Looking for Tiny Broadwick’s Daughter
In my blog post last week about Tiny Broadwick, “First Lady of Parachuting,” I mentioned, with some sadness, that Tiny’s daughter disappears from the narrative.
I am pleased to tell you that my writing friend Nancy Kennedy took up the challenge and went looking for the daughter’s story. Here’s what she found:
The short version is that Verla Jacobs led a more “grounded”[1] life than her mother did, in every sense of the word. In fact, in a 1973 interview in the Durham North Carolina Herald-Sun, Verla shared that she didn’t like to fly.
As we know from Tiny’s biography, Verla was raised by her grandmother—something that wasn’t entirely unusual once you look past the “her mother left to join the circus” element. Poor families at the time often had to send children to live with other relatives for a variety of reasons.
Verla completed the ninth grade, again not that unusual at the time– plenty of people didn’t make it that far. She married a farmer named Joseph Poythress in 1925, when she was 18. They had six children, thirteen grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. She named one of her daughters Tiny, which suggests she had a positive relationship with her mother, even if it was often at a distance. Tiny Poythress Culler was living in Saudi Arabia when Verla died; perhaps she inherited a portion of her grandmother’s adventurous spirit as well as her name.
Tiny stayed in touch with Verla throughout her life, though she seldom saw her. She wrote to her daughter regularly, emphasizing the importance of education, and sent her money, clothes and toys. We know that Tiny visited Verla for three months in 1972 and they were both guests of the Golden Knights[2] at Fort Bragg that year. Verla’s pride in her mother comes through clearly in the 1973 interview.
Verla died in 1985, only seven years after her mother.
Thank you, Nancy, for the reminder that there is always another narrative if you take the time to look.
[1] Sorry. Sometimes I can’t resist.
[2] The U.S. Army’s elite parachute team
Deja Vu All Over Again: The Fort Snelling Concentration Camp, 1862
Benjamin Franklin Upton. 1863. From the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society
Back in August, My Own True Love and I spent a History Nerd Holiday in the Twin Cities. I came back with a lot of stories, but I left an important one for later: the concentration camp the United States government built at Fort Snelling at the end of the U.S. -Dakota War of 1862. I didn’t have a firm grasp on the details of the war itself[1] and, quite frankly, I found it difficult to write about. I think it’s time to tell the story.
The U.S. – Dakota War of 1862 was a short-lived, violent conflict between white settlers and the Dakota people in the Minnesota River Valley that was a precursor to the later so-called “Indian Wars” in the west. Tensions between the settlers and the Dakota were already high, as happens when two different peoples claim the same land. Then the U.S. Government failed to keep its treaty obligation to send annuity payments, leaving the Dakota to starve. The attempt by a small band of the Dakota to take some eggs from a homestead escalated into violence and then war. During the six weeks of the war, hundreds of white settlers, American army soldiers, and the Dakota people died.
More Dakota died after the war was over.
After the Dakota surrendered, a military commission tried 392 Dakota men for their participation in the war. They were not allowed legal representation and most of the trials were brief. Some lasted less than five minutes. More than 300 of the defendants were sentenced to death. Even at the time, people questioned the legal authority of the commission and the procedures it used, publicly and loudly.[2] As a result, President Lincoln personally reviewed the convictions. He decided that only those men who had killed civilians should be executed. He allowed the death sentence to stand for 38 of the convicted men. They were executed on December 26, 1862—the largest single execution in American history. The rest of the men received commuted sentences and were interned at Camp Kearney in Iowa for four years.
Meanwhile, almost 1700 Dakota non-combatants—most of whom were women, children and the elderly—were removed to a river bottom below Fort Snelling. Soon after they arrived, the army enclosed the area with a twelve-foot tall wooden stockade, which they patrolled to control movement in and out. Several hundred people died that winter due to disease and harsh conditions.
In February, 1863, Congress passed an act that annulled all existing treaties with the Dakota people and stated that their lands and all annuities still due them were forfeit to the United States. A bill passed in March called for their removal from the area that was their ancestral homeland. The surviving captives at Fort Snelling, along with 2000 members of the Ho Chunk nation, who were not involved in the war, were put on steamers and taken to a desolate reservation in the Dakota Territory. [3]
Today a major immigrant detainment center[4] stands on the site of the camp. In a particularly ugly echo of the past, members of the Lakota nation are reported to have been held there in recent weeks.
[1] A pivotal event in American history that neither My Own True Love or I had heard of prior to our visit to Fort Snelling.
[2] As far as I’m concerned, this is the only point of light in this story. Even in the midst of the Civil War,which presumably took most of America’s bandwidth, people stood up and questioned actions of questionable authority taken by men in power.
[3]I wish I could say this was an isolated incident in American history, but we all know that is not true.
[4] The official description, not mine.
Tiny Broadwick: “First Lady of Parachuting”
Georgia Ann “Tiny”[1] Thompson Broadwick (1893-1978) fell in love with aviation in 1907 at the age of 14 when she attended an aerial show at the North Carolina State Fair. The show featured pioneering balloonist Charles Broadwick (c. 1875-1943), who went up in a hot air balloon, climbed over the side and parachuted down. Tiny later told a reporter “When I saw that balloon go up, I knew that’s all I ever wanted to do.”
The sight of that balloon rising into the air may have looked like freedom to Tiny. She had married one William A Jacobs two years earlier[2] and had a daughter within a year. Jacobs abandoned them soon after the girl was born. With her husband gone, she worked in a cotton mill to support herself and her daughter.
When the show was over, she went straight to Broadwick and asked to join the act. He thought adding a young, pretty girl to the act would be a draw. After sorting out the complicated issues of her life, she joined Broadwick’s World Famous Aeronauts and the Johnny J. Jones Carnival, leaving her daughter with her mother with the promise that she would send part of her earnings home for her daughter’s support.[3] Soon thereafter, Charles Broadwick adopted Tiny.
A year later, back at the North Carolina State Fair,[4] Tiny made her first jump in a performance. Charles emphasized her size and youth, dressing her in girlish clothes, curling her hair into ringlets, and billing her the “Doll Girl.” When interviewed later in life, she said she hated being dressed up like a doll—she had been a tomboy her whole life—but she loved jumping. It was “the most wonderful sensation in the world! From up in the air I can appreciate the beauty of the earth from a new perspective and felt that I was in the presence of God.”
Tiny was soon the star attraction of the show. She sat on a trapeze that hung from the bottom of the balloon and jumped when she reached the correct altitude. (This sounds terrifying.) Newspapers described her as the most daring female aeronaut[5] ever seen, though she was definitely not the first.
In 1912, Tiny went from jumping out of balloons to jumping out of planes at the suggestion of Glenn L. Martin, an early barnstormer and aviation pioneer. (He was the Martin in Lockheed-Martin.) No woman had jumped out of a plane before and he thought the addition of a woman to his aerial act would spice things up. The two men developed a new type of parachute for her to use jumping from the plane. She sat on a seat behind the wing and outside the cockpit that worked like a trap door. (Even more terrifying.)[6] When the plane reached an altitude of two thousand feet, she released a lever next to the seat and dropped. A rope was fastened to the fuselage and woven through the canvas cover of her parachute; when she dropped, the rope pulled off the cover so the parachute filled with air.
Two years later, the Army Air Corps, which was looking for ways to improve pilot safety. asked Tiny to demonstrate jumping from a military plane to its pilots. She made four jumps in one day.. Everything went smoothly on the first three jumps. On the fourth, Tiny’s parachute line became tangled in the plane’s tail. She wasn’t able to get back into the plane because the wind was flipping her back and forth. She cut the line, leaving a short length attached—essentially improvising what would become known as a ripcord. As she plummeted to the earth, she opened the parachute by hand with the remaining line. She was the first person to self-deploy a parachute. It was a game-changer. Her quick thinking demonstrated that it would be possible for a pilot to bail out of a damaged airplane and survive.
Tiny Broadwick made more than 1100 jumps from balloons and airplanes over the course of her career, making her last jump in 1922[7]. She served as an advisor to the Army Air Corps throughout World War I. During World War II she worked at Rohr Aircraft Company on the assembly line making aircraft parts. She was also asked to speak to young paratroopers about her experiences as the “First Lady of Parachuting”
In later years, she received important recognition from the aviation world. She received the U.S. Government Pioneer Aviation Award in 1963 and the John Glenn Medal in 1964. In 1970, NASA invited her to watch the Apollo 13 launch. In 1976, she was made an honorary member of the 82nd Airborne. She was posthumously inducted into the Skydiving Hall of Fame.
When she died in 1978, members of the Golden Knights, the US Army’s elite parachute team, served as her pallbearers.
[1] She was was nicknamed Tiny for a reason. As an adult she stood a little over four feet tall and weighed 80 pounds
[2] Yes. At the age of 12.
[3] And at this point the daughter disappears from the story as reported in the sources I read. Which makes me sad and angry on her behalf.
[4] I’d like to think she visited her mother and daughter.
[5] Both aeronaut and balloonist came into use to describe someone who flies in a balloon in 1784, a year after the Mongolfier brothers launched the first successful manned hot air balloon flight.
[6] For some reason, I find the idea of hanging outside an airplane more frightening than the idea of jumping. (Which I have no intention of doing.)
[7] Or possibly 1923. Sources disagree.