Aileen Mellott, Lea Hanlon, Polly Ross prepare to deliver Christmas gifts, 1961

It all started because of a huge dust storm and a dinner date with Ingrid Bergman. By the time events had played themselves out a month later, a group of San Diego physicians, dentists, optometrists, pharmacists, nurses, medical technicians, and pilots had formed a loose confederation that would become the Flying Samaritans. For 37 years, the Samaritans have delivered monthly medical and dental services to villages in Baja California with volunteer labor, private funding, and donated supplies. The day the Samaritans idea was set in motion, Aileen Mellott (Mel-LOT) was at the controls of a six-passenger Beechcraft Bonanza forced to land on a rocky, mesa-top air strip at El Rosario, a fishing village on the Sea of Cortez.

Mellott still maintains her pilot’s license and flies to Baja occasionally.

At that time, in 1961, she was Aileen Saunders, one of the best-known women in civil aviation. The den of her Escondido home is a thicket of trophies from her air-racing days. Two first-place awards (1959, 1960) and one second-place (1961) from the Powder Puff Derby dominate the collection. The derby was a prestigious, all-woman, coast-to-coast air race, a cross-country test of navigation and piloting skills and sheer endurance. The International Air Race for Women — Florida to El Salvador one year, Houston to the Bahamas the next — netted her two more first-place prizes. The National Pilots Association named her pilot of the year in 1960 for her contributions to civil aviation.

Growing up, she’d wanted to be a stewardess. But in the days of the low-headroom DC-3, no flight attendant could be taller than five foot five. Aileen overshot the mark by one inch. “I’d always been fascinated with flying. Perhaps one of the reasons I was attracted to my husband,” she now says, “is because he was a pilot.” And it was on a flying vacation with her husband that she was convinced she had to learn too.

“We were flying around Yosemite, taking in Half Dome and all, in a little low-wing air coupe that has the canopy that slides over. We noticed gas was siphoning out, so my husband unhooked his seat belt, slid the canopy back, and leaned way out to tighten the gas line. I said, ‘Hey, don’t fall out! I don’t know how to fly this.’ He said, ‘Oh, you’re not worried about me?’ And I said, ‘No. You’d be dead and I’d still be up here.’ So when we got home, I got serious.” Three years later, she won her first Powder Puff Derby.

Aileen also logged many hours flying in Baja California. “I was with the air wing of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and in those days they did search and rescue in Baja. Students who were doing their cross-country flights were supposed to go from Gillespie Field to El Centro, but sometimes they would get lost and go over the border. I guess that’s how I started flying so much in Mexico. Of course, that’s low-level, mountain flying, so I got pretty good at short fields and rough terrain. I think that helped me a lot in the races, because I got used to the wind currents over the mountains.” Aileen also organized several all-woman Baja air races in the ’60s.

“In those days, there was no paved road south of Ensenada. It was beautiful. There were little resorts that had their own air strips, mostly for men who wanted to go fishing. You couldn’t easily get to them by car, not like it is today, where every place is as crowded as Acapulco. We would fly down, spend the weekend, and fly back.

“The day all this happened, I was bringing back jack Vietor, owner of San Diego magazine, and Roberta Ridgely, the editor, from La Paz, where I’d flown them to do a story on two new hotels that were about to open. There were the three of us, plus my son, and two others.”

It was November 16, 1961, the second year of an extended Mexican drought. The group’s 1000-mile return trip to Gillespie Field would include a lunch stop in Bahia de los Angeles.

“I fueled up and filed a flight plan in La Paz, but when we were ready to leave L.A. Bay, I didn’t get more gas. In those days, [at these small airports] you had to filter the gas through a chamois, because it came straight out of big barrels. I didn’t want to take the time because Jack was in such a hurry. He had an appointment to meet Ingrid Bergman for dinner in San Francisco that night.”

With no weather forecasts or navigation aids available to Baja flyers, the Twin Beech left for San Diego. “About 45 minutes out of Bahia de los Angeles I was in tremendously strong winds, and I began to realize I’m not going to make San Diego. I couldn’t get San Diego or Tijuana by radio, so I decided I’d better land at Ensenada. The wind was blowing hard, and the dust started to swirl up from the ground. I dropped down to 200 feet and probably was within minutes of Ensenada airport when the weather closed in and everything suddenly went blank. We couldn’t see the ground, and I knew we were between 3000-foot peaks.

“I climbed on top and turned south. I’d hoped to beat the storm to Santa Maria Sky Ranch, but when we got there, the dust was too thick to see the landing strip. I remembered there was a small strip at the village of El Rosario,” about 250 miles southwest of Tijuana, “where my husband and I had once salvaged a Twin Beech that had crashed. I’d made the water runs every day from Santa Maria to the crash site, so I knew it pretty well. We just beat the storm into El Rosario and landed at the little dirt air strip on top of the mesa just outside of town.

“In those days, when people in Baja heard a plane in the area they would go out and shine lights or their headlights on the air strip or a road, because they knew an airplane was either in trouble or wanted to land or something. The Mexican people have always been very helpful in those situations. I’ve had nothing but good experiences flying in Mexico.

“That day they knew we must be having a problem, so some people from El Rosario came up in a truck to meet us. It wasn’t a great distance, but the roads were so bad it took them 45 minutes.” Aileen’s extensive scrapbook has a photo of the small, dented, dusty stake-bed truck that took them down to El Rosario. The village, at the intersection of two barely distinguishable dirt roads, had perhaps a dozen buildings. Most homes were tiny structures of lashed branches.

“When the storm came in, the men drove all the way back up the mesa and stuffed rags in the engine of the plane to keep out the dust. We were so grateful.

“They took us to the home of Anita Espinosa, the owner of the town’s general store, sort of the unofficial mayor, and she acted as interpreter for us.” Snapshots show Anita, then in her 50s, as a smiling, handsome, stocky woman with thick, shoulder-length black braids. Her features reflect her mixed Pima Indian-Italian heritage.

“She offered us coffee and apologized that she had nothing more. When we asked what we could do in return, she waved the question away. But we pressed her to talk, and eventually she told us what a difficult time they were having and how the drought had killed all their cattle, but what would be most useful would be clothes, especially children’s clothes.

“Anita couldn’t accommodate all six of us overnight, so some men offered to drive us to Santa Maria Sky Ranch. The road was horrible. It took hours. One of the cars didn’t have a backseat, so we sat on the floor. We all stayed at the Sky Ranch that night, and they drove me back to El Rosario the next day. The storm had passed, so I flew back to Santa Maria, picked up my passengers, refueled, and we made it home.”

Winning the Powder Puff Derby was something like becoming a flying Miss America. The achievement brought certain perks and opportunities to the top pilot as an ambassador for aviation. A 1959 photo of Aileen from an Air Force public relations event shows her with parachute pack and helmet, about to step into the cockpit to fly a military jet at George Air Force Base in Palmdale. She was sponsored in one derby competition by the Tijuana Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club. She also acquired media and well-placed social contacts. (Actors Uoyd Bridges and Robert Preston presented her with a plaque for her work with the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Bridges even proposed a Sea Hunt episode that would include Aileen as a search-and-rescue pilot.) Over the next two weeks, she’d call on many of her San Diego and Tijuana friends to implement the first airlift to El Rosario.

“When I got back to San Diego, I just thought about how nice everyone had been to us; they’d gone out of their way to help us and would have given us whatever they had. It was right before Christmas, so I called on some of my friends to help, the media to publicize the clothing drive, and we ended up with a hangar full of donations — toys and clothes like you wouldn’t believe. The Boy Scouts of La jolla wrapped every one in Christmas paper, and by the time we were through, we had nine planes loaded down with gifts.” They made their first trip on December 9. On December 16 they returned with 16 planeloads of gifts and clothes.

“One of the pilots I asked to go down with us was a doctor, Dale Hoyt. He brought his medical bag with him and asked the people if anyone would like to see a doctor. People started lining up at Anita’s door, and Dale used her kitchen table for examinations.

“It’s illegal to fly in Baja after dark in a single-engine plane. So I had told most of the pilots to leave so they’d make it home on time. Dale and I and two others stayed later, and he kept seeing people in Anita’s kitchen. Finally we had to go and decided to spend the night at Mehling Ranch [near Ensenada], Dale and I were up all night talking about El Rosario and how they really needed medical aid. And that’s when the idea of the Flying Samaritans was born.”

Aileen’s scrapbook and old Super-8 film records of the Samaritans’ project show a skinny Santa riding in a two-wheel burro cart, the town’s school bus. A plain, whitewashed building with double wood doors topped by a graceful demilune window, “Hospital Civil de El Rosario” the sign says, built by the government but completely empty, never staffed or stocked. Gowned, gloved, and masked surgeons working under hospital lights in an otherwise dim, murky room designated as the operating room. A M*ASH-like tent city for recovery rooms and exams. A generator, X-ray machine, boxes of medications and equipment. A commercialsized pressure cooker for sterilizing instruments on Anita’s old wood-burning iron stove. A bilingual nurse explaining to a middle-aged man what will happen during his operation — how the spinal anesthetic will make him lose feeling below his waist, but he shouldn’t panic at the strange sensation. An eight-year-old girl, shoulder and arm encased in a spica cast after surgery to give mobility to her polio-weakened left side.

Aileen, Dr. Paul Woodward, and Dr. Al Birkenfield narrate the 30-year-old films, remembering details of the first years of the Rosario clinic. (Woodward was the Chargers’ team physician for 15 years. Another early Samaritan doctor was Tom Hombein, one of the first Americans to climb Mt. Everest.)

Aileen Mellott: In those days, there wasn’t a [resident] doctor between Ensenada and Santa Rosalia [about 400 miles south]. One day something like 16 people came in a pickup truck. It took them three days to reach El Rosario to see a doctor. And if few people had ever been treated by a doctor, none of them had ever seen a dentist, so Jim Gunderson and Dale Burke [came with us]. Not all the volunteers flew to the clinic. Some drove. And in those days it took eight to ten hours to drive there from San Diego. The paved road ended just south of Ensenada.

Dr. Woodward: We got permission through the mayor of Ensenada to do this free medical care down there, and having gotten permission, we then were able to approach San Diego hospitals for used medical equipment. We enlisted people to help us install it and set up a facility that we could do some work in.

We would see the people ahead of time to plan exactly what needed to be done, and then on the next trip, we’d take down medical kits with our sterilized instruments. It was a real logistical chore. All the sterile packs were put up at Scripps and Sharp Hospitals and had to be carried down. I remember one day when the generator went out on us, we had to finish the operation by flashlight.

It was amazing to me how well the patients tolerated discomfort, because we were unable to take any narcotics down, and so we had to treat their pain with aspirin. They tolerated it extremely well. The only ones who didn’t do as well were the few who had been treated in the United States, and they were used to getting their narcotics.

[Aileen recalls an old woman who had most of her teeth pulled one afternoon, with only aspirin for the pain. But that same night the woman was among the crowd assembled to watch the movies the Samaritans had brought down for entertainment.]

Dr. Birkenfield: It was Dr. Dale Hoyt who really got the medical end of things going [for the Flying Samaritans]. Every weekend we might do 10 or 12 cases, and the nurses worked so hard. They had quite a turnaround time. The people that we sent down to do surgeries were [surgical specialists and anesthesiologists] who were well trained and qualified. We didn’t have people doing procedures that they weren’t trained to do. We tried to minimize any chance of trouble, because we sure didn’t need them under these conditions.

When I first went down there, I was really scared, doing surgery under these conditions. A little operating room, no medical backup. I’m amazed at what was accomplished.

There was one little window in the operating room, and the kids used to plaster their noses against it. I don’t think they ever thought they would see anything like surgery going on in their town.

So many of the men have cataracts. Some of them extended over the central portion of the cornea and really knocked out their central vision. And we did a lot of hernia repairs. These men didn’t have these nice little hernias that you see up here. They were all huge, neglected hernias. Their main occupation was pulling in lobster traps and diving for abalone and doing hard, physical work. A hernia kept them from working. So [the surgery] would often restore a man to being able to take care of his family and earn a living. Dr. John Milner used to stay down there for two or three days after we operated to make sure the patients were all okay.

We had a lot of good meals in Anita’s kitchen. She had that magic frying pan that made refried beans. It was never washed. She just kept adding beans to it, and year after year they just got better and better.

Aileen Mellott still maintains her pilot’s license and flies to Baja occasionally. But her duties for the Samaritans now are administrative, as one of the directors of the Palomar chapter. She notes some differences between the early days and now.

“First of all, knowing the chief of police and the mayor [of Tijuana] and others in high places helped a lot to get us started. I just saw a newspaper picture of us with the chief of customs. He was supposed to charge us a tourist fee, but he just waved us through each time and never checked us. They were very, very cooperative, and we’d take all kinds of equipment down there.

“The government and the systems have changed. It’s much more difficult for us to work down there now than it used to be. The customs people in the U.S. and Mexico have gotten much stricter. Now they always check to make sure the medicines are not outdated and the physicians are licensed.

“We go in and work with [the system]. For example, for some things to clear Mexican customs, we need a letter of permission. Our chapter works with the DIF, a Mexican organization of children’s charities. So it’s like everything we bring into the country is going to the DIF. That way, we can clear it through customs.

“We don’t do major surgery anymore, just cataracts and things like that. People are brought back to the U.S. for anything big. What we used to do down there in the beginning we wouldn’t think of doing now.”

Anita Espinosa, in her 80s, still lives in El Rosario. One of the 11 Flying Samaritans groups in California and Arizona still maintains the original clinic. Medical and nonmedical volunteers, including student chapters at Palomar College and UC-Irvine, number about 2200. They work at 23 clinic sites and assist Mexican emergency workers during disasters like the recent floods. And today, with improved roads, they might as correctly be called the Driving Samaritans.