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Laura Ingalls

1893 Brooklyn, New York - 1967 Burbank, California

BiographyLaura Houghtaling Ingalls (December 14, 1893 – January 10, 1967) was an American pilot who won the Harmon Trophy. She was arrested in December 1941 and convicted of failing to register as a paid Nazi agent, and served 20 months in prison. The Nazis had encouraged her to speak at events of the America First Committee. She was a distant cousing of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote Little House on the Prarie. Ingalls was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 14, 1893. She learned aviation in 1928 at Roosevelt Field near Mineola, New York, and then continued at Parks Air College in St. Louis. By 1930 she was setting records in acrobatic flying. In late September 1939, Ingalls flew over Washington, D.C., in her Lockheed Orion monoplane, dropping anti-intervention pamphlets. She was arrested for violating White House airspace, but was released within hours. Later, she worked with the America First Committee with the encouragement of and under consulatation with Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, the head of the Gestapo in the US and second secretary of the German Embassy. After her probation ended, in July 1944 Ingalls was arrested at the Mexican border. Her suitcase contained seditious materials, including notes she had made of Japanese and German short-wave radio broadcasts. She was prevented from entering Mexico, but was not prosecuted. Ingalls was never really remorseful and maintained that she was doing a patriotic thing. Her reputation never recovered and she was estranged from family and the aviation community for the rest of her life.

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