Angela Masson is a true Renaissance woman: an artist, inventor, a decorated pilot, television host and – naturally – musician whose life we can
but marvel at.
Born in California, Angela began flying lessons at age 15 and,
shortly after obtaining her pilot’s license, she started air racing. At 21
years-old, while flying in the Powder Puff Derby, an annual transcontinental
air race for women pilots which ran for 30 years from 1947, she set a record as
the youngest person to fly coast to coast in a high-performance aircraft.
In 1971 she trained armed forces pilot cadets at fellow
aviatrix Claire Walters Flight School to build her flight experience, getting
over 1,000 flight hours in less than a year. “The place where I was teaching
had two bathrooms,” she told reporter Benjamin Gleisser in 2019, “and both were
for men. So I wrote ‘WO’ in lipstick in front of the word on one of the doors. There
was a law on the books that said, essentially, ‘Women shall not fly for the
military.’ I thought, Wait a minute, why can’t we be pilots? The military’s
excuse was they didn’t have helmets that would fit us.” She then went on to fly
as a charter pilot for Express Airways out of Naval Air Station Lemoore on a
civilian contract for the Navy and became a full-time commercial pilot the
following year.
Frustrated to see her former male students flying jets while
females were barred (bizarrely they were allowed to fly helicopters, the US
military not considering whirlybirds proper aeroplanes!), she went back to
school, writing her Ph.D. dissertation “Elements of Organizational
Discrimination: The Air Force Response to Women as Military Pilots”. That paper
was read by Robert Crandall, president of American Airlines, who hired her,
initially as a flight engineer on a Boeing 727, in 1976. Shortly after she
became a pilot and was the first woman to fly as First Officer on the Boeing
707, 767 and Douglas DC-10. The Ph.D. that had so impressed Crandall was presented
before Congress during the Hearings about opening military the Academies to
women. In 1978, as airlines began investigating the idea of commercial flights into
space, Angela’s name was being put forward, the first and only woman considered
to pilot such a enterprise.
By the late 1990s she was living in Florida, still mixing
and making and applying for patents for her various inventions. As their most
senior female pilot, she finally retired from American Airlines in December
2007 after 31 years’ service. But of course, she had many more strings to her
bow. In 1980 Angela decided to run for Mayor of Los Angeles. She didn’t win,
and we should probably be grateful for that, because if she had become a politician
we may never have heard her 1982 opus, Jet Lady.
Jet Lady, released under
the name Tangela Tricoli, is Angela’s her one and only album… but what a marvel
that is. Released independently (and now worth a fortune) the disc features Angela/Tangela
singing her own compositions, accompanied by her own solo acoustic guitar.
Sounding like a cross between Frances Baskerville the Singing Psychic and Lucia
Pamela, Jet Lady contains such stone-cold classics as Stinky Poodle (surely
the inspiration for Phoebe Buffay’s Smelly Cat), Life of a Housewife and
Space Woman. Occasionally, as on the original Stinky Poodle she
double tracks her voice; many of the tracks are slathered with echo and reverb,
producing a unique, ethereal sound unlike anything else. It’s just wonderful.
As she herself said (in a 2010 interview), “I sing about everything I do. I can’t
sing on-key, but that doesn’t stop me.” It’s a sentiment very close to my own heart.
She followed up the release with her own cable TV show,
which ran for four years in the Hollywood area. By the late 1990s she had
retired and was living in Florida, although still mixing and making and
applying for patents for her various inventions. Sadly she would not record a
whole album again, however in 2003 Arf! Arf! Records reissued the album on CD,
complete with extra material, campaign ads, unreleased demos and a brand new
re-recording of Stinky Poodle.
Angela may have retired from commercial work, but as
recently as last year she was still passing on her love of flight, teaching at the
St. Augustine High School Aerospace Academy and at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
University in Daytona Beach, Florida. “Every day, I try to share with my
students the love of flying,” she explained to Benjamin Gleisser. “Aviation is
a lifestyle. There’s something sparkly in it for everybody. It gives you a
reason to wake up in the morning and play with the reality of being alive.”
Here are two tracks to get you started – the original
recording of Stinky Poodle and the wonderful Space Woman, but I
urge you to go buy the CD of Jet Lady and wallow in the brilliance of
Angela Masson, aka Tangela Tricoli.
Enjoy!
Download Poodle HERE
Download Space HERE
I was on her TV show when she was pitching it in Dallas, and I OWN an autographed copy of "Jet Lady". BTW, Craig James was on the same show.
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