Jolantha Tschudi was 18 years old when she documented in her diary the overwhelming experience of her first solo flight: “I am alone with my bird. It obeys my every command and takes me through the air. A simple mistake can cost me my life. But that is what makes it so attractive, what gives me that sense of pride and freedom.” Thirteen years earlier, when she was five, her father ignited her passion for gliders. “He had a beaming face and squealed with joy every time we turned,” Jacques Tschudi recalled of that defining moment for her daughter in the Swiss Alps.
Jolantha was meant to be an adventurer. “I didn’t know what fear was,” commented her son Christian Neukom, recalling the years of her mother’s youth. “She loved to explore unknown territories.” The same thing happened to her when, in 1944 and after high school, she attended a gliding school in Belp, near Bern. Flying was then something almost exclusively masculine. The 18-year-old was not afraid, but she did have the weight of responsibility on her young shoulders. This marked the beginning of an exciting career as a pilot, which would take Tschudi to Africa, on a road full of adventures.
In addition to being a pioneer in the air, Jolantha Tschudi was also open to new experiences on the ground. She was fascinated the first time she heard of a new sports car named after Porsche, in 1948. “For her, driving and flying meant freedom and adventure,” recalled Christian Neukom. She and she made her dream come true with the elegant Porsche 356, extraordinarily modern at the time.
In June 1948, the first car with the Porsche name got its road license in Gmünd, Austria. With the 356 “No. 1” Roadster, Ferry Porsche fulfilled a dream: to create his own sports car. A brave plan for a difficult time at the end of that decade. Porsche found its first fans in Switzerland, which, as a neutral country, largely kept out of the humanitarian and economic catastrophe of World War II.
In the winter of 1948, Bernhard Blank, a Zurich hotelier and car dealer, owned two of the first Porsches ever built: a 356/2 Coupé, which he exhibited on the ground floor of his hotel, and a dark blue 356/2 Cabriolet. with bodywork by Gebrüder Beutler, which he sold to Jolantha Tschudi. She thus became the first woman in the world to buy a Porsche.
Blank had a request before handing over the Cabriolet to its new owner. He wanted to present it together with the 356/2 Coupé at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1949. The brand’s first appearance at an international event was a great success and won over the specialized press, immediately making the Porsche 356 a reference among motorists. European car enthusiasts.
Jolantha Tschudi lost her parents when she was still young. Her father, founder of the AMAG dealer in Zurich, died in 1944. Her biological mother died when Jolantha was only three years old. “He learned very early to be firm,” said his son Christian Neukom. “And she didn’t let anyone get in her way.”
He studied ethnology in Neuchâtel and, in December 1946, undertook the first of his long study tours to Africa with the curator of the ethnographic museum in that city and a pilot friend. But not on a glider, but on a Stinson single-engine. It was also an extraordinary adventure. “In the end they covered a distance of 13,000 kilometers,” Neukom said. “And they had to make no fewer than six emergency landings.” The gasoline with impurities blocked the carburettor. “It was always a struggle to get the plane to the ground quickly so that the engine could be repaired.”
But that didn’t stop Tschudi from flying to Africa again and again in the years that followed. Together with the Director of the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, he visited indigenous African peoples hitherto unknown in Europe. Readers of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper awaited the stories of him from distant lands in his regular column, Letters from the Jungle. “My mother was probably the first European woman to live with the Tuaregs in the Sahel region, for a long period of time,” according to Christian Neukom. She published a scientific reference book on prehistoric rock art from the Tassili n’Ajjer mountain range in the Sahara.
Jolantha Tschudi was fascinated by hunting, another male preserve, and even played the cello in a chamber orchestra. But she never lost sight of his great passion, gliding. He held several altitude and distance records and was a member of the Swiss national gliding team. He used the 356/2 Cabriolet with registration ZH 44035 for long journeys to various locations in the Alps. But his joy was short-lived, as he crashed into a curb at the Julier pass, in the canton of Grisons, considerably damaging the car, which he later sold to his brother.
After marrying Louis Neukom and the birth of their two children, she gave up her passion, flying. “It was very difficult for her, but my mother said that the sense of responsibility she had for my brother Yves and for me was greater than her desire to fly away from her,” Christian Neukom pointed out. She even gave up his research trips for the sake of her family, focusing instead on her passion for hunting and devoting herself to graphological studies. Jolantha Tschudi passed away at the age of 86, in 2011.
