane sale a day. Even now they sell five to eight Bellancas
a month by doing anything it takes, while not pushing the customer.
Marge saved her pushing for the air races, which she discovered with
Kathy Long in 1965. They both flew the Bellanca Viking and traveled
a lot with their husbands who were the president and vice president
of Texas Oil Jobbers, an organization of oil companies. “Why
don’t we race as the Oil Jobber Wives?” they said on a
lark.
Their first race was the Doll Derby, a proficiency race. “Oh,
the butterflies we had,” Marge says. They had a lot to learn,
but they discovered the thrill of racing. Their second was the Powder
Puff Derby the same year. “Everything went wrong,” she
says. “I didn’t have a vacuum pump. The O-ring was out
of my gear. You can’t have things done because they think you
are sprucing it up in some way. So we just relaxed and had the best
time.” They played hostess at the Champion Spark Plug hospitality
rooms each night.
“Then we made up our mind if we were in there we wanted to
win.” They studied what winners did. They prepared and they
practiced. “If you’re going with the idea of trying to
win something you have to be precision-minded. You don’t alter
your course, you don’t deviate from anything. I spent hours
on precision flying,” she says. Marge began to fly the West
Texas section lines with a stop watch. “I would check and double
check that my airspeed was what it said it was and how much the wind
would affect me turning around and coming back across with a crosswind.”
She put in the hours and the energy. “On at least four or five
of the races I flew the race route ahead of time to see where we were
going to be landing, to visually have it in our mind as we were making
our approach. The book may say trees, but you don’t realize
they are 200 foot high trees until you see them. We would circle and
see it from all angles, because you’re not sure what angle you’ll
be coming in from.” Their diligence paid off, especially on
low visibility days when they were coming in 20 feet off the ground
and knew they had to find a granary 32 miles out and miss the 4,000
foot mountains off the other end of the runway if they went around.
Their third race was from Seattle to Clearwater, Florida. They waited
in Seattle for 2 ½ days while weather obscured the jagged Cascade
Mountains. Finally the city officials came to them and said, “There’s
no way you can get out over the Cascades, so we’re going to
take you out down through the Columbia River Gorge. It’s 1,000
on one bank and 5,000 on the other, but don’t worry, you’ll
never see either bank since the ceiling is 1,000 feet.”
He also said, “There are guy wires all across the gorge—some
at 200, some at 500, some at 600 feet. And, another thing, remember
it’s right hand traffic, so please have mercy on that unsuspecting
male that might be coming down the other way.”
Marge says, “I don’t even know if there was a river down
there, or just dirt. I was at 600 feet and there was a guy wire at
600 feet, so I was looking for it. Airplanes were going past me, over
me, under me. I never saw the wire.” That day 135 women’s
airplanes went through the gorge. Marge’s team placed fifth
and from then on she was always in the top five.
One of the things that helped her was expert advice from an ace meteorologist.
He insisted she fly the Great Circle Routes, which are the straightest
lines on a curved surface and he coached her on exactly where, when
and how to fly for the best winds. She followed his advice, even when
it meant climbing straight up over the 13,000 foot mountain right
after takeoff, in Lander, Wyoming on the Jackpot, Nevada race. She
won that race.
Another time his advice meant flying 40 miles out to sea, enroute
to Managua, Nicaragua, skimming the surface of the water, looking
down the throats of the white sharks they saw breaking the waves.
“We realized that if our engine coughed no one would ever find
us because we’d be in their stomachs.”
Toward evening they turned into a bay. “I was doing 240 mph
on top of the water, skimming along, and all of the sudden the tide
was coming out. All the great speed I was doing suddenly dropped as
if I’d put my brakes on.” The tide was coming out with
a great rush of wind. She had to climb above it to get in.
After her first couple races she always flew to win. “If you
don’t go all out when you race, you might just as well stay
at home,” she says. On one race she lost by 21 seconds. Instead
of being disappointed she said, “It’s not any different
than a thunderstorm getting in your path. There was an obstacle. A
loss can come so easily and you just better accept it and go on.
“You can push too far on reaching a goal. You need to make
that goal a part of you life and not ruin your life while you are
trying to achieve it.”
She also said, “I’ll never lose by 21 seconds again.
If I’m going to lose by that close, I’m just going to
stop and have fun on the way.”
Camaraderie and fellowship were a big part of the racing that she
did for 20 fun-filled years, but she also loved the challenge. “It’s
fun pushing that throttle and going fast,” she says.
When she was born, 126mph was a world speed record. In her second
year of racing, 4,534 mph was a glimmer on Pete Knight’s ASI.
There is no telling how fast a plane might fly before Marge Mitchell
thinks of slowing down.
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