Irene Leverton begins work as a crop duster, Tennessee, 1950.
If Randy Lovelace had lined up his thirteen candidates all together in his office, he might, at first glance, have thought them a startlingly diverse group of women. They ranged in age from twenty-one to forty, and they came from all over the country. One had eight children, while a couple of others were staunchly single. A few were struggling to keep a roof overhead, and one was a millionaires daughter. But beneath the surface
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differences, one thing united them: these women fell in love with flying the first time they climbed into a cockpit. As little girls, they begged and cajoled their parents to let them “go up.” If coaxing didn’t work, they lied and sneaked out to the airfield. Once they were licensed, they realized women weren’t going to get the glamorous test pilot or corporate jobs, and they turned instead to instructing and ferrying. They took advantage of the Civil Air Patrol and the WASP to get access to planes, sometimes to heavy, fast planes. They paid lip service to the rules, flying in shirtwaist dresses and pastel pumps. But they always found ways to keep flying.
The pilot strode down the aisle of the plane in his navy wool uniform and stopped at her seat. Geraldine Hamilton, just four, was looking at his knees.
His voice boomed from above. “Want to come up and see the cockpit, little lady?”
It was 1932, and Jerri was flying with her father Watson Hamilton, an oil man, to a meeting in Austin, Texas. They left home in Amarillo in a Lockheed Electra that belonged to a family friend, and when the plane leveled off at about five thousand feet—these were the days before pressurized cabins—the pilot came back and made his offer to Jerri, all starched and shiny in her best dress. She most certainly did want to see the cockpit: she scrambled out of her seat and followed him back up to the front of the plane.
The pilot let her sit in his lap and hold the control column, which she called the steering wheel. He showed her the compass and told her to keep the little needle right in the middle. And she “flew” the plane until they were close to Austin; then a stewardess led her back to her father.
“Jerri, when you grow up, if you study real hard and become a nurse, you can fly all the time,” Watson told his daughter as
she clambered back up into the seat beside him. “You can be an air hostess.”
Jerri shook her coal-black curls, unimpressed. “I don’t want to do that,” she informed him. “I’m going to fly these airplanes. I’ve been flying this one and I’m gonna fly ’em.”
Watson corrected her. “Honey, gals just don’t fly airplanes.”
Telling this story almost seventy years later, Jerri lets out a rich laugh. “I guess I showed him.”
Her father was the son of a powerful Texas rancher and a prominent figure in the booming oil patch. Her mother, Prissy, was a daughter of Texas society; both sides of her family traced their roots in America to back before the Revolutionary War. Jerri, born in 1928, was their only child, and the focus of Prissy’s considerable attention. Her third birthday party was written up in the social pages. She had tap dancing lessons, and she was never allowed to leave for school until her mother had painstakingly brushed her hair into thirty-two perfect Shirley Temple curls. (As soon as Jerri was allowed out the door, she crammed on her toy pilot’s hat and goggles, squashing the curls, and pedaled off in her little red-and-yellow airplane on wheels.)
One day in the middle of World War II, Jerri was in the car with her mother when she saw two women coming along the sidewalk in Amarillo. They wore trousers and caps and had shiny gold wings pinned to their shirts. They walked with confident strides, parachute packs and duffel bags slung over their shoulders. Jerri pressed her nose up against the window: “Mother, look! They’re letting women in the air force!” She had never heard of the WASP. Her mother started to explain what the women’s air corps did, but Jerri wasn’t listening. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going in the air force.’” But the WASPs were disbanded eighteen months later.
When she was fifteen, Jerri and a friend went out to the Amarillo airfield and persuaded a young man who was just out of the navy to take them up in his Waco open-cockpit biplane.
She had fifteen minutes in the hat and the goggles—for real, this time—with the wind slamming into her face and the air thick with the smell of gas. That was it: she had to have flying lessons.
She knew better than to ask her parents for the money: a premium was put on “ladylike behavior” in the Hamilton household, and there was nothing ladylike about flying lessons. Jerri had had her drivers license since she was thirteen (that part wasn’t so unusual in Texas at the time) but she started charging her friends for rides in her car. She squirreled away her allowance and money from her parents that she told them was for sodas at the drugstore or trips to the drive-in. She could scrape together five dollars, enough for one lesson, each week. She found an instructor who was willing to teach her, though there weren’t any other girls taking lessons. And she started to build up the time for her license.
Then—disaster. One day Prissy was home to catch her daughter coming in the door in her coveralls. “Somebody ratted,” Jerri says. There was no plausible excuse for the oil beneath her fingernails, the wind knots in her curls. “How could you do such a thing without telling me?” railed her mother. Prissy had ambitions for her daughter: college, a good marriage, a membership at the country club and a position in society. Hanging out at the airport with Lord knows what kind of men was not part of that picture.
She was so angry that she called Jerri’s father. Although the two had been bitterly divorced after Prissy caught him cheating with Jerri’s piano teacher, they managed to agree on one thing, and within a week their duplicitous daughter was on a train bound for the convent school in San Antonio. “We were Episcopalian, we weren’t even Catholic!” Jerri snorts, recalling the depth of her mother’s horror. “I spent a whole year on my knees plotting how I would get back into a plane.” After that one year, her mother relented and she was allowed back to the local high school in Amarillo—but nowhere near airplanes.
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But within hours of her return, Jerri was sneaking out to the airfield. One oppressively hot day in June 1945 she was hanging around the tarmac with friends. The war in Europe had just ended; she was seventeen and newly graduated. That afternoon, a B-25 thundered in and touched down beautifully, and Jerri and all the other spectators turned to watch the huge bomber as it coasted down the runway—and kept going. “Amarillo is up at three thousand feet and there’s not a tree, shrub, bush or bump on the whole place, and the plane just went right off the end of the runway,” Jerri recalls. Jerri and everybody else chased after the plane, and she was standing a few feet from the cockpit when a tanned, dark-haired pilot jumped down, grinning ruefully.
“He was gorgeous Jerri says, the power of that first glimpse undimmed by fifty-five years. The pilot stood watching a truck hook up his plane to tow it back toward the airport. Jerri took a deep breath.
“Your brakes gone?” she asked the pilot, searching for conversation.
“Sure are,” he said. “I hadn’t planned on a trip out the highway.”
His name was Lou Sloan, and he had stopped to refuel on his way from Europe to the Pacific coast, as America shifted its forces to the last battles of the war. A few days later, he took his plane west, but he was soon back in Amarillo, come to visit the petite, blue-eyed teenager from the airfield.
“He was never one to waste any time,” Jerri says, laughing at the memory. “He said, ‘Let’s get married and go on up to the university together.’”
Jerri hesitated—she had only known him a couple of weeks.
“Look, I’m twenty-seven, you’re seventeen,” Lou told her. “You got time. I don’t.” The war had left him feeling far older than his years, and Jerri was won over by the force of his conviction. Her mother reluctantly consented when Jerri promised she would go to college. They were married a month later, and come September they headed off to the University of Arkansas.
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They moved into Veteran City, a community of ex-soldiers and their wives. “Nine months and thirty minutes” after they were married, Jerri gave birth to their daughter, Candy. Now she could resume her flying lessons—it was a bit of a strain on their budget, but she and Lou both wanted to fly. When they graduated from college, they moved to Memphis, where Jerri’s father helped Lou get an engineering job with an oil company. In 1952, their son, David, was born. And as soon as he was toddling, Jerri got a nanny to watch the children and concentrated on getting her private license.
The FAA inspector for her exam had never licensed a woman, and he didn’t like the idea much. He put Jerri through a brutal check ride, going around and around the field, screaming at her that she was doing everything wrong, obviously intent on rattling her. She looped, spun, stalled as directed. When they landed, she got out of the plane and started to walk to her car in tears. “I knew the way he yelled at me I wasn’t about to get my license.” He asked where she was going. “And I said, ‘What, you son of a bitch, I know you’re not going to give me a license.’ And he said, ‘Well, I never thought I’d see the day I’d give a woman a license to fly an airplane.’” But he gave Jerri one.
Now she told Lou she was going to get the rest of her certifications: she wanted instrument, instructor and commercial ratings. She wanted a career.
They moved to Dallas, and when Jerri met a couple of other women who flew out at the airfield they got together and started a chapter of the 99s. Within months, she was flying in local air races, building up the two hundred hours she needed for a commercial rating. On one of those races, she met a quiet Oklahoman who shared her sense of humor; she and “Jerrie C” quickly became friends. Then Jerri got some work ferrying planes for a Cessna dealership. She gloried in it, making money for being in the air. “Only another pilot knows what I’m talking about. It’s an exhilaration, you’re free, you’re in control, you’re up
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in the heavens, nobody can get to you if you don’t want them to, the phone doesn’t ring, the kids don’t cry, the world can go to hell. You’re floating in the clouds and then you grab hold of that machine and you go play Just go play Go play with the clouds.”
But at home, things were grim. Lou was drinking, all the time. He was haunted by demons that had followed him home from the war. And now drinking was in his job description: two- martini lunches, then rounds of whiskey with colleagues after the eighteenth hole in the evenings.
u He was such a gentle, kind man until he was drinking. Then it was absolutely 180 degrees in the other direction: he was mean, he was loud.” Jerri’s voice is raw with pain as she recalls the disintegration of her brave, young pilot. She emptied his gin bottles into the hyacinth bushes outside the kitchen door, and when Lou was on a tear, she barricaded the children in her bedroom with a dresser in front of the door. She knew about the memories that haunted him but despaired of how to help. She had two small children who were terrified of Daddy, and she sensed that she had better make sure she had an income of her own. She had been raised to imagine herself cared for as somebody’s wife, but Jerri didn’t see that in her future.
In 1959, she heard that several test-piloting contracts were coming up at the nearby headquarters of Texas Instruments, and she wanted them. But she was certain she wouldn’t get them as a woman on her own. She knew a pilot named Joe Truhill, a slight, reticent man who also worked for the Cessna dealership. He had taught Jerri for her instructor rating. Joe was an experienced pilot and an airplane and engine mechanic—she persuaded him to go into business with her, and they opened Air Services Inc. Then she called her father and asked if he would help with the purchase of their first plane, and he agreed to sign for a loan. She and Joe earned military security clearance, won the TI contracts, and before long they had a fleet: three DC-3s, four B-35s, two B-26s, a DC-6— most of these war surplus planes that Joe refurbished.
Jerri loved the flying: most of it was military equipment, top secret work. She tested the first airborne radar systems, the first “smart bombs” and the first powered navigation systems, flying just a few feet above the waves out on the Atlantic. Sometimes they flew all day and often all night, too. The cockpits were freezing cold, the flights so long her muscles would ache. At home, things were difficult, but her business was booming, and out over the sea, or above the clouds, she felt free.
Then, in the summer of 1960, there was a strange phone call. Jerrie Cobb, her pal from the races, wanted to know if Jerri could get away from work to take part in “a top secret government project.” Jerri thought for just a minute, then replied, “Sure, yeah, I think I can get away.” She didn’t hear anything more for almost a year, and she didn’t ask. “We were doing secret work, too, and it was need-to-know. If you needed to know you did, and if you didn’t, you didn’t get told.”
She had just about forgotten the whole thing until one day in early spring of 1961 she found a letter in the mailbox. “It said, ‘We understand you have volunteered for the preliminary astronaut tests.’ I said, Huh? I kept wondering when the hell I had volunteered.” She laughs uproariously. “And then I thought, ‘Oh this must be what Jerrie was talking about.’ Jerrie never has been one to give out a hell of a lot of information.” The letter gave her a date to be at the Lovelace Foundation in New Mexico. Jerri went back into the house and began to think about how she was going to tell Lou—she was going.
Jane Cameron Briggs came in from riding in the woods on a gray Saturday afternoon and sat down on the edge of the sofa where her mother reclined. Janey was about fourteen, and the Briggs family was on an extended stay in England, where her father went for business each year. Janey had made a decision about her future that afternoon, and she confided it to her mother: when
she grew up, she was going to be a spy. She had heard the tales of intrepid female spies who carried out covert missions in World War I, just before Janey was born, and this struck her as just the life of adventure she was looking for.
Her mother was alarmed, and made her promise she would give up the idea. u Mother said, ‘You’re just dumb enough to believe that you’re smart enough to do it,”’ Janey recalls. Her mother was adamant, so Janey agreed, with considerable reluctance, that she would forgo life undercover. “But in my head I thought, Okay, fine. But I am going to learn to fly.”
Janey’s father, Walter Briggs, was a self-made millionaire auto industrialist, who married Jane Cameron, a young lady from a good Detroit family. They had five children. The youngest, named for her mother, was always known as Janey. As a child, Janey had a governess. Then, in fourth grade, she was sent to the convent at Grosse Point. She hated it, and made it known. The nuns gave up after a year and sent her home to her mother. She did better at boarding school in Philadelphia. But she was happier outside—playing tennis, swimming, sailing or riding. She regularly competed in horse shows and regularly shattered bones. She also followed the adventures of Amelia Earhart with great attention—her records and her Atlantic crossings and the horrible day when the radio said she had disappeared.
After high school, Janey went off to Manhattanville College in New York, but at the end of her first year it was apparent that the United States was about to enter the war. Janey went home to Detroit and signed up as a volunteer with the Motor Corps. She looked tall and strong in her trim uniform, and she wore her sandy hair cut short. She was often sent out to the city airport, which had been converted into a base, to ferry pilots to their billets in town. At the airfield, joking with the young air force fliers, Janey remembered her childhood plan. “I was out there with all those guys in those planes and thinking, Well, that’s what I want to do.”
But when she broached the idea at home, her parents were disapproving. And so, like Jerri Hamilton Sloan, she secretly saved up her allowance for the five-dollar cost of an hour-long lesson. She took the streetcar out to the airport, coming up with excuses for where she had been. “I just wanted to fly”
One day when Janey was nineteen, she was bedridden with the German measles. Downstairs, she heard her father come home—and with him was Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace. Janey did not intend to miss this opportunity. “I thought, if anybody in this house should be meeting Eddie Rickenbacker, its me.” So she got out of bed—and on the way down the stairs, heard her father telling the pilot that his youngest daughter was “secretly” taking flying lessons. And he sounded proud, not furious. Her mother later confided that yes, they knew about the lessons. Rather than try to stop her, “Mother just turned me over to a guardian angel.”
About the time she got her private license, Janey read about the WASPs in the papers. At twenty-one, she wrote to apply. The WASP flying sounded like hard and often tedious work, she says—ferrying and target towing. But it seemed like a good way to be “useful,” to be part of the war effort. “And you’d get to fly some planes that you never could get your hands on any other way.” She passed the interview and was about to enlist when something happened to change her plans.
Phil Hart was a serious young lawyer from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the son of a bank chairman. He roomed with Janey’s brother Walter at Georgetown University, and was sometimes invited home at holidays. Janey had known him since she was nine and he was eighteen. In 1942, she met him again at a party in Detroit. He was gentle and kind and funny, and he began to court her intently.
Phil had joined the army reserves at Georgetown, and he was called up after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the spring of 1943, it was obvious he would be sent overseas imminently,
and Janey wanted to be married to him first. They joined the legions of couples who wed that June, weeks before he was dispatched to England. She wrote to the WASP office and said her circumstances had changed. She could still have flown with them as a married woman, but months after the wedding she found herself pregnant and that ended her plans to join the pilot corps.
Phil was wounded in the invasion at D-Day; after recuperating and another tour of duty in Germany, he came home in 1945, deeply disturbed by what he had seen in Europe. Shortly after his return, there was tragedy at home. The Harts were spending the first of what would be many summers on Mackinac Island, the seasonal enclave of Michigan’s wealthy. One morning in 1946 their firstborn, Phil Junior, just three, toddled down on the dock when everyone’s back was turned and drowned. “It’s awful,” Janey says, simply, about losing a child. Sixty years later, she knows without pausing to calculate how old her son would be had he lived.
Phil left the law to try his hand at public service—at politics. The day after Janey gave birth to their third child, Phil showed up to tell her he had been to the county Democratic convention and had signed Janey up to be the vice chair of the Democrats in sprawling Oakland County. “I said, Are you out of your mind? What am I supposed to do with these two little girls?’ And he said, ‘You’ll be able to figure that out, you’ll manage.’ And I thought, I don’t know anything about this.” But she and Phil had similar ideas, including a sense of responsibility for society’s poorest, and as she got involved she found she loved the inner workings—organizing, campaigning, seeing the party grow. The state Democratic chairman was a veteran politician, and at his side Janey learned how things worked.
She was still flying, in the spare time she managed to carve out of being a politician’s wife and the mother of, before long, eight children. In 1953, Janey bought her first plane, a twin-engine
Bonanza. The same year, she and another female pilot were asked by the military to do a test flight in aThunderbird jet. Recruiters were having trouble signing up pilots for the Korean conflict and thought it might be because anxious mothers and wives were holding men back. The military brass figured that if they showed the jets were so safe that women could fly them, it might allay their fears. Janey found that idea a little wry, but she was willing to help—and glad for an hour in a jet, something she wasn’t likely to get any other way. The speed and the pull of gravity were a revelation. On steep turns, she took deep breaths and clenched her muscles to try to keep blood in her head; “my arm weighed six times what it should have.”
She flew the All-Women’s Transcontinental Air Race three times in the 1950s. The race winner was calculated with a complex handicap formula that included not only the pilot’s finishing time but also the size of her aircraft and her fuel efficiency. “I didn’t pay any attention to worrying about the handicap and flying intelligently,” Janey recalls of her first race in 1956. “I just put the throttle to the wall and wanted to be the first to finish.” Phil was up for election that year and she knew that if she landed first at the finish line in Boston, it would make news— and that most people wouldn’t know the AWTAR rules or that she had not actually won the race. The odd person, as usual, told Phil he should be controlling his unruly wife instead of letting her race airplanes, but mostly, as Janey had intended, the publicity helped Phil’s campaign. She went on to serve on the board of the AWTAR, and in the years she could not compete she lent her Bonanza to women who could not afford their own planes.
Phil served two terms as lieutenant governor, and then, in 1958, he ran for the Senate. But he had a problem—a poll said that despite almost ten years in public office, he had a very low recognition factor. Janey thought there had to be something she could do to help, so she earned a helicopter license, the fifty-eighth woman in the world to do so. There were only two helicopters
in all of Michigan then, and this ensured press attention. Soon she was flying her husband to campaign events. “I picked Phil up and we would go to picnics or county Fairs and I’d land right there [on the grass]. . . . That certainly helped.”
He won the election, and in the fall of 1958 Janey moved her clan to the capital. She made a lousy Washington wife. “Washington at that point was a southern city, and you had to get your calling card and then you were supposed to call on all the other wives, one after the other, and you wore your white gloves. And then the women—the volunteer work for the Senate wives [was] still making bandages for the Red Cross. I said, ‘You make the bandages and I’ll deliver them anywhere in my helicopter or airplane.’”
Commuting to their home in Michigan in her helicopter, she would fly over the highways and revel as she passed above the lines of traffic. And with so few people flying helicopters, there were few rules about where she could land. Janey would touch down next to restaurants for dinner. Inevitably, crowds would appear, drawn by the machine and the doubly astounding sight of its female pilot.
In the spring of 1960, she went sailing in the Caribbean with a couple of friends. One of them, B Steadman, was an old pal from the 99s, a flight instructor who taught Janey for her instrument rating. B had heard about a program for female astronauts, and in the warm sun on the deck of the boat near Martinique she confided that she was going to try to take the tests—and she thought Janey should try to get in, too.
On December 3, 1943, Jean Hixson stepped off the train in Sweetwater, Texas, and into the rigors of air force life. “I’ll tell you my schedule,” she wrote home to her parents that first week. “6:00 a.m. reveille, it is darn cold. 6:50 mess, good swill, 7:45 to 1:00, flight [training], 1:15 mess, 2:30 class call, aerodynamics,
it is tough, I thought this stuff would be a pushover. Tests are already beginning to come up. We have seen some government films on it. We need a little geometry in this class but I haven’t come to that part yet. Its based generally on general sciences and a little physics. 3:30, engine class—this is really tough. We have a test Monday, there are a lot of physics formulas and stuff we studied in texts. 4:30 to 5:30 math, we start at the beginning and go clear through the problems, a lot of tricky ones. Physics, so far we are only on the ones dealing with volume density and formulas. Physical training: this is really something. I am having a little trouble with drill. 7:50 mess, 10:00 p.m. lights out.”
In her first letters home, in scratchy handwriting on thin onionskin paper, Jean sounded awestruck. “Almost all the army personnel you see in this town are officers and most all the officers are pilots,” she wrote. “I have never seen so many different types of pilots—ferry, transport, everything—not to mention the girls who are everywhere.” Her pride was palpable too. “One of the officers told one of the girls that when a WASP walks down the street, even in civvies, you can tell it is a WASP. There is just a certain distinction.”
Slim and strong with short, dark curls, Jean was determined to win her wings. Like so many of the other women who would be WASPs, she had been in love with airplanes since she saw her first one courtesy of a barnstormer who buzzed Hoopeston, Illinois, on a summer Saturday in 1931. The pilot was taking thrill-seekers up for a ride for a few dollars. Jean, age nine, begged her parents and finally struck a deal with her father: she would go to Sunday school every single week without complaint if she could take the flight. He gave in, and Jean got her few minutes in the sky. On the very next trip, with Jean looking on, the barnstormer cracked up the plane. He was not badly hurt, and Jean was undeterred.
Jean was born in Hoopeston, “the corn capital of the world,” in 1922. She was the eldest child of Pearl Hixson and her
husband, Robert, who sold insurance. The town was thirty miles from the nearest airport, so when, at sixteen, Jean persuaded her parents to let her start flying lessons, she had to take them on Sundays. She was immediately, instinctively good at flying and earned her private pilots license at eighteen.
The next year, America entered the war, and suddenly all the boys in Hoopeston were going off to fight. When Jean heard about the WASPs, she immediately wrote to the Chicago Daily Times for information. She soon learned that she was too young to enlist: WASPs had to be twenty-one. Jean anxiously put in the time, working as a secretary at the food rationing office and the canning company, taking extra classes at the high school and flipping over pages on her calendar.
From her first day at Avenger Field, it was hard work. The classes were rigorous, and friends from home washed out. “After going several months, some girls who were crazy about flying even hate it, the classes and the regimentation,” she wrote home. “Our courses get tougher all along, I think they are as tough if not tougher than the [male] Air Cadets. We have to be able to send code faster than the cadets. It is an odd business—one day you may be here, the next you may be eliminated. ... It all adds up to a devil of a life.”
She graduated in June, her wings pinned to her uniform by Jackie Cochran. The next day, Jean was dispatched to Douglas Air Force Base in Arizona, a bomber base. At Douglas, she test flew B-25s from 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., checking out their navigation systems in the dark. It was risky flying, in battle-fatigued aircraft. One night, a thousand miles away from Douglas over mountainous terrain, she lost all navigational aids, radio and lights. She was alone in the dark at the controls of the heavy plane, reaching for the instruments from memory as she turned by instinct to avoid the mountains and head back toward the base. She followed the lights of the towns until she recognized the landing field, but she could not radio to tell the tower she
was coming in, so she took a deep breath, gripped the steering column, came in straight and brought the B-25 down. She parked it, reported the loss of the instruments and went to catch a few hours’ sleep before the sunrise.
When Jean had been at the base six months, she had the chance to go back to Texas for an advanced instrument course at Avenger. The political furor over the WASPs was growing and Jean wrote to her parents that she thought she should seize the chance to get this training normally closed to women. She spent six weeks in Texas and had been back at Douglas for only a couple of months when word came from Washington: the WASPs were to turn in their uniforms and make their own way home.
Jean came back to Hoopeston for a little while, but she soon qualified as an instructor and got a job in Akron, where a flood of veterans was taking flying lessons on the GI Bill. She had a roster of twenty students and worked from 8:00 a.m. to sundown on a bustling airfield. But she didn’t think flight instructing would be enough of a career—for one thing, the work might dry up when the vets were gone, and as a female instructor she’d be the first one fired. And she saw limited room to advance. So in 1948, she enrolled at University of Akron. She earned an education degree in two and a half years, going to school year-round, and teaching flying on the weekends, then got a job as an elementary school teacher.
In 1949, the WASPs were belatedly given the right to be commissioned into the Air Force Reserves as second lieutenants, and Jean accepted the commission. She took her reserve duty seriously, going back to Douglas to do research every year, and was soon promoted to lieutenant. She saw the reserves as the best way to keep up with the latest developments in aeronautics.
Jean was also intensely patriotic—in a firm, committed way that was common in the years before the Vietnam War. She was a staunch supporter of the American military and believed that each citizen should contribute to building the nation. It was a
sense of patriotism forged in World War II and undiminished by the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. She took Russian classes at the local college, thinking it might be useful in her military career. She read all she could about the Soviet education system and worried that the Russians were producing far more scientists and engineers than her country. She wanted to keep abreast of developments in aeronautics so that she could pass on the most up-to-date information to her students and inspire in them an interest in aviation and the military: even out of uniform, she saw herself as part of a national effort to safeguard the American way of life.
The desire to bring aviation into the classroom led Jean to one of her great adventures. “I had been holding forth in front of my third graders about flying, about how important it was as both a civil and military preoccupation, how it would mean even more in their time than it does to my generation,” she wrote in a personal memoir. a A student asked if I d been in a jet. I hadn’t.” That, she felt, was undermining her credibility with the tough crowd of eight-year-olds, and so she wrote the head of the Eastern Continental Air Defense Command a persuasive letter— and he agreed to get her a jet.
She reported to Youngstown Air Reserve Base in Dayton for instruction with fifteen air force jet pilot trainees. Jean planned to go through the sound barrier—something only one other woman, Jackie Cochran, had done. In the lectures, she learned what happens when Mach 1 is “broken,” then had the conditions of flight at forty-two thousand feet simulated in an altitude chamber. She learned how to use the ejection seat. And finally she had to pass a 109-question exam she called “plenty tough.”
Then they took her to her plane. The pilot in the Starfire F-94C jet fighter was Capt. Don Chaplin, a war veteran a year younger than Jean at thirty-four. The takeoff was standard—but they shot up, higher than Jean had ever flown in her multiengine prop planes. “At 42,000 feet, we leveled off in that special purple
plain of which pilots speak.” Jean described her flight in an essay for a national education association. “The sky above was never bluer, and I never felt so divorced from the other earthbound beings. It was exhilarating. . . . Then with the afterburner on giving us an extra shove, we went into a 60-degree angled dive down toward the lake. The captain counted the speed off for me. ‘Point eight,’ he said. ‘Point nine. Mach ONE (the speed of sound).’ There was a slight buffeting, or tremor, nothing like I had expected. Gravity assured me it was there, and I squashed real hard into the seat, weighing about 400 pounds at this point. ‘All right?’ he asked as we turned back to Youngstown. ‘Fine,’ I said.”
The flight made her philosophical. “Men, once schoolkids like mine, had built it, every bit of it, all the 8,000,000 or so little wires, rivets, connections, rotor blades, gadgets—everything, and then pulled this glistening aerodynamic skin over it all to ‘clean’ it for speed. Why such speed? Well, for one thing, an attacker could come right now against the U.S. in present planes owned in numbers by our possible enemies at 10 to 12 miles per minute. Every minute that could be saved in getting up to intercept and shoot these intruders down would keep them 10 to 12 miles farther from my home, or yours.”
In the national awakening that followed Sputnik in 1957, Jean lectured about the need for drastic changes in the American education system. “The Soviet Union’s ten-year school demands five years of chemistry, four of physics, and mathematics through trigonometry,” she wrote that year. “When a boy or girl walks through the door the first day of school, they know a decade later that they will have spent 40 per cent of their time on these compulsory activities. This system of preliminaries, of forced feeding in math and science, now produces three to one more engineering graduates for their universities than we graduate annually. What used to be a peasant people, which could only copy our B-29 after World War II, was able 10 years later to show
their long range jet bomber, the Bison, equal to or maybe better than our B-52. It was no copy. It was their own.”
That first jet trip was extraordinary, but Jean was not content to be a passenger. In July 1958, she was the pilot, the second woman to fly the F-102 Delta Dagger fighter-interceptor (Ruth Nichols was first). Again, Jean arranged a flight through the air force. A squadron pilot did the takeoff, then gave her the controls and she “put it through every manoeuvre they would allow.” A reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal noted that she showed “no trace of excitement” as she clambered out of the cockpit in her heavy flight suit. He gave her a nickname that would follow her all her life, one she disliked—“Akron’s flying schoolteacher.”
Jean learned to fly gliders and blimps and balloons, and received a master’s degree in education in 1959, with a thesis on attitudes toward aviation. Her commitment did not go unnoticed. That year, she won a National Education Association contest as “a teacher who had made outstanding use of travel and aviation experience in her classroom.” She also raced the AWTAR almost every year and did stunt flying for Warner Bros, at the Akron Airport. She later told friends how once she was instructed to fly low over the camera. “I looked back over my shoulder to see the camera apparatus and the cameraman flat on the ground. I was only following orders.” The remark was typical—Jean was reserved and unassuming, but also funny and gregarious, prone to undercutting those who irritated her with wry remarks they often missed altogether.
She followed America’s first, faltering steps in the space race with great interest, and she was quick to pick up on rumors at 99s meetings that women were taking the astronaut tests. Jean mailed Dr. Lovelace a letter in August I960, after laboring over several rough drafts:
I understand that you are in the process of selecting
women for the astronaut tests.
I have an extensive background in aviation, education, science, and educational writing. If feasible at all I would like very much to participate in this program for two reasons. First, being, any help that I can give my government in the space race, I want to do. Secondly, I hope within several years to work on my Ph.D. in the area of space psychology, and this background would serve as an excellent stepping stone toward this field. . . .
I would like very much to have the opportunity to undergo the program for purposes of educational dissemination as well as the fact that I would have no aversion to an orbital shot, because I have seen the precautions our country goes to insure safety.
Dr. Lovelace responded promptly with a questionnaire—-and then, it seems, he read her letter more closely and noticed her age. In November he wrote a polite letter declining her participation. “After reviewing all the applications and consulting together, we have decided that thirty-five will be the upper age limit for candidates in the Women Astronaut Testing Program.” But Jean really wanted this opportunity: she still had a copy of the questionnaire, and she sent it back to Lovelace with her date of birth changed from 1922 to 1924, bringing her in just under the limit. Lovelace either didn’t notice the deception or tolerated it. Jean must have been an alluring candidate—a military veteran with test-pilot experience, jet time, a half-dozen ratings, altitude and compression experience and a graduate degree. Jean’s qualifications were reminiscent of Jackie Cochran’s. In August 1961, Dr. Lovelace summoned Jean to Albuquerque.
Janey Hart and Jerri Sloan had money behind them as they made their way into flying: an allowance that paid for those first clandestine lessons, a comfortable middle-class life that allowed for
someone to take care of the kids while they went flying. They could afford to pay for flying time and to earn ratings. For women without family wealth, it was much more difficult to get into aviation. For Jean Hixson and the select group who wore the WASP wings, there were rare and great opportunities. But other women also managed to take advantage of the changes that swept in with the war years, as new jobs opened up and the social restrictions that kept women away from airfields began to ease.
When Irene Leverton started flying, there was no family money to pay for lessons—Fier father had drunk himself to death, and her mother was working dawn to dusk scrubbing floors just to pay their rent. But in her senior year of high school, the war effort was enlisting every possible pair of hands, including those of seventeen-year-old girls. Irene got a good-paying job at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Chicago, working as a riveter on the assembly line. The war ended three days after she graduated; three days after that, she and all the other women were sent home from their factory jobs. It was the first of what would be a lifelong experience for Irene, losing a satisfying job because she was a woman. But those few months of work paid for a first, crucial set of flying lessons.
She had wanted to fly, just to be flying, for as long as she could remember. She loved things that went fast: as a tiny child, she eschewed dolls in favor of a toy train. She was fascinated with airplanes: air shows were a popular diversion in the Depression, and there are grainy pictures of a two-year-old Irene pointing at the planes overhead. Her father, Curly, indulged her, and bought her balsa models from the time she was six. She would toss them over the third-floor railing at their apartment house, then race down the stairs to catch her gently descending planes.
Irene was headstrong and bossy, and other mothers didn’t like to let their children play with her. Her mother, Frieda, was her best friend. “She was always climbing trees and walking on fence rails”—that’s how Irene remembers her mother. Curly fought
with the Canadian army in France in World War I and told his daughter stories about lying in his trench, watching the dogfights between the Tiger Moths and Sopwith Camels. He came home from the war with medals, and a body riddled with shrapnel. Frieda was German; she came through Ellis Island when she was thirty-five and met Curly at a pub where she was a waitress. They married in 1926; a year later Irene, their only child, was born.
Curly was an ironworker, part of the team that erected the first high-rise in downtown Chicago. But his war injuries tormented him and he took refuge in liquor, going on week-long benders and selling his medals to buy booze. As Irene got older, she would regularly come home from school to find the furniture piled out in the yard by an angry landlord, and they would move into another, smaller, darker apartment. “The city sent trucks around with boxes of food. They’d put them in the snowbank outside the doors of people who really needed it. We were in bad shape.” By the time Curly died in 1940, they were in a basement apartment with a shared bathroom and a tide of cockroaches her mother could not stem. Frieda worked for a while, tutoring middle-class children in German. But when the United States entered the war against Germany, her services were no longer required, and she started scrubbing floors.
Irene too got a job, at twelve, washing dishes and carrying trays at a private girls’ school a few miles away. In exchange for several hours’ labor each day, she was given a hot meal. “Everybody seemed to be in the same boat. Going to school, kids didn’t have clothes to change into and their shoes had holes in them.” She also started working weekends at a stable, grooming horses and cleaning stalls. She was saving for something special: she wanted desperately to join the Civil Air Patrol cadets, who marched and learned about flying and were trained by real marines. But she had to be able to afford the uniform, the royal blue jacket and trousers and cap. Finally it came to a choice between the flannel trousers that went with the uniform and a
replacement for her school skirt, so patched it could no longer be made to serve. Irene chose the uniform—and so had to wear her uniform trousers to school. Outrage ensued—girls did not wear trousers—and Irene was suspended. The rule was only relaxed after the parents of her fellow students protested (they couldn’t afford long coats to keep girls in skirts warm in winter).
Now Irene had the uniform, and she could join the CAP. Every Saturday, she took the bus four miles out of town to the assembly hall and joined five hundred other cadets. There were lessons on flight and meteorology, and on military techniques as well—a burly marine taught the group how to slit the throat of a sentry. And the cadets could learn to fly, if they could come up with six bucks—four dollars for an hour in an airplane and two dollars more for the instructor. In June of 1944, Irene took her first flight, going up in a Piper J-5 with a CAP captain and the only other female cadet. The girls were buckled into the backseat, and the captain set out on a hair-raising series of banks, steep climbs and rolls: if the cadets couldn’t hack it, they were weeded out early. Irene was unfazed. “I felt—just—that this was where I belonged.”
She had an ambition: she was going to be a fighter pilot. “Howling around, upside down, firing those machine guns.” She had the stories her father had told her, and the images of the bold Tiger Moth pilots fighting for America over Europe. And even though she had to fight just to be allowed to take the high-school aviation class, she was sure she would one day fly a fighter jet. She never believed the world was going to stay the way it was. “It was all going to change and I was going to get to do this.”
Once she had started proper lessons, funded by her factory job, she heard about the WASPs, and was desperate to join. When she called to ask about the specifics of recruiting, she was told candidates had to be nineteen. She borrowed a birth certificate from an older friend and faked a logbook that showed the requisite thirty-five hours of flying time (in truth,
she had about nine). But the recruiters saw through her and sent her home again.
She finally saved up the money for enough hours to get her private pilot’s license and got a job working on the line crew at Elmhurst Airport. She was the only woman on the crew; the others were all students at Northwestern University. But the guys admitted her easily to the fraternity that washed, gassed and propped the planes, and smoothed down the snow for ski landings in winter. “They were so nice,” she recalls wistfully. When the weather was too bad to fly they played poker in the hangar. Irene studied every plane that came into the field and traded labor for fifteen minutes of flying time here and there. She earned her commercial license in 1948.
She was up for a job as chief of the line crew, but an old war vet gave the job instead to a pretty girl in a sweater set. Already, Irene was getting the sense that she was going to have a real struggle to work in this business, despite the conviction that she could do these jobs as well or better than anyone else on the airfield. “I never even knew about [discrimination] before, and I think as a child, whatever I did, I just wanted to do better than anybody else—sort of a big ego thing.”
In the summer of 1948, the airport at Meig’s Field was inaugurated, and a pilot friend told Irene that she could get her a chance to fly a crop duster—another woman knew Jackie Cochran and figured she could get a couple of gallons of Jackie’s trademark Tailspin perfume. They thought it would be fun to spray the crowd at a 99s air show at the field. She agreed immediately—but had a little trouble gauging the crowd and wind and wound up liberally dousing a line of Chicago cops in perfume. “People said it was the first time the Chicago police ever smelled good,” she recalls; the memory still makes her giggle. In the crowd was a man with a crop-dusting business, who asked the woman sitting next to him who that was flying the duster. The woman happened to be a friend of Irene’s; when the man said he
was having trouble finding “ag” pilots, she said, “You should hire Irene! She’s real experienced!’’ That was an overstatement, but within days Irene found herself on her way south, at twenty-one, to her first real job as a pilot.
On her first ag flight in a Piper Cub with a huge tank loaded with DDT, she came in too low and tore the propeller off on a power line. But she managed to land, and her next flight was without mishap, and so began six years of crop dusting. She sprayed and dusted wheat and cotton in Tennessee and Arkansas and Mississippi, and she reckons she was one of just three or four women in the whole country doing the job. In Arkansas, all the men turned out to see her do her first field, just a foot above the cotton, her wheels thocking against the branches—but she did fine, and after that she was just one of the team.
The third season, she flew for a company that had almost two hundred pilots dusting; they flew from before dawn to after dark, following each other in to the airfield on the dark blue trails of exhaust in the night sky. That year, on the best days, she might make as much as two hundred dollars—a fortune. She bought her first car. The ag money paid for her instrument, multiengine and seaplane ratings. She remembers that season, 1951, as the happiest year of her life. “I love the heavy smell of the air at sunrise and the way the dust swirls in the vortices,” she wrote in her scrapbook above pictures of her favorite planes, “and I love the way the exhaust blows blue on the way home after dark.”
In the winters, she went back to Chicago and scrambled for jobs, instructing, flying charter, working on an assembly line at the Ford plant. Irene had started racing shortly after she got her license. She founded a race in 1948, the Illinois Women’s Air Meet, although to her irritation she did not manage to win it until 1954. She competed in the Transcontinental in 1954, and then again in 1956. But she didn’t do well because she couldn’t afford a decent plane and couldn’t muster good sponsors. “The rich women were the ones who won those races,” she says a little bitterly.
In 1956, she decided to head west, with her two hundred dollars in savings. She got as far as Kansas City when a female pilot she met at the airport restaurant told her a DC-3 pilot was scrambling to find a replacement first officer. The cargo plane was five times bigger than anything Irene had flown before, but the pilot said that if she could do three takeoffs and landings unassisted, he would hire her. She did, and he did. She made a flight as first officer that afternoon.
For a year she flew the company’s contracts, ferrying military personnel across the country. Then, she says, she ran into “a real S.O.B.” of a captain, who tried to take off with the flaps still down, which meant the plane would never have the lift to clear the hill at the end of the runway. Irene fought him for the controls; when they landed, he said the fault was hers, and she was fired. The pilot was ex-military with war buddies in management, and no one was going to take the word of a female pilot over his, she says. But almost immediately, she met the pilot of a C-46, a huge cargo plane, who needed a first officer on a route to Fairbanks, Alaska. She went with him and that same day landed a job with a small charter outfit based in Fairbanks. She rented a room in town and came back to start work—to find that the boss had called the owner of the DC-3 operation, learned the flaps-down story and was reneging on the job offer. The same C-46 shuttled her back south. Now, however, she was stuck—in Oregon, she flipped through the yearbook of the 99s and relied on their generosity for a meal or a night’s hospitality here or there as she made her way down to California.
The next years brought a string of jobs, a year at a flight school, a year with a charter company. Irene was restless and dissatisfied, and nothing seemed to go right. Men, she says, kept getting in her way, when all she wanted to do was fly. By 1960, she was flying air taxi in Santa Monica, when the phone in the hangar office rang, and a man’s voice she didn’t
recognize asked if she was free in a few weeks’ time to come and take the astronaut tests.
Wally Funk never imagined she would fly. Trips in airplanes were for rich people.
‘‘Commercial aviation was—we didn’t talk about it much, it was really for the elite. You had to be dressed. The men had to have coats and ties, and the women had to have heels, hose and gloves and that was what was expected.” When Wally was growing up in Taos, New Mexico, in the 1940s, there was one plane in town, a Cessna 195 that belonged to a photographer. She liked to go and watch at the little airport, in case other planes stopped in, and she loved the tiny model airplanes that her father, Lozier, sold in Funk’s Five and Ten. But she never thought she would fly a plane.
Lozier and Virginia Funk had a son, Clark, in 1936, and Mary Wallace arrived three years later. Wally (as she insisted everyone call her) was a tousle-haired tomboy who spent much of her time off in the mountains with the Tiwa, the local aboriginal people, who taught her to hunt and fish. She used her twenty-five-cent weekly allowance to buy bullets. She played at being Joan of Arc, carrying out a bold plan to save her people, and Lawrence of Arabia, urging her imaginary camel forward. She was thin and strong and her smooth cheeks were perpetually sunburnt. “Mother wanted a froufrou girl with frills, and all I wanted was an Erector set.”
At five, Wally was jumping off the barn roof into a haystack, holding a Superman cape behind her. On the sidewalk outside her father’s store, she sold live rabbits, fresh vegetables, bows and arrows and furniture she had made to visitors passing through town. And she excelled in sports. When she was a teenager she was a fearless skier, and her parents let her leave school for weeks in the winter to train for the national team in Colorado. Her
sights were firmly set on the Olympics; she would ski, and possibly shoot, for she was an expert markswoman.
In 1956, when she was sixteen, her parents decided she had exhausted the educational opportunities in Taos, and she was enrolled at Stephens College in Missouri, a two-year junior college that prepared young ladies for university. The Wabash Cannonball pulled into town, and Wally got on, fidgeting with her new gloves. She made her way to the car where the Stephens girls were gathered and found a group of young women in fashionable hats and high-heeled shoes, smoking cigarettes—and thought, I’m not going to belong here. That first semester, she was uncomfortable, coming down to dinner each night in her requisite skirt and embroidered sweater. When she went home for Christmas, she rushed to the ski slopes—and had an accident with a tow line one day on ski patrol, crushing two vertebrae. At first the doctors said she would never walk, but Wally, ferociously stubborn, wasn’t particularly interested in that diagnosis. Within weeks, she was back at Stephens—but she was in a half-body cast and could not sit down. A guidance counselor suggested aviation class as a distraction.
The classes were indeed interesting, and then came the day when the instructor led the girls out to the airfield for their first flights, in a Cessna 172. Wally went up with the teacher and one other student in the four-seat, single-engine plane. “What impressed me the most was that the airplane just kind of took itself off, and the ground was so beautifully packaged as north, south, east, west—it was all fields we flew over, near the Missouri River. The earth was so pristine, and I was up there looking down at the perfect pattern on the ground, at the cows and the cars and the houses and the river and the town. The bug bit and that was it.”
She had to have lessons, and her parents agreed to pay for them. She didn’t find out until ten years later that it was a huge financial burden. “It was fifteen or twenty dollars an hour. I had
to do one hundred hours, which was about three thousand dollars, which was as much again as my tuition at the college.” There was a fringe benefit to the lessons: only two groups of Stephens students were exempt from the dress code of skirts or dresses at meals—the fliers and the horseback riders could wear trousers on days they had classes. Wally carefully arranged her schedule so she had a class every day. She soloed at sixteen, won her license at seventeen and promptly joined the Flying Susies, Stephens’ intercollegiate flying squad.
That was wonderful flying—alone in a tiny Cessna 120 or 172. “I took a plane with a radio to listen to radio stations, because we couldn’t have radios at school. ... I snuck out the window from a formal one time to go night flying and snuck back in by midnight so I wasn’t caught.” Another time she accepted a ludicrous dare to land on a sandbar in the river, where she could easily have been stuck with the plane crippled; she pulled that off, too. The student pilots would take their Aeronca Champions, with just sixty-five-horsepower engines (roughly equivalent to that in a vintage Volkswagen) and deliberately fly into a fifty-mile-per-hour head wind, so that they floated stationary, like hawks on an air current.
At the 1958 National Intercollegiate Flying Meet in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Wally won the Outstanding Female Pilot trophy. And she got her first sight of the Oklahoma State University’s flying team—the legendary Flying Aggies—who won all the other trophies. She decided she had to go to OSU to fly with them. In 1959, she was the university’s top female flier. She studied for an education degree that qualified her to teach junior high, but she was never much of a reader (she got through school relying on comic books that described historic events) and freely confesses that she took as many aviation courses as she could because she always got A’s in those. At the end of her senior year, Wally was named the top female pilot at an international air meet in Columbus, Ohio, and won the Alfred Alder Memorial
trophy as the most outstanding pilot. As airport manager Hoyt Walkup presented her with the trophy, she says, he told the crowd, “This young lady has one of the brightest futures in aviation that I have ever seen. Mark my word, if ever a woman flies into space, it will be Wally, or one of her students.”
In the summer of 1960, she earned her instructors license. The day after graduation, she went home with a friend from college whose parents lived on the military base at Fort Sill. The girls had envisioned doing some lounging around, but the friend’s father quickly informed them they had better find jobs. That afternoon, Wally landed a job instructing at the Red Leg Flying Club, teaching servicemen who wanted to fly recreation- ally and, sometimes, their wives. She was paid four dollars an hour. She says today that she was immediately welcomed as a flight instructor by her soldier students. “Oh, they loved me. I had forty [students] waiting; I could only take ten to fifteen at a time. And all of the instructors would say, Are you going to go to that girl? She doesn’t know much.’ That’s what I heard later.” On the base, she watched the marching, the roll calls and the tank drills and reveled in the military atmosphere. She nursed a secret desire to join the forces, but women would not be allowed to fly for the military for another twenty years.
By then, she knew Jerrie Cobb, whose senior job with a major aviation company made her something of a star for young women fliers. “She was premier with Aero Commander,” Wally recalls. “They loved her. She knew her stuff, she had flown a lot of airplanes, she had a lot of hours. Personality wise, she was probably as painfully shy as I. I remember going to Aero Commander and being escorted in by her secretary and sitting down and fidgeting in my chair, and I suspect we probably had two or three moments of niceties to say.”
Leafing through an issue of Life magazine at the flight club one day in October, Wally saw a picture of Jerrie, all wired up and floating in the isolation tank under the headline “Damp
Prelude to Space.” That same afternoon, Wally sent off letters: to Jerrie, to the doctors quoted in the article, to staff at the hospital that ran the isolation tests. “I am most interested in these tests to become an Astronaut, this has been ever since I started to fly,” she wrote to Dr. Lovelace. “It would be greatly appreciated if you could send me some information on the field, or who to contact immediately. I can arrange for an interview most any time.” If women were being trained for space, Wally was going to be part of it.
B Trimble Steadman knew that somehow she would be part of it, too.
In 1937, when B was twelve, she conned her parents into paying the two dollars for a brief ride with a barnstormer named Clarence Chamberlin, the daredevil pilot who had crossed the Atlantic just weeks after Charles Lindbergh. Strapped into the wicker seat between the broad expanse of the double wings of his Curtiss Condor, B felt almost drunk on the smell, a mix of gas and oil and leather. “I could see the whole world passing below my wings.”
At the end of high school, B badly wanted to go on to college and dreamed of becoming a doctor. But her stepfather, an electrician at the car factory, said there wasn’t money for that. “Go to work and learn the value of a dollar,” he told her. It was wartime, and she quickly found a job on the assembly line at the E. C. Sparkplug factory. It was dull work, but she could finally afford flying lessons. At seventeen, she was tall and strong with dark curls. She earned her private license in weeks. She bought a war surplus bomber jacket and saved up for the chunky chronograph watch that pilots wore. At the airport, B met a couple of women, one a flight instructor, the other the owner of her own FBO (fixed base operation), and began to consider a new idea: women could make a living at this. She could make a living at this.
Then the war ended and suddenly there were floods of young men, pilots with hundreds of hours of flying time, all hanging around the airport hoping for a job. And the GI Bill was sending more veterans to college who were now graduating and hoping for jobs in aviation. The men, however, wanted to fly charters, or airliners—not teach amateurs. Nothing glamorous about that. So B earned a commercial and an instructor rating and soon got work teaching ground school at the junior college. The guys called her Miss B, and a breathless article in the Flint Journal in 1947 reported that “glamour has been added to flying lessons at Bishop Airport” where the “tall, statuesque” B was teaching flying. By then, she had soloed thirty students, all men. “This is my career,” she told the reporter.
For eight years, B flew and instructed for the FBOs in Flint, working from first light until long after dark. One day one of her students, a businessman, gave her an appraising look after a lesson and said, “If you’re gonna work so hard, why not work for yourself?” Friends leased her a pair of war surplus Taylorcrafts, and she opened a school of her own. “I hired another instructor, and a secretary,” she says with a grin, “a man secretary.” At twenty- four, she was CEO of Trimble Aviation. She took on dealerships for Piper and Cessna, did aerial photography and taught. She taught Marine Corps vets, Janey Hart the Senator’s wife, and even a nun, who wanted to be able to explain airplanes to her pupils. One student, a lawyer named Bob Steadman, convinced her to marry him. She started coming first in the national races, and at one she met Jerrie Cobb. B began to hear rumors—that women were being tested as astronauts, that Jerrie was at the center of it.
Dr. Lovelace called her in the spring of 1961. B says she had no reason to think she would be chosen for his program—she was just a young woman with a small business in a little town in Michigan. But still, “I’d been waiting for this.”
Sarah Gorelick, on the other hand, was caught totally off guard. On a Saturday afternoon in May 1961, Sarah was in the
beauty parlor at Macy’s in Kansas City, having her blond bouffant set when the hairdresser beckoned her out from under the hood of the dryer for an urgent phone call. It was Dr. Randy Lovelace—Sarah certainly knew the name. He wanted to know if she could be in Albuquerque the next day to take the astronaut tests.
Her mother died when Sarah was just fifteen and left her a small inheritance. She used it to buy a plane—a Cessna 120 with a silver body with a red stripe, blue fabric wings and yellow numbers. She named it Baby. Sarahs parents were Russian Jews who emigrated at the turn of the century and bought a pawn shop in Kansas. She joined the Civil Air Patrol in high school and knew from the first time she went up in a surplus World War II T6 trainer that she wanted to be a pilot. “Just to feel the freedom,” she says, struggling to explain what was so intoxicating about that experience. “And getting everything in perspective in your life: one little old building down there couldn’t cause you all that trouble. The world was so much vaster than that ... to be tied down nowhere, to be controlled by no one, just to be me, no one telling me what to do or when to do it. Just feeling truly free, and being able to rise above my problems.”
Women who learned to fly in that era raise this idea again and again: flying was an escape. It lifted them out of the tight social strictures of American life in the forties and fifties, and it offered brief moments of freedom from the roles they were under great pressure to fill. “My sister stayed home to learn to be a good housewife and all that good stuff,” Sarah says. But she went to work in her father’s store, helping with the filing, doing the taxes and saving up for flying lessons. At eighteen, she flew off to the University of Denver in her own plane, weighed down with everything a young coed needed to take away to school. “To arrive at college in an airplane is something different. I didn’t have any trouble making any of the rush parties.” The curvy blonde with a sassy pilot personality was immediately popular,
and she met lots of boys: she was the only girl in the math and physics classes.
She earned a math degree—and instrument, commercial and seaplane ratings. But she didn’t intend to instruct. “I could make ten times as much money in engineering. I worked my way through college partially teaching people how to fly, but there were so many pilots at that time. ...” Instead, she returned to Kansas City and went to work for AT&T, calculating circuitry loads for the telephone system—but she flew every weekend, in races and to 99s meetings.
In April of 1959, she saw the barrage of press coverage as John Glenn and the others were introduced, Americas new heroes. “I remember watching. And wishing it was me up there on the stand.” There were new horizons out there: “to be a pioneer, that’s what appealed to me.” And her resume clearly appealed to Dr. Lovelace: he could not wait to test this multirated pilot who was also working as an engineer. Sarah was on a plane to New Mexico the next day.
Gene Nora Stumbough heard about the tests from Wally Funk at a 99s meeting in April in Oklahoma City—the same place, in fact, that Sarah Gorelick first heard the news. Gene Nora (pronounced Janora) was a flight instructor at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. She was twenty-four, and she had one thousand hours in the air. She worked her way through college, dropping out after every semester to make the money to pay for more flying time. “I thought, Well, the only thing you could do as a girl in aviation was be a flight instructor—that’s it.” When Wally told her about the tests, however, it suddenly seemed as if there might be something else a girl could do: Gene Nora wrote to Dr. Lovelace immediately, offering one more volunteer.
While Gene Nora was writing, Rhea Hurrle was making her way stoically through the tests in Albuquerque. A farm girl from Minnesota, Rhea ran away from life as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, learned to fly in Texas and by the mid-1950s was
working as a corporate pilot in Houston. She was twenty-nine and flying seven days a week when the first mysterious letter arrived from Jerrie Cobb, whom Rhea knew from racing. Rhea signed up immediately. “Being a pilot, I thought that going into space would be great. And I knew I was good.”
And K Cagle went to the clinic a week after Rhea. Just five foot two and a self-described Southern doll, she was christened Myrtle, but that sounded too much like turtle; she preferred the snappier sound of K. When she was twelve, her brothers taught her to fly in a little beat-up plane on a “runway” cleared in the family tobacco field in North Carolina. Too young to be a WASP, K trained as an airplane mechanic in the war and later opened a one-woman airport in Selma, Alabama. When she heard about the astronaut program, she had forty-five hundred hours and an airline transport license, and she was flying out of Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia. She wrote to Jackie Cochran—and “they phoned me immediately. I was ready to go into orbit right then.”