100 years ago in Spokane: The comatose pilot woke up and recognized her father, and a new ‘mermaid queen’ was crowned

Daisy Smith, Spokane’s sole woman aviator, was “winning her fight with death.”

Three days after her plane corkscrewed into the ground at Parkwater Field, Smith had regained consciousness and “recognized and greeted her father.”

Doctors warned that she was not yet out of danger, but her condition had improved every day.

Her friends reported that she had always been of a “daring disposition,” partial to riding bucking broncos and driving fast cars. She bought a plane three years earlier and learned to fly.

However, she had not completely mastered the art of flying, according to her fellow pilots at Parkwater.

They said they warned her repeatedly about what they called her “graveyard glide” – coming in for a landing at “so slight an angle as almost to lose control of the machine.” She had replied that she was confident that she had enough “feel” to prevent a stall.

Witnesses said she was executing said glide when the accident occurred.

Her friends were confident that, when she recovered, she would buy another plane and “perfect herself in handling it.”

From the “mermaid” beat: The Spokane Daily Chronicle crowned Rena H. Dea as the “Inland Empire Queen of the Mermaids” in front of a massive crowd at Liberty Lake.

This so-called “mermaid” contest was actually a bathing beauty pageant. Dea won not because of any particular swimming skill, but because she was the “most beautiful, the most graceful, the one with the most poise.”

By contrast, the second place winner – Lois Davenport, of Coeur d’Alene – was an “accomplished long-distance swimmer and expert surfboard rider.”