The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star by Susan Wittig Albert




For Lucille, Pearl, Mildred, and Josephine,

four sisters who made the best of even the worst of times.





Author’s Note

The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star takes place in the summer of 1932. Across the United States, it has already been a year of extreme highs and abysmal lows. More than 13 million Americans have lost their jobs since 1929, and in that same period, more than 10,000 banks have failed—at a time when there is not yet any unemployment or depositors’ insurance. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped to 41.22, down 340 points from its bull market high of 381.17 on September 3, 1929.

Looking to the future, the Republicans have nominated President Herbert (“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”) Hoover for a second term, while the Democrats have selected Franklin Delano (“Happy Days Are Here Again”) Roosevelt. Hoping to collect the compensation already due for past service, the Bonus Army of 20,000 Great War veterans has marched on Washington, D.C., and it will take General Douglas MacArthur, an infantry regiment, a cavalry regiment, and six tanks to oust them. It is also the year of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, of cigar-smoking Bonnie and gun-toting Clyde, and dust storms that turn the sky over the Great Plains, as Aunt Hetty Little would say, as black as the inside of a dog.

Nineteen thirty-two is a year when everything seems to move slower than molasses. The Gross National Product has fallen 43 percent since 1929, and the unemployed and homeless are mired in a Slough of Despond. But it’s also a year when things go faster and farther than ever before—a time of exciting achievements. Jimmy Doolittle flies his Gee Bee Model R-1 aircraft into the record books with a speed of 296 miles per hour, and Amelia Earhart pilots her Lockheed Vega 5B (which she affectionately calls “Old Bessie, the fire horse”) from Newfoundland to Ireland in 14 hours and 56 minutes—the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. Not satisfied with that record, she flies from Los Angeles to Newark in just over 19 hours, the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the United States.

When I began this mystery series, I thought it might be difficult to write about the Depression, because . . . well, lots of people were depressed. But as I’ve dug deeper into the newspapers, magazine articles, interviews, and letters of the time, I’ve learned that while people saw very clearly the difficulty they were in, they resisted giving in to their heartaches and fears. In my family, my mother always told me, “Folks just put their heads down and kept on keeping on.” Hard times, yes, and people in our family didn’t have one nickel to rub against another. Or, as Mom wryly put it, “We darned the darns in our stockings and then, gol-darn it, we darned ’em again.” But they worked hard, found fun where they could, and met often overwhelming challenges with courage, determination, and a deep awareness that almost everybody was in the same leaky boat.

And throughout my research, it is the women who have impressed me the most, the women who made do or did without, shared what they had with those who had less, and smiled as hard as they could to cover their tears.

That is the spirit I want to celebrate in these books about the Darling Dahlias.

I hope you find their stories as heartening as I do.

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Thanks to Deborah Winegarten, whose wide acquaintance with the life and times of Pancho Barnes and other early women pilots (and her wonderful collection of books!) gave me a wealth of ideas. Thanks to Nancy Lee McDaniel, for volunteering to help out on the Darling switchboard. And special thanks to my husband, Bill Albert, who, among his many other talents, has flown small airplanes. He suggested some nefarious ways they might be sabotaged.

A note about language. To write about the people of the rural South in the 1930s requires the use of terms that may be offensive to some readers—especially “colored,” “colored folk,” and “Negro” when they are used to refer to African Americans. Thank you for understanding that I mean no offense.

Susan Wittig Albert

Bertram, Texas





July 30, 1932

The Darling Dahlias Clubhouse and Gardens

302 Camellia Street

Darling, Alabama

Dear Reader,