The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 82

,1 7 REMEMBER GRANDPA -x 1 '0 i She Became an Artist and Flier, Fulfilling Nathan Hofheimer's Admonition to lilllj Stand on Her Two Siranaers. Forced to Land, Gave Aline Rhonie iii rne riying oug. plane company in which he had an interest and Pat painted. She thought a mural would look good on one of the hangar walls at Roosevelt Field in Long Isand, and approached the airport manager. He agreed, and Pat started out to do a nice mural, her first, with a dozen or so people and probably ten or so planes to depict the history of aviation.

Four years later, with a sigh of exhaustion, she completed the largest mural in the country, 135 feet long, 15 feet high. It contained some 500 life-sized portraits of famous airmen, and 263 models of planes. The mural was unveiled in 1938 with much praise, but since the war it has been practically unseen by the public. The hangar now houses only private planes. Her marriage to Brooks also ended in divorce.

During the war she forsook her increasingly-profitable painting and one-man shows to drive an ambulance for the French and, after the fall of France, to ferry planes for America and England. Both the British and the French decorated her. After the war, Pat returned home, determined first to rest, then return to painting. She recently made a trip through the West Indies, painting what she saw when she felt like doing it. She brought back many scenes on canvas, and was told that they were" too "representational." "That means it looks like what it is," Pat explained.

"That's supposed to be bad. What they want, I guess, is the doodling you tear up after you get through telephoning." She recently, although with no intention of giving up painting, invested in the Allison Radar, a 58-pound radar set developed by Donald K. Allison, the radio scientist. This gadget not only reveals to the pilot all planes in his vicinity, but also mountains and weather con- ditions. She is sole distributor.

Still in her 30s, the little girl who had to do something has finally met, and mastered, two diverse and complicated fields. Grandpapa 'Hofheimer made his' lessdri stick. the weekly By -Bernard Dorrity IT WAS an all-too-frequent occurrence. The five little girls, running like steps down to Aline Rhonie. the littlest, would stand before their giant, millionaire grandfather, twisting their hands.

"And what are you going to be when you grow up?" Grandpapa Nathan Hofheimer would boom at each of the girls from tiis "You may not have money all your life, you know. Do something. Stand on your own two feet." Then the little girls would run off to do something, to get somewhere, to stand on their own two feet. Along with the other four Hofheimer girls, Aline Rhonie tried the piano. There were five pianos in the country house in New Jersey, and somehow, with all that racket going on, Aline Rhonie didn't make much progress with the piano.

She was going to be a great writer, too. She wrote a wonderful little story, truly beautiful but a little sad, about twin princes. One twin was born in August, the other on Christmas day and whenever she read the story people giggled instead of crying. Apparently she just wasn't cut out to be a writer. She tried sculpture.

Not knowing that sculptors use a metal frame, she went ahead with her clay, building tremendous figures without support. Her biggest blew over, squashing itself. So much for sculpture. Then she turned to drawing, and there, finally, she made the grade. She copied a portrait of Marshal Foch from a Sunday rotogravure section during the closing days of World War and her grandmother gave her a dollar.

From4henort Aline Rhdnic was an artist, ca'pa-' 22 Jannary 15, 1930 ble of standing on her own two feet. When she was 17 she married Richard Bamberger of a wealthy New York family. One day in the late '20s, painting in the little cottage her family had given her in the New Jersey countryside, she heard a plane land on grandpapa's golf course, right by the cottage. Two men got out, said something about, weather closing in, and that they were hungry. Aline Rhonie fed them, and listened to their fantastic tales of flying.

That was the day she the flying bug. She and her husband didn't get along from the very first, and at 19 she went to Reno. With nothing to do but wait for her divorce, 'she learned to fly. On her return to New York, she bought a plane. Now she was both a flier and an artist.

She dropped the names Hofheimer Bamberger and became Aline Rhonie, nicknamed Pat. A year or so after her divorce, she met a personable young man, Reginald Langhorne Brooks, a nephew of Lady Astor. He was learning the Morse code as a requirement for his reserve commission as a Marine Corps aviator, and he insisted on talking to her in Morse. They'd fly to a beach, and settle down for a long afternoon's talk of love with a telegraph key. Telephone conversations, too, were composed of Morse code "dits" and "dahs." Many a girl might quail at such a courtship, but Pat seemed to like it.

She and Brooks were married, flew a honeymoon junket in two planes from New York, through the West Indies to Mexico, up the West Coast and across the continent to home. Brooks occupied himself with a small-.