{"product_id":"the-happy-bottom-riding-club-the-life-and-times-of-pancho-barnes","title":"The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes","description":"xxiii, 305 pp. Pancho Barnes was a force of nature, a woman who lived a big, messy, colorful, unconventional life. She ran through three fortunes, four husbands, and countless lovers. She outflew Amelia Earhart, outsmarted Howard Hughes, outdrank the Mexican Army, and out- maneuvered the U.S. government. In The Happy Bottom Riding Club, award-winning author Lauren Kessler tells the story of a high-spirited, headstrong woman who was proud of her successes, unabashed by her failures, and the architect of her own legend. Florence \"Pancho\" Barnes was a California heiress who inherited a love of flying from her grandfather, a pioneer balloonist in the Civil War. Faced with a future of domesticity and upper-crust pretensions, she ran away from her responsibilities as wife and mother to create her own life. She cruised South America. She trekked through Mexico astride a burro. She hitchhiked halfway across the United States. Then, in the late 1920s, she took to the skies, one of a handful of female pilots. She was a barnstormer, a racer, a cross-country flier, and a Hollywood stunt pilot. She was, for a time, \"the fastest woman on earth,\" flying the fastest civilian airplane in the world. She was an intimate of movie stars, a script doctor for the great director Erich von Stroheim, and, later in life, a drinking buddy of the supersonic jet jockey Chuck Yeager. She ran a wild and wildly successful desert watering hole known as the Happy Bottom Riding Club, the raucous bar and grill depicted in The Right Stuff.","brand":"Random House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39717830426694,"sku":"2320209","price":8.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/ym-demo.myshopify.com\/products\/the-happy-bottom-riding-club-the-life-and-times-of-pancho-barnes","provider":"Yesterday's Muse","version":"1.0","type":"link"}