1991 Newspaper Stories-

THE SIERRA STAR, Oakhurst, California, Thurs., March 14, 1991:
p. 15 -

   LOCAL WOMAN RECALLS LIFE FROM AIRPLANE BARNSTORMING TO MOUNTAINS

                      by Dwight H. Barnes

       In her 90 years, Carline Stephens' life has ranged from the
  excitement of early-day airplane barnstorming to the quiet of the
  mountain towns of Mariposa and Oakhurst.

       During the first half of her life, she traveled with around the
  nation promoting airplane rides at $5 each, met kings and queens, did
  logistics for international air races, learned from Will Rogers how to
  rope a calf and traveled with a select circle of movie stars in those
  days of transition from silent films to talkies.

       Then, in 1946, after a courtship that lasted five years and one week
  to the day, Carline married Newey Oral Stephens, trading the Hollywood
  life for that of a forester's wife, becoming active in a small town
  church and other activities of Mariposa, enjoying trips to the woods and
  mountains with her husband and later their son.  It was not until after
  Mr. Stephens death did she ever talk about her earlier life.

       Born Carline Stovall on Valentine's Day, 1901, in the small
  Mississippi town of Corinth, she remembers it as a child as a happy,
  slow-paced, lazy type of town with no automobiles, no telephones, no
  electric lights, "but everyone had all they needed."

       Southern manners and customs prevailed to such an extent that when
  boys came to call they first asked permission of her uncle with whom she
  lived.

       In the 23 years before she met her first husband, Roscoe Turner,
  Carline Stovall not only had given no thought to a flying career, she had
  never even seen an airplane.  That changed when Turner, a World War I
  aviator turned barnstormer, returned to his native home of Corinth.  They
  met at a church party when Turner, dressed in the uniform which was his
  trademark all his life, showed up with another girl.

       "He looked mighty snappy in his soft, powder blue silk shirt, the
  French blue jacket which matched his eyes, his tan pants and leather
  boots and Sam Browne belt.  Oh how many times I ironed those silk shirts.
  We couldn't send them to the laundry even when we could afford it."

       After her first flight with Roscoe, she was enchanted by flying and
  Roscoe was equally taken by Carline.  They were married September 29
  1924, Turner's 29th birthday, while they stood in the cockpits of the
  barnstorming pilot's JN4D, commonly called a Jenny.  The minister stood
  on the wing.
  
  

       After the ceremony they took off for the Dayton National Air Show.
  It took three days to fly from Mississippi to Ohio.  At one memorable
  stop they landed in a pasture when they ran out of daylight.  Their host
  had never seen an airplane and the newlyweds were invited to stay with
  the family.  Today, Mrs.  Stephens still recalls with great amusement the
  huge four poster with two feather beds into which they sank almost out of
  sight.

       After a few years of "aerial advertising" and barnstorming --
  Carline's job was standing on the field, usually a pasture, and assuring
  timid ladies that flying indeed was great sport, looking down on the
  world -- the Turners established a flying school near Richmond, Va.  It
  was there in 1927 they met Will Rogers, who was on tour with his show of
  cowboy humor and rope tricks.

       Rogers had never flown, so Col. Turner introduced him to the
  airways.  After the flight, Carline asked the humorist his reactions.  He
  replied, "It was fine.  I didn't put all my weight down."

       Eight years later Rogers died in the Alaskan crash of Wylie Post's
  Winnie Mae.  The Rogers and the Turners had become close friends after
  the Turners moved to Hollywood in 1928 to help Howard Hughes make the
  historic World War I film, "Hell's Angels." They had anticipated a short,
  six months stay in California, but when the movie had to be changed from
  a silent to a talkie, it started a long career.

       They had flown west in their huge passenger plane, the first ever
  built by Count Sikorsky and, at the time, the safest plane in the sky.
  As they approached a military airfield at El Paso, Texas, they were hit
  by sudden violent winds.  The Sikorsky went through many gyrations
  including a partial spin.  Although the passenger cabin was enclosed, the
  pilots sat in an open cockpit and Carline had to hang on to Roscoe's
  pants -- his seat belt had frayed -- to keep him from falling overboard.
  When they landed, the army pilots commented they had never seen such a
  big plane do so many stunts.

       The Turners did not disillusion them.

       Hughes, at 21 "a spoiled, rich child," had just inherited a fortune
  so large, according to Mrs. Stephens, he couldn't spend just the interest
  fast enough.  It kept building up.  Carline and Hughes, both Southerners,
  got along fine until the day she stormed into his office without knocking
  and told him to "quit bugging Roscoe" about doing stunts too dangerous
  for their huge plane.

       No one said "No" to Hughes!  A few days later, Hughes gave the
  Turners the weekend off and while they were gone convinced another pilot
  and mechanic to fly the desired stunts.  The Sikorsky was a good, strong
  plane, but it was pushed beyond it's limits.  The result was a fatal
  crash.  Both the pilot and the mechanic were their good friends.  Mrs.
  Stephens always will be bitter about that.

       "Hollywood starlets, in those days, didn't know enough to come in
  out of the rain," she comments, changing the subject. "The directors, the
  photographers and the lawyers were the important ones who made all the
  money."

       Most of the few real stars came from the New York stage. Actresses
  Marian Davies, Mary Pickford and her special friend, Bebe Daniels, were
  close.

       The Turners were good friends with Wallace and Noah Beery and their
  wives, Robert and Betty Montgomery, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Jr., Joe
  E.  Brown and his wife, Mary, who with their two children were special
  friends.  She described them as a good, happy American family.

       Mrs. Stephens recalls that before the Montgomerys' daughter,
  Elizabeth -- "the only child of a film star to really made a go of it in
  the movies" -- was born, Betty Montgomery insisted on building a small
  kitchen off the nursery so that she personally could prepare all the
  baby's food.

       It was at the Rogers' big home across from the polo grounds that
  Mrs. Stephens learned to throw a rope.  Rogers had built his den with a
  high ceiling so that he could throw his lariat when he tired of writing
  his newspaper columns.

       Every Sunday, the Rogers would hold open house.  One time Will said,
  "Carline I'm tired of all those movie people standing around telling each
  other how great they are.  Let's go down to the den and I'll teach you to
  rope a calf."

       "In a closet, Will had a stuffed calf which he rolled out and then
  told me to put a rope around its right front leg," Mrs. Stephens recalls.
  "I didn't know what to do, but he showed me. He was a great teacher.
  Before the afternoon was over I could rope a front leg, a back leg, the
  head, anything.  You know, I never tried it again after that day."

       On another occasion when Will was to talk to a governors'
  convention, he confessed he was nervous, "Carline, I don't know how to
  talk to governors."  Her advice: "Talk to them just like you do to the
  rest of us."

       Among the her long list of memorable events was the weekend they
  flew to "the ranch" at San Simeon.  Now known as the Hearst Castle, then
  it just was the elegant home of William Randolph Hearst and Marian
  Davies.

       "Mrs. Hearst was Catholic and would not agree to a divorce, so she
  moved to New York.  I was nervous about visiting people, who, as my
  mother would have said, 'were living in sin.'  But I have never been to a
  more warm, happy place full of serenity.  In spite of its immensity and
  elegance, it was a homey place with a good family feeling with the Hearst
  children treating Marian with courtesy, charm and obvious affection.

       "Because they knew I was a musician, our guest house had a grand
  piano, a joy to behold.  The beds were made up with silk sheets and while
  we were at dinner, the servants unpacked our bags and laid out our night
  clothes.  There was a special antique priedieu, a special stand for
  kneeling at your prayers.

       "It was Mr. Hearst's birthday with 50 people at the table.  I sat
  across from him and Roscoe across from Marian Davies.  Mr. Hearst knew
  how to entertain a Hollywood crowd.  As soon as dinner was over he took
  us into his personal movie theater which seated about 100 for a special
  show.  That way he saw to it that there weren't a lot of people sitting
  around drinking and carousing."

       After the Turners and Hughes came to a parting of the ways, Turner
  went to work for Earl B. Gilmore and the Gilmore Oil Company, renaming
  their year-old pet lion "Gilmore."  The lion went everywhere the Turners
  flew.  He had a special cage and a special parachute with an automatic
  ripcord.

       "He was safer than we were.  We had to pull our own ripcords,"
  explains the former Mrs. Turner.

       "Fortunately we never had to use parachutes and Turner only made one
  forced landing, that without injury.  He was fearless but never took
  chances."

       The year 1934 was a memorable year for the Carline and Roscoe
  Turner.  In addition to winning the Los Angeles to New York
  transcontinental race, he competed in the London to Melbourne, Australia
  race sponsored by King George V of England.  Turner and his crew placed
  second, earning $50,000, almost of all of which went to expenses.  For
  his exploits that year, he earned the coveted Harmon Trophy for the
  greatest contributions to aviation that year.

       "The British anticipated the world was headed for war and they
  wanted to see what the world's aircraft manufacturers could do using
  regular commercially produced planes," explains Mrs. Stephens.

       Turner's plane was a Boeing twin-engined aircraft.  Carline spent
  seven weeks in England with the flight crew, doing most of the logistics,
  working out the mileages to be traveled, insuring the proper gas, oil,
  water and supplies were available at each stop.  Originally they had
  planned to fuel in Turkey, but the logistics had to be reprogrammed when
  permission to land was denied.  Plans had to be changed several more
  times as the British insisted the Boeing would carry too much fuel and
  forced cut backs to equalize the competition.

       Throughout the visit, two British air force officers, "who were very
  English," were assigned as liaison to the Turner crew, assisting in many
  ways.  Mrs. Stephens recalls how they worked so hard to teach her and her
  secretary, Gladyce Lyons, how to curtsey when they met the King George
  and Queen Mary.

       "Oh how we struggled.  We tried but we were never very graceful."

       The first royal visitor was the Prince of Wales, Edward VIII who
  became king in January, 1936, and before the end of the year abdicated to
  wed American Wallis Simpson.  While inspecting the American aircraft with
  the Turners, the Prince saw a model in which he was quite interested as a
  collector of aircraft models. The Turners gave the model to him.

       "I had a heavy, topcoat, black and white checked tweed," Mrs.
  Stephens laughs.  "When Edward showed up on the scene he wore a coat of
  the same material.  I had to explain to some people later that I was not
  Mrs. Simpson, even if the Prince and I wore identical coats."

       Although they were prepared to curtsey, the Prince reached out first
  to shake hands with the two women, as did his parents on subsequent
  visits with the Turners.  In spite of all their practice, neither ever
  had to curtsey, much to their delight.

       "It was strange.  When the king and queen appeared, the British
  liaison officers and others just kind of vanished.  We found later that
  etiquette demanded that common people not stay around royalty unless
  invited.

       "When Queen Mary came to see us, she wore one of her traditional
  turban hats.  She was a tall woman and those hats looked wonderful, like
  a crown on her head, surrounding her pretty soft curls.  Apparently I was
  the first person to tell her how nice those hats looked.  The press had
  ridiculed them.

       "When I got back to New York I had to do a 15-minute live radio show
  on just what the Queen of England had worn for her visit.

       "While still in England people in shops and everywhere seemed to
  know we had been introduced to the king and queen.  They were full of
  questions about them for they had never seen them.  I was shocked that
  people living in London had never seen their king or queen, but they were
  just very natural people."

       Returning to Hollywood, he continued to fly for Gilmore and also
  inaugurated a "divorce express" between Hollywood and Reno. Ultimately,
  the Turners were divorced themselves.

       It was an incident on a vacation trip to Mexico in November, 1941,
  that was to change Carline's way of life.  Traveling by train with a
  friend, Elaine St. Maur, then art editor for the Los Angeles Examiner,
  the two women joined a group of young people. Stephens, then a
  42-year-old bachelor who had never married, was there.

       "I was impressed.  He was the most thoughtful, courteous man I ever
  had met.  I got my guitar and we sang and when we left the train he
  carried my guitar for me.  Throughout the week he had left on his
  vacation, he was there to help, take us fishing, take us on a picnic, do
  everything to help. "When I got home a week after he did, he called me
  and asked me to marry him.  I remember it well, it was December 7, 1941."

       At that time, she said she hardly knew him and refused his proposal.
  Stephens, an army veteran who had served in the Philippines rejoined the
  army, but on every occasion until after the end of World War II, came to
  visit and press his suit for her hand.  He never gave up and on December
  14, 1946, they were married.

       "He was a most devoted husband and we had a wonderful life
  together," Mrs. Stephens says.

       The Stephens lived for a year in Fresno where he was employed as a
  forester for the California Division of Forestry.  In 1948 Stephens was
  transferred to Mariposa, a town she fell in love with.

       "We were so warmly welcomed at the little Methodist church there.  I
  sang in the choir and played the organ and watched the community and our
  son grow there.  It was wonderful.  There were so many beautiful people
  in the mountains."

       They spent many hours and days in the woods and the mountains and
  today their son, James, is a forester too, stationed at the U. S. Forest
  Service Mariposa Ranger District office in Oakhurst. Since her husband
  died, Mrs. Stephens has been living in a home near her son, watching with
  happiness her grandchildren growing up.


          Data file received direct from the author:  Dwight H. Barnes,
                  42784 Knoll Road, Oakhurst, California 93644, (209)
                  683-4319 on April 23, 1994.