Don Dahler
Don Dahler
Listen to the Episode
Show notes
A decade before Amelia Earhart became a household name, Harriet Quimby made aviation history.
In 1911, Quimby became the first woman in the United States to earn a pilot’s license. The following year, she became the first woman to fly solo across the English Channel—a dangerous and extraordinary achievement at a time when aviation itself was still in its infancy. And then history largely forgot her.
In this episode I talk with longtime television journalist and author Don Dahler about his biography Fearless: Harriet Quimby, a Life Without Limit.
He shares Quimby’s beginnings on a struggling Michigan farm; her successful career as a journalist, critic, and travel writer; her determination to learn to fly despite widespread resistance to women in aviation; her ingenious plum-colored flying suit; and the extraordinary 1912 English Channel flight whose moment in the headlines was eclipsed by the sinking of the Titanic.
And Harriet was much more than a pilot. Don describes a fiercely independent woman who traveled the world, wrote fearlessly, resisted the limitations society placed on women, supported her family, wrote screenplays, and imagined an eventual career as a novelist—a future cut short when she died in an aviation accident at just 37.
We also wander into Don’s own fascinating story. A former CBS News correspondent and war reporter, Don is the author of the memoir Souvenirs from an Absurd Life. We talk about journalism, adventure, writing, encounters from Ethiopia to Grenada, retirement, curiosity, and what a lifetime spent deliberately seeking out the wider world has taught him.
And near the end, our conversation circles back to the word at the heart of Harriet’s story: fearless. Is anyone really fearless? Or is courage something more interesting—the ability to acknowledge fear, accept the risk, and keep doing the thing that matters anyway?
