Aviation pioneers

Mary Alice Beatty didn’t get asked many questions about the two plane propellers in her living room. Instead, it was the anaconda skins, poison darts, blowguns, grass hammocks and war drum that got people talking. 

In her home at Montevallo Road and Overhill Road, Beatty’s Venetian glass and table settings and two Steinway pianos shared space with memorabilia from her life in South America, where her husband, Donald, was a pilot in the 1930s.

A self-taught pilot, Donald built his first airplane using a motorcycle motor at age 16, just 13 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903. He studied radio during World War I and built radio stations around the world, but it was a plane that helped him win Mary Alice. 

They had met at a party at the Tutwiler Hotel, and sometime thereafter Mary Alice traveled to Annapolis for a party and got engaged to an old boyfriend. Donald took action when he heard the news, flying his plane along the railroad tracks out of Birmingham until he found her incoming train. He landed in a field and climbed aboard the train, found Mary Alice and ordered her to take off her ring, placing his own mother’s ring on her finger. “You’re mine, and don’t you forget it,” he told her.

They married in 1925, and with that, their adventures in the air together began.

In their early years, Donald taught Mary Alice to fly, but she didn’t tell anyone because she knew flying was for men, not girls.

“He taught me to love the sky and to feel right side up and upside down in the clouds,” Mary Alice wrote in her 1986 memoir, To Love the Sky. 

In the 1920s, airlines were not capable of flying over the Andes Mountains in South America from coast to coast, and Donald envisioned a route to change that. The stock market crash in 1929 halted his original plans for a business and trade expedition, but the market crash did not lessen his determination.

Donald waited a full year to meet with J.P. Morgan to propose a scientific expedition. Once he arrived, their five-minute meeting turned into several hours because Morgan was so excited about Donald’s ideas.

In 1931, Mary Alice left their young daughter Madelyn with her parents to fly with Donald at the start of the expedition. She sat on top of the gas tank with reverberations going through her whole body, drinking nothing because there was no room for food or drink, much less additional clothing, during their day flights. They flew to Cuba, then in revolution and under martial law, before encountering a hurricane and later being rescued by a British battle cruiser’s lifeboat off the coast of Honduras.

They then crossed over mountain peaks and rivers in the “green hell” of Honduras to the “pilot’s graveyard” of Nicaragua. It made Mary Alice “long for the peace and quiet I had known in Birmingham.” After landing in Panama, Mary Alice returned home via a Standard Fruit boat to New Orleans while Donald embarked on an eight-month trek from Quito, Ecuador, to Iquitos, Peru. 

On the journey, Donald snapped photos of the Jivaro natives and documented their ceremonies and living conditions. He also shipped back animals he had found as a fifth birthday gift for Madelyn. The creatures lived in cages in the Beattys’ rose garden and keep everyone awake at night before being donated to the zoo.

The Beattys’ next adventure would take them to live in Chile with Madelyn. On the journey down via air, Madelyn was fascinated by natives who wore no clothes and used dugout boats. In Chile, Donald flew to look for a plane that had disappeared in the most dangerous pass in the Andes.

While flying over the Andes, Donald kept strict records and determined the safest time to fly in the mountains is in the early morning, a rule that is still in practice and that his children have seen followed on their travels. Later in his career he would also create maps of air currents over the Pacific Ocean that airlines still use.

Donald was later transferred to what Mary Alice called “beautiful, need-nothing Panama” to manage the Northern Division of Pan American-Grace Airways. There, Mary Alice Jr. and Donald Jr. were born in 1936 and 1938.

Still full of the determination he had when he met with Morgan, Donald tried to help the airline establish a new route across the continent from the Pacific to the Atlantic through the Amazon basin. As the years went on, there were several times when Mary Alice lost communication with her husband and feared the fate many of his fellow pilots had met. Her own fears grew as she watched other pilots’ wives “crack with fear.”

After 25 moves in their first 20 years of marriage, the Beattys settled back in Mountain Brook after World War II. They lived with Mary Alice’s parents on Canterbury Road for a few years before Donald built a home at Montevallo Road and Overhill Road, where the couple lived for the remainder of their lives.

Donald would continue to work in research and development for telecommunications and electronics while also accumulating a number of patents, including ones for an answering machine and hands-free telephone (although no one knows who invented them). His grandchildren would know him for his boats, one of which was named “Pat Pending,” and his collection of artifacts house at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

Mary Alice owned and managed real estate parcels and established a museum at Samford University that would grow into the Southern Museum of Flight. Today the Birmingham institution holds parts of their planes, Donald’s World War I uniform, letters and doors to the “throne” that was an early airplane bathroom.

Both Donald and Mary Alice were installed in the Alabama Aviation Hall of Fame and remain the only husband-wife couple to receive the honor. Mary Alice was a charter member and the only woman in the OX5 Aviation Pioneers, Alabama Wing, and both were charter members of the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio.

Since their deaths in 1980 and 1995, the Beattys’ daughter Mary Alice Beatty Carmichael has pieced together her parents’ historical mark from memorabilia they left. Many of Donald’s adventures were coupled with tragedy, as many fellow pilots were lost, and he didn’t talk of them often in his later years. He passed along funny stories, such as the time he tried to convince a chief he met that he was supernatural by making music come out of his stomach, thanks to a radio canister he had placed underneath his shirt.

“When he did tell stories, they were so riveting because you thought, ‘How would you live through these things?’” Carmichael said. “Mother said thos first ‘daring young men in their flying machines’ were looked upon like the first astronauts were looked upon.”

Carmichael has been rounding up copies of To Love the Sky for her 11 grandchildren and hopes to republish the book with the addition of some of her favorite stories that were edited out of the original edition. 

“Mother wanted to publish the photos in it because no one would ever believe her stories without them,” she said.