Facts can be elusive things, and
facts obtained from newspaper accounts always need to be taken with a grain of salt. Even Nilla’s child Sally, born December 6, 1937,
stretches things a bit by saying that her mother was 5 months pregnant with Sally at the time her parents joined the others at the Miami airport on Tuesday, June 1, to bid farewell to AE and FN. By my reckoning, her mother would have only been barely 3 months pregnant at that time. That’s 12-14 weeks pregnant — and in my experience, many women at that stage are able to conceal their baby bump.
Whether the woman standing beside AE in the photo that shows the window in the lavatory area of NR16020 is the pregnant Nilla Putnam is not the important thing. An essential question is whether that photo was taken in late May 1937 as AE and FN prepared to depart for San Juan, thus showing that the lavatory window was still installed during that stop in Miami. Subsidiary questions include, “Who fabricated the patch, where was it fabricated, who installed it, and when was it installed, and why was it even done?”
Woody has called into question the identification of the woman, suggesting another person as being the one standing beside AE. That has led to legitimate questioning of the time and location of the photograph. As I recall, we’re told that the source of the photograph is the archives of the Miami Herald, but that does not guarantee who the woman was or the time and location of where it was taken.
But to repeat, an important thing is to nail down whether that window was in place when NR16020 arrived in Miami in late May 1937. So the challenge is to find other photographs taken as AE and friends flew across the U.S., from California to Arizona to Louisiana and on to Florida, showing that the lavatory window was in place during that trip.
They departed Oakland on May 20, 1937, and landed in Burbank about 6 p.m. The next afternoon they departed Burbank and landed in Tucson, Arizona about dusk, where the infamous backfire of the port engine occurred, causing AE to activate the engine fire extinguisher and her mechanic Bo having to replenish the extinguisher.
On May 22, leaving Tucson in the early morning they flew on to New Orleans and spent the night at a hotel near the airport. Then after a late morning breakfast on Sunday, May 23, the gang flew across the Gulf of Mexico, passing over Tampa and landing in Miami (at the wrong airport). Here began 8 days of preparations, involving Pan American personnel attending to autopilot and radio repairs. And, we believe, at some point the lavatory window was replaced with an aluminum covering, before the departure for San Juan, Puerto Rico.
So Forum detectives: can incontrovertible photographic evidence be found from that cross-country hop that shows the lavatory window still in place? That’s really the important point.