In Dickens County, we’re fortunate to have quite a few experts on local history—some from their depth of reading, others from visiting sites of the past, and still others, from living it. Three of these experts have teamed up to offer an occasional feature in The Texas Spur. The trio whose initials appear below welcome answers and other feedback to be shared in the pages of the newspaper.
I once received a phone call from a man in Atlanta, Georgia. His first question was, “Does Spur have an airport?”
I explained that Spur in fact did have an airport at one time. The caller said he’d inherited his greataunt’s belongings; she had lived in San Francisco and worked at a newspaper. The lady had become one of the first female pilots in the country and had entered an airplane race from San Francisco to Kansas City. In her flight across Texas she was forced to land at Spur. Like any proper lady, she would check her makeup before seeing anyone—so when she opened her purse in the open cockpit its entire contents were sucked out by the slipstream and scattered far and wide over pasture south of town.
After landing and finding someone to repair her plane, she learned that the property she had been flying over was the Horace Woods ranch. Mr. Woods and his wife were contacted and took the pilot out to their ranch, where the search party found all of the purse’s contents except for twenty dollars.
