The Happy Bottom Riding Club

Description

"Florence "Pancho" Barnes was a California heiress who inherited a love of flying from her grandfather, a pioneer balloonist in the Civil War. Faced with a future of domesticity and upper-crust pretensions, she ran away from her responsibilities as wife and mother to create her own life. She cruised South America. She trekked through Mexico astride a burro. She hitchhiked halfway across the United States. Then, in the late 1920's, she took to the skies, one of a handful of female pilots. She was a barnstormer, a racer, a cross-country flier, and a Hollywood stunt pilot. She was, for a time, "the fastest woman on earth," flying the fastest civilian airplane in the world. She was an intimate of movie stars, a script doctor for the great director Erich von Stroheim, and, later in life, a drinking buddy of the supersonic jet jockey Chuck Yeager. She ran a wild and wildly successful desert watering hole known as the Happy Bottom Riding Club. In the Happy Bottom Riding Club, Lauren Kessler presents a portrait of a woman who didn't play by women's rules, a woman of large appetities - emotional, financial, and sexual - who called herself "the greatest conversation piece that ever existed.""--BOOK JACKET.

First Sentence

Every Sunday, the old man would take his granddaughter on another adventure.

Excerpt

Every Sunday, the old man would take his granddaughter on another adventure.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho BarnesPaperbackRandom House2000-05-23
• The Happy Bottom Riding ClubRandom House2000-05-23
• Happy Bottom Riding ClubPenguin Random House2010-01-01