(AVIATION) Archive of material from flight pioneer Clara Ada

Sale 2473 - Lot 39

Price Realized: $ 531

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900

(AVIATION.) Archive of material from flight pioneer Clara Adams. 28 items, various sizes and conditions, in one folder. Vp, 1926-47 and undated

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Clara H. Grabau Adams (1884-1971) was an Ohio native who married a wealthy Brooklyn leather-goods magnate. She took her first airplane ride in March 1914, and was hooked. Though she never trained as a pilot, she became perhaps the most famous air passenger of her day--the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a ticketed passenger, and a passenger on the first flight of the Hindenburg. She set a record in 1939 for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe by commercial flight.
The highlights of this lot are 3 photographs of Adams with Amelia Earhart: an undated posed joint portrait, 10 x 8 inches, signed by the photographer Harold Wagner; and 2 smaller snapshots of the pair standing with Arthur Bestor under the wings of a plane, 1929. Also included are a pair of snapshots of Adams with Zeppelin pilot Hugo Eckener, 1929; 15 other photos of Adams; her canceled $123.50 check to the Hamburg American Line (possibly a deposit on her 1936 Hindenburg flight?), 3 June 1935; 4 other pieces of signed Adams ephemera; and a letter to Adams from former Pennsylvania governor William Cameron Sproul, 8 December 1927.