I hope Cate Blanchett is between movies because I think she would be the perfect choice to play Lynn native Ruth Law, a determined and charismatic woman who pioneered flight.
Between 1912 and 1922, Law crisscrossed the globe, breaking aviation records and performing death-defying aerial stunts. In an America 100 years ago when radio was barely the chief medium and flight was in its infancy, Ruth Law was a larger-than-life daredevil who scoffed when aviation innovator Glenn Curtiss told her, “You’re too little and not strong enough” to fly one of his planes.
Law took to flight in 1912, inspired by her brother, Rodman, who made a name for himself parachuting off the Statue of Liberty’s hand. Law’s husband bought her a plane and, according to a 1949 Daily Evening Item story, she applied to the Wright brothers for admission into their flight school.
“The Wright brother felt the air was no place for a member of the opposite sex,” wrote reporter Hazel A. Anderson.
Undaunted, Law hired W. Starling Burgess of Marblehead to teach her how to fly. She made her first solo flight on Aug. 21, 1912 from the former Saugus race track and never looked back.
Within five years she had broken the American non-stop cross-country flight record and set an altitude record when she topped 14,000 feet over Illinois.
Flight in the second decade of the last century meant enduring biting wind and cold that even heavy wool and leather clothes could not repel. Aviators like Law risked mechanical failure, faulty navigation, and fog in their pursuit of prizes worth $10,000 ($240,000 in 2021 dollars) or more.
With sensation and entertainment value a steady lure for aviation pioneers, death lurked around the corner. Law was involved in a stunt involving a leap from a car to an airplane that ended with a stuntwoman’s death. “Lack of judgment killed the girl,” Law said with characteristic bluntness.
The United States’ entry into World War I saw Law heading for Paris determined to find a way to sortie over the front lines.
She flew observation missions and, according to her obituary written by the great Item writer, Jim Tagalakis, she was one of the few women to wear an aviator’s uniform in the war zone.
Newspapers splashed their pages in 1918 with stories that Law had been arrested for being a German spy. The aviatrix debunked the reporting, noting: “Part of the story, as it is usually told, is that I am a man disguised as a woman.”
Well before Charles Lindbergh cemented his name in history by flying the Atlantic, Law announced her transoceanic bid in 1919 with her signature pluck: “Yes,” she told reporters, “I am going to show these men a few things. I’m not a bit afraid, take my word for it.”
After 10 years spent breaking records, braving bad weather, executing aerial loops, and flying planes packed with special effects fireworks, Law quit flying in 1922. She settled in California with her husband, Charles Oliver.
“It was when my husband suffered a nervous breakdown after worrying about me that I decided it was my duty to give up flying,” she told a reporter in 1935.
Law never forgot her Lynn roots and returned throughout her flying career to the city, sometimes staying at her uncle’s 520 Eastern Ave., home and ending visits and interviews with a jaunty, “I must be off.”