After a 17-year-old girl watched a woman crash an airplane, she decided to prove women could fly. Soon after, she paid for her first flight.
Named Kus-de-cha, or Kingfisher, by her grandmother, Marie Agnes Riddell (1902-1981), better known as Mary Riddell, took to flying as naturally as her namesake, the small pointed-beak bird that flies fast over the water and dives head first in streams catching fingerlings. Unlike the kingfisher, a parachute lowered Riddell from the sky to the Earth.
The daughter of a Quinault father and a Clatsop mother, Riddell was the first Native American woman to earn a pilot’s license and then a commercial transport license. She was likely the first to make a parachute jump, although no records show this.
Excited by her first flight, Riddell saved for two years to enroll in Tex Rankin’s school sometime around 1929. Completing her 1930 solo, she said she wasn’t scared but “missed the weight” of her instructor.
To perform in the 1930 Rose Festival air circus, she practiced for weeks. The day of the air show, she dressed in a traditional Quinault costume, rode a horse to her plane, dismounted, slid into the cockpit and quickly lifted skyward. She often flew in her traditional dress as a 1934 cover of The 99er shows.
Rankin demanded his trainees — men and women — jump from a plane. Riddell was no exception. When later enrolling in the Spartan School for parachutists in Tulsa, Okla., under her Native name, the school rejected her because she was female. Riddell argued her way in saying women parachutists brought crowds to air shows. She made more than 40 exhibition jumps around the Northwest and as far east as Bismarck, S.D. Her parachute tangled around her legs in 1937. The landing broke her back, ending her skydiving career.
In World War II, the War Department trained her to inspect planes and sent her around the country to check their safety. When interviewed in 1975 by the Oregonian, Riddell was working for engineering consultants. She said she still flew, and her transport license was current.
Martin Middlewood is editor of the Clark County Historical Society Annual. Reach him at ClarkCoHist@gmail.com.
