Dorothy Rice Sims

Dorothy Rice Sims (June 24, 1889 – March 24, 1960) was an American sportswoman, aviator, bridge player, artist, and journalist.

Born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on June 24, 1889, Sims was one of six children of Isaac Rice, a businessman (or corporation lawyer) who founded the Electric Boat Company (producer of submarines for the US Navy and others). Her younger sister Marion (1891–1990, Marion Rice Hart) also became famous as an aviator and sportswoman. ("Before her flying career, Mrs. Hart had captained a 72-foot ketch around the world, most of the way alone.") Their mother Julia B. Rice founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noises in New York City.

Father Isaac Rice was born in Bavaria and raised in Philadelphia. He was also a musician and musicologist, chess player and patron. Dorothy and Marion were the second and fourth of six children, the second and third of four daughters.

According to the cultural historian Hillel Schwartz, as paraphrased by a New Yorker journalist:

Julia Rice's campaign resulted in a federal law "quieting the whistles of ships in federal waters".

"The careers of the six Rice children attracted considerable attention in New York, because their parents encouraged them to stifle their inhibitions." Dorothy Rice left school at twelve, she recalled in her 1940 memoir Curiouser and Curiouser, seeing "no point in clogging my mind with things that everyone knew"; her father was pleased rather than vexed. Later she studied sculpture and painting in Paris.

As a young woman she was a motorcycle racer and became the first amateur licensed woman pilot in the United States, training at Wright School, Mineola, New York, in 1916).

Her first husband was the artist Waldo Peirce.

A website using the name Mile High Club regards the "Club's" "founder" as pilot and design engineer Lawrence Sperry as the "Club's" "founder", along with "socialite Mrs. Waldo Peirce" (Dorothy Rice Sims) citing their flight in an autopilot-equipped Curtiss Flying Boat near New York in November 1916.

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