The Happy Bottom Riding Club and the dirt strip where the sound barrier broke
Florence "Pancho" Barnes flew her first solo in 1928, smashed Amelia Earhart's women's speed record in 1930, and stunt-flew for Howard Hughes in Hell's Angels. In 1935 she bought 80 acres of Mojave dust adjacent to Muroc Army Air Field — what would become Edwards AFB — and built a ranch, a bar, an airfield, and the Happy Bottom Riding Club. By the late 1940s every test pilot at Edwards drank there. Pancho's rule: any pilot who broke Mach 1 earned a free steak. On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 to Mach 1.06 over Rogers Dry Lake. He was 24, two ribs broken from a horseback fall the night before. He landed at Edwards, drove to Pancho's, and ordered the steak. The club burned down in 1953 in a land dispute with the Air Force; Pancho fought them in court for ten years. The dry lake is still there. The pilots she fed are mostly gone. The rule still stands.