Edmonds resident Alice Marks, who met aircraft restorer Addison Pemberton through her son-in-law Cliff Sanderlin (also of Edmonds,) got the ride she had dreamed of for the past eight decades at the North Cascades Fly-In at the Skagit Aero Education Museum in Concrete, WA on Saturday, July 24, 2010.


In 1928, as seven-year-old Alice Eakle Marks sat inside the tiny wood-paneled passenger compartment of a Boeing 40 bi-plane, she dreamed of actually flying in one.

Alice sat in many open-cockpit biplanes as she grew up along the Transcontinental Air Mail route near Waterman, IL, 40 miles west of Chicago, where her parents managed an emergency airfield for airmail pilots. 

She met a number of heroes of early aviation, and served as a U.S. Airways Weather Observer until 1942.  

She sketched a picture of Amelia Erhart, which she delivered in person in 1936, and met Ira Biffle, the pilot who taught Charles Lindberg to fly.

For eight decades, Alice wished she had gone up in a Boeing 40 before they all disappeared from the skies. Then on Saturday July 24, at age 89, her dream finally came true.

Aircraft restorer Addison Pemberton, who rebuilt and owns the only flying Boeing 40 (the C model), took Alice up for a flight at a fly-in at Concrete, Washington, about 100 miles northeast of Seattle.


Antique aircraft restorer Addison Pemberton assists 89-year-old Edmonds resident Alice Marks into his Boeing 40-C, the only model still flying of the world's first passenger plane. 

Pemberton, a Spokane businessman, resurrected the four-passenger, open-cockpit Boeing 40-C from wreckage that had rusted for 70 years on a hillside in Southern Oregon following a crash.  After verifying in 2008 that the reconstructed plane was airworthy, Pemberton and two other pilots in antique aircraft flew a re-enactment of the early days of airmail, tracing the exact route of the Transcontinental Air Mail from New York to San Francisco.

Coincidentally, during their airmail re-enactment in 2008 Pemberton and his companions spent five days pinned down by weather at Rochelle, IL, just a hundred yards from Alice’s Illinois home.  Alice did not know about their grounding as she was living with her daughter Heather Marks and son-in-law Cliff Sanderlin in Edmonds, WA.

Sanderlin, who met Pemberton at Felts Field Airport in Spokane in 2008 and stayed in touch, arranged this summer for Alice’s barnstorm ride.  Pemberton introduced Alice during a presentation about his re-enactment flight at the Museum of Flight in Seattle in November of 2008.

“Mr. Pemberton has been wonderful with Alice,” said Sanderlin.  “We’re pleased that Alice and others who supported aviation in its infancy as ground crews and weather observers are getting some recognition for their heroism, along with the pilots.  Better late than never!”

Alice describes several figures from the early days in a book that she and Sanderlin are writing about Alice’s life on the airfields.  Titled “And There He Came, With One Wing High” the book emphasizes that every pilot flying the mail was a hero since they were forced to fly day and night, regardless of unreliable equipment and life-threatening storms.

The book, which is due to be published in September, includes photos of Alice as a teenager clinging to the tower while cleaning the anemometer and—of course—photos of her in the “new” Boeing 40-C in July 2010.

For more information go to Alice’s website  at "http://www.airmailtrail.org./"www.airmailtrail.org.           

Addison Pemberton reviews the proof copy of a book about the early days of airmail by Alice Marks and Cliff Sanderlin (left.)  The book is due out in September.