At the age of twenty-nine, Marvel Crosson was the first person to file an official entry in the 1929 National Air Races, and she entered the Women’s Air Derby eager to win. Earlier that year, she had shattered all previous altitude records held by women and flew 23,996 feet up in the air. One headline had even called her the “New Star of the Clouds.”

Her passion for aviation began at the age of thirteen, when she and her ten year old brother, Joe, peered through a Fence at the Logan County Fair and spotted their first airplane. They were immediately enchanted and told their parents they would grow up to be aviators someday.

They were right. After years spent saving every penny they could spare, Marvel and Joe purchased an old N-9 seaplane for $150. It was a steal of a deal, but came with a few drawbacks: it had no engine, and due to a wreck, it was all in pieces. But Marvel and Joe had some experience as amateaur mechanics. They had, for example, managed to disassemble their father’s new car and piece it back together again, so they were confident they could fix this too.

Much to their parents’ dismay, Marvel and Joe brought the airplane to their backyard and began reconstructing it. From 1920-1921, Marvel and Joe worked tirelessly. They replaced the pontoons with wheels, removed the depth controls, and made cloth covers for the wings and fuselage. They put in stick controls, landing gear, and struts in the wings. Finally, they installed the only motor they could afford--a Curtiss OX-5 ninety horsepower motor...intended for boats.

Joe had been taking flying lessons, and with the repairs on the old seaplane finalized, he and Marvel took it to the skies--and it flew! Although Marvel said, “In those days, flying was regarded as dangerous for men and impossible for women,” Joe began teaching Marvel how to fly too. Their parents, who had once viewed their children’s love for flying with skepticism and nervousness, came to embrace it. Her mother sometimes referred to them as her “bird-children.”

In 1926, Joe was offered a job flying passengers and mail in Alaska, and Marvel stayed behind in San Diego logging solo hours in the plane after work. But she missed her brother, and in 1927 she sold the old seaplane, moved to Fairbanks, and accompanied Joe on all sorts of exciting adventures in the skies, including flying by Mount McKinnley at 10,000 feet elevation. Shortly after, Marvel took her pilot’s examination and became the first woman to earn a flying license from the Territory of Alaska. There, she delivered mail, machinery, medicine, and more by airplane.

She and Joe took a trip out of Alaska to ferry a new monoplane from Los Angeles to New York. The entire flight took twenty-five hours and five minutes, and Marvel described it as, “...one of the happiest times of my life.” She wrote, “You know, there is something cozy and wonderful about being 10,000 feet up in the air, above the clouds, with the motor humming sweetly and the ship making 130 to 140 miles an hour and the best friend in the world there with you.”

In 1929, during the Women’s Air Derby at the National Air Races, near the final checkpoint, something went wrong with Marvel’s plane. She flew determinedly into the clouds and never returned. Search parties recovered Marvel and her airplane in the Arizona desert; she had tried to bail from the plane but did not have enough altitude for her parachute to open.

Before her death, Marvel wrote, “I have given up my life to prove that women are the best pilots in the world.” Her trailblazing efforts in the skies paved the way for more and more talented, hardworking women to take flight. Three years after Marvel’s death, Amelia Earhart became the first woman pilot to fly non-stop over the Atlantic alone.

After Marvel’s death, Joe became legendary for his mercy and rescue flights, and the airport in Sterling, Colorado, where Marvel and Joe saw their very first airplane, named its airfield Crosson Airfield in both their honors.