Irma “Babe” Story
An Oral History
Women Airforce Service Pilots Oral History Project
Interviewed by Dawn Letson, October 3, 2002
The Woman’s Collection Texas Woman’s University Denton, Texas 2003
Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Introduction
Irma “Babe” Story was born in Burbank, California on October 14, 1921 to Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Story, Jr. In 1922, the family relocated to Lancaster, California from Burbank just a few days before her first birthday. Her mother died in 1989 at the age of 103 years, and her father died in 1968 at the age of 87 years.
Babe’s fascination in airplanes began at an early age, fueled by her brother Tom’s interest in them, and his constant trips to local airports. She would often accompany Tom to the airport, and as a child knew that she wanted to be a pilot. In order to receive occasional rides on an airplane, she would work at the airport with her brother doing grunt work for the mechanics.
Babe learned to fly by taking part in a CPT program at Antelope Valley Junior College in Lancaster. It was here that she met and became friends with Florence “Pancho” Barnes, the famous aviatrix. In June of 1941, Babe received her pilots license upon her graduation from junior college. After graduation, she took a job at Lockheed Vega Aircraft, where she worked until April of 1943, when she left to join the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP) program. She entered the program in the class of 43-W-6 at Sweetwater, Texas, and graduated on October 9, 1943 among 83 of her fellow classmates. After receiving her wings, Babe was sent to Dodge City Army Air Base (AAB) in Kansas to begin training in the B-26. It was here that she developed her strong friendship with Bonnie Jean Alloway Welz (43-W-6), who would later become her flying partner, as well as one of the thirty-eight casualties among the WASP. From Dodge City AAB, she went on to Harlingen Army Air Field (AAF) in Texas, where she flew tow targets until going to Officer Candidate School in Florida. She returned to Harlingen AAF after OCS where she served until deactivation on December 20, 1944.
After the war, Babe returned home to California where she volunteered for the USO, and then took a series of jobs as a flight instructor in the years that followed. Altogether, Babe was in the aviation field approximately twenty years, until leaving for a management position with Santa Fe Engineers that lasted for thirty-two years. Currently, she resides in Lancaster, California.
3 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Irma “Babe” Story An Oral History Women Airforce Service Pilots Class of 43-W-6
Interviewed by Dawn Letson October 3, 2002
This is an interview conducted at the Women Airforce Service Pilots [WASP] reunion in Tucson, Arizona on October 3, 2002. Story served in the WASP program, class of 43- W-6.
Letson: We'll kind of go after your life story. So, I'll, it -- we're going to start early.
Story: I could start from 1600 [both laughing].
Letson: And if it's too cold for you, we'll open the door, okay?
Story: Yes, okay.
Letson: Let's see. I need to start out with a little intro for, because once we get it back there they'll lose track of it. Today is October 3rd, 2002. We are at the Sheraton Hotel in Tucson, at the WASP reunion. I'm interviewing Irma "Babe" Story, who was a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II, class 43-6. I'm so thrilled to find you! Can -- let's start out, the first question I always ask is, when and where were you born?
Story: I was born in Burbank, California, October 14th, 1921.
Letson: 1921. All right. Tell me, if you don't mind, tell me about your family. Your parents. Who were they? And --
Story: Well, my father had come from Michigan when he was about eighteen to be with an uncle that was out in Burbank, and work, because he didn't like northern Michigan.
Letson: Uh-huh. What was his name?
Story: His name was Nathaniel Story, Jr., and he worked for his uncle Tom, who was called the Father of Burbank, and one of their first mayors and things. He
4 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection did, he was really interesting. He left upper Michigan, or upper New York, with an uncle and went, I guess, to New York and worked when he was nine years old. He worked to get a ride on a clipper ship around the horn to come to San Francisco, you know during their Gold Rush time.
Letson: You're kidding!
Story: And from there, somehow he got down to Burbank and he married a German immigrant lady, my aunt Emma. Great Aunt Emma. Then they had their family, and he stayed there for, so he was just starting his, you know it was all farmlands and things like that, and --
Letson: Sure.
Story: -- the old Spanish missions and things there, and he started the town. That's it.
Letson: When did your father then move out --
Story: In 1899.
Letson: 1899?
Story: And my mother came from New Hampshire, and she was born in 1885. And her mother died when she was fairly young and she was raised by an aunt and an uncle, and he was a druggist in Nashua, New Hampshire. When she graduated from high school, she went to Boston to go to art school. I think she went about two and a half or three years. But, the uncle, in the mean time, had come to Burbank, because his wife's health wasn't too good, and he came out to Burbank and ended up by starting another drugstore. So he asked my mother if she'd like to come out, because she had no close family then, in the New England area. That, her family maiden name was Spofford.
Letson: Spofford?
Story: It was Irma Spofford then. I was named after her, that's why I'm --
Letson: Irma Spofford, uh huh.
Story: That is --
Letson: Isn't that amazing how these --
5 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: A family that, yes --
Letson: -- two people from totally different areas of the United States ended up in Burbank? I love it.
Story: Her family goes clear back to 1638 in the United States.
Letson: Really?
Story: We have, I have a whole genealogy deal that has been printed --
Letson: Oooooo.
Story: -- and it's, it's pretty interesting.
Letson: Yes.
Story: But my great-grandfather had settled in Chester, New Hampshire, and he had a big family. And my grandfather was like, the youngest boy. But he went to the Civil War, and my mother's grandfather died in the Civil War. He wasn't killed, but one of his younger sons was killed in the Civil War. So, when you get from the lowest, you know from the youngest person in the family to when my mother was born, late in her mother's life, to another young one, to another one, you lose a couple of generations of people.
Letson: Right. How interesting.
Story: That's the way our particular family runs.
Letson: When your father came out from Michigan, what did he do for his uncle?
Story: For his uncle? Well, he did a lot of things. My uncle, he owned a livery stable, and he had a hardware store and things like that. But, he also had a homestead up in Bishop, High Sierras that he really liked. Then they would go up there and get wild horses out of the White Mountains. And --
Letson: Oh!
Story: -- and break the buck out of them, and stuff like that, and then drive them down to Burbank, and fine tune ‘em for buggy horses, and sell them. So dad did that a lot. And he, you know, there were very few cars in those days, early
6 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection 1900s. He worked for a contractor building roads, and development, things like that. He worked as a butcher at various times.
Letson: Really?
Story: Then he worked for Union Oil Company and drove a truck, and finally in 1921 he got transferred up to Lancaster. I had been born in Burbank, but I was just a year old, or two days before my first year old [birthday].
Letson: Right. Yes. Do you have any stories about how your mom and dad met?
Story: Yes [laughing]. My mom worked in her uncle’s drugstore –
Letson: Drugstore, yes.
Story: -- when she started, and dad smoked cigars; and he came in every day and would buy six cigars. The first time he came in, well, he gave mom like, a twenty dollar gold piece; she’d never seen one in her life. She thought it was the quarter. She thought it was a quarter for six cigars; for a quarter, White Owls [both laughing]. And he kept hanging around and hanging around, and finally she says, what do you want? He said, I want my change! [laughing] And she said, you gave me a quarter. Well, there was a lady sitting there that used to help my uncle in the drugstore, and she said, open the drawer and if there’s a coin in the little deals, then that’s a twenty dollar gold piece; because your uncle always kept the gold in that little sack in there.
Letson: Oh! Oh really? Sure!
Story: People paid with gold dust and things. I had the little scales, and he, my niece’s husband is, or, one of her sons is a gemologist. So I gave him –
Letson: Oh how neat!
Story: -- one of those little, tiny scales that weighs grams and things and stuff.
Letson: Uh-huh.
Story: But, so that, she had a lesson there.
Letson: She opened it up and found that twenty dollar gold piece? Oh my gosh!
7 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: [laughing] Yes, so they got acquainted. Every day he bought his cigars there.
Letson: [laughing] How cute!
Story: And they were married in 1908, or –
Letson: 1908? Okay.
Story: Early 1908. Mom says she married him because he had the wildest team of horses [laughing]. I’ll bet he did!
Letson: I’ll bet he did.
Story: But my dad would never teach her to drive a car when they finally got a car, because she couldn’t keep the horses in the middle of the street.
Letson: [laughing] Oh! Oh that’s cute! That’s cute! Really.
Story: So my mother lived to be a hundred and three, almost a hundred and four.
Letson: No kidding!
Story: And she lived in both centuries.
Letson: And, she, you said she was born in 1895?
Story: She was born in 1885.
Letson: 1885.
Story: And she died in, uh, 1989. Yes.
Letson: ’89.
Story: Yes, in January.
Letson: Is that right? So you’ve got longevity on, certainly on one side.
Story: So yes. And my dad died about 1968 or something.
Letson: Oh, uh-huh.
8 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Story: At 87 or so.
Letson: So what was it like growing up in, well -- Now after you were born they moved up to –
Story: Lancaster.
Letson: --Lancaster. Where’s that compared to Burbank? I’m not sure.
Story: Oh it’s just over the mountains, on the high desert.
Letson: Oh it is? Oh!
Story: And, near Edwards Air Force Base.
Letson: Oh really? Uh-huh. And what did he, why did he move up there, what was --
Story: The Union Oil Company transferred him up there as a station agent.
Letson: Oh I see.
Story: You know, delivering fuel to the farmers. It was a farming community.
Letson: Right. Oh, okay.
Story: But I was the baby of the family. There was, I had two brothers and a sister.
Letson: Uh-huh.
Story: My oldest brother was like, thirteen years older than me. Our family was spread out.
Letson: Really? Yes.
Story: And my second brother was probably my favorite because I knew him better.
Letson: Uh-huh.
9 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: He was always interested in airplanes, and out at the airports. I was always with him [laughing], and I always wanted to be a pilot.
Letson: Was, even as a child, was Edwards –
Story: No Edwards wasn’t there.
Letson: Wasn’t there.
Story: It was Muroc Dry Lake, but no, it was just the old people after World War II, some of them were pilots; some of them always wanted to fly. Bought up the old Jennys, you know.
Letson: Yes.
Story: And there was –
Letson: You mean after World War I?
Story: World War I.
Letson: Yes, yes.
Story: There were things like that.
Letson: So there were airports out in that area?
Story: My, uh, and this particular brother, Tom, was just really mechanically minded and artistic and stuff, and there wasn’t anything he couldn’t build.
Letson: Is that right?
Story: My niece that’s here with me, uh, her family is like that. Her brother is a sculptor.
Letson: Oh!
Story: Real good artist and stuff.
Letson: Oh that’s interesting. What did you do as a kid? What kinds of things were you interested in?
Story: Airplanes [laughing].
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Letson: Just airplanes, huh?
Story: Just airplanes. I had more model airplanes that my brother would build me, and, you know if they flew once then they were mine.
Letson: Ooohhh!
Story: So –
Letson: So he’d build them and then give them to you?
Story: Yes, yes he used to build all of my toys. He's designed, even before like, the kit airplanes that are coming out now. When he’d heard about the CPT program starting in about 1939, he knew that these people, you know, these kids that had thirty-five hours would want to go ahead and continue. So he built a small airplane that could be, you know, you could build and sell pretty cheap for building up time, so you get a commercial and do something with flying.
Letson: Right.
Story: It was called The Story Time Builder, and it was really a nice performer.
Letson: Story Time Builder?
Story: Yes.
Letson: And he built and designed his own plane?
Story: Oh yes! And he built, well, he helped a lot of people. And he built an amphibian, he built six amphibians for men up in Portland to take up to the different lakes in Canada and stuff and go fishing. He finally ended up in Portland. Stuff like that. But, all the –
Letson: Was his main interest in building and designing, or, was he a good pilot?
Story: Well, he was a pilot, but all he wanted to do is know they would fly. I mean, he wasn’t that interested in flying them, but he –
Letson: But in building them!
Story: Yes. He had a private license, but that was about it.
11 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Letson: The Story Time –
Story: Time Builders.
Letson: Builders.
Story: So, you know, in the Experimental Aircraft organization, you know, he was one of the original people that would join that and help build it out there. There was hardly a home-built up in the Oregon area that he didn’t do something on. And that he was an FAA inspector, obviously.
Letson: I’ll be darned!
Story: He was pretty well known.
Letson: Tom Story.
Story: Then he built cars and racecars and stuff.
Letson: Oh he really was remarkable, wasn’t he?
Story: Yes, he was really, really –
Letson: So, how, you got his models. How did you get, decide further – how, what, did you fly some of these planes? Or ride in them? Or –
Story: When my brother was, you know, spending his time out at the airport, he had a lot -- actually because of his talent -- he had a lot of mentors in town. You know, men that, like a plumber had a lathe and taught him to machine stuff; and the blacksmith taught him to weld and all kinds of things like that. And so, he, and he was interested in airplanes and wanted to be an aircraft mechanic, so he was out there learning; and so I was out there doing their dirty work and running after soda pop, down to the restaurant for the mechanics and stuff just for a ride. So about once or twice a year I’d get an airplane ride.
Letson: No kidding! What was the name of this airport?
Story: It was the Lancaster Airport.
Letson: Lancaster Airport. He was thirteen, Tom was thirteen years older than you?
12 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: No, he was nine years older than me.
Letson: Nine years older than you. Okay. How interesting. So how did you progress in your; how did your mother feel about your –
Story: Oh she thought it was great. It didn’t bother her. Tom had broken the ground for me [laughing].
Letson: He did? Uh-huh.
Story: But, no she was excited, she, because there, I don’t remember not wanting to fly. And um, so, after I learned to fly in junior college in the CPT program –
Letson: Oh you did? Uh-huh.
Story: Fortunately for that.
Letson: What junior college did you go to?
Story: Antelope Valley Junior College in Lancaster. The flight portion, you know ground school, was run by Junior College Flight Program and the flight school that was owned by Pancho Barnes. So, she became a good friend.
Letson: She did? Tell me about her. What are you, what are some of your earliest memories of her?
Story: Well, she’s a great person, in regards to all the stories you hear about her, you know. But, she was a character, no doubt about it. But, she was, you know, without her, getting, making sure that two girls got into the CPT program that she had the flight school; because the man that was in charge of the CAA then, predecessor of the FAA, did not want any women in the CPT program that he was monitoring. But, the law said that ten percent could be girls, but only if you can’t fulfill your quota with men. But Pancho was bound and determined she would at least start out with one. So the school had picked another girl, even though they knew I wanted to fly all my life; but they picked a girl that had ten hours of flying.
Letson: Oh.
Story: Because her family could afford –
Letson: Afford some, umm hmmm.
13 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: -- for her to start learning to fly. But, and she’s a good friend of mine. She, during the summer, before school started again, she was just shaking out a throw rug at home and a piece of glass or something flew up and hit her and cut her eye. She couldn’t pass the physical, so I got in. I was number two on the list.
Letson: You got in? Do you, just for the record, do you remember her name?
Story: Yes, it was, actually her name was Beulah Ritter, but –
Letson: Beulah Ritter.
Story: -- it was Jerri, we called her Jerri. She lives in Filmore, California. But, then one of the boys, Pancho had a corps of two, which would be twenty people; and one of the boys couldn’t pass his physical, so, uh, a girl named, well she’d been married then, but, Margaret “Meg” Castle, her maiden name was Walters; and she was engaged to my brother Tom for a while when she was a senior in high school.
Letson: Is that right?
Story: So, but anyway, she got in and then, and learned to fly at the same time.
Letson: That you did?
Story: Yes. We got our licenses in June of 1941.
Letson: Was, Pancho wasn’t one of the instructors though?
Story: No, she wasn’t an instructor, but she did go up with me a couple of times before I got my license, and then –
Letson: She did?
Story: -- years later, we flew together. We’d fly just for fun.
Letson: Uh-huh. Was she a really good pilot? I mean, was she --
Story: Well she, in her day, yes, but she’s, you know if there’s a rule, she’s going to break it.
Letson: She’s going to break it?
14 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: [both laughing] You know, she’s that kind of person. Rules weren’t made for Pancho. My goodness. But when she was in her flying days and things, she was a good pilot, and flew some early airplanes experimentally for Severski and some of the, things like that; and raced; and had started a, what do you call it? It was a women’s air something or other. Might have been air corps, I don’t know; but it was just a group of early women pilots that had gathered on the west coast, most of them. Some of them would, Pancho flew, you know, in the movies, stunt pilots and things like that.
Letson: Right.
Story: Some of these others, like, Bobby Trout and people like that.
Letson: Ummm hmmm.
Story: All belonged to it. And then there was a group of women that learned to fly in the early days on the east coast; apparently not too many in between as up in the east coast. And then out on the west coast. But it was, you know, there was a lot of interesting flying going on in those early days; when I was a kid, and Tommy would try to get me down to some air shows and things.
Letson: Right.
Story: But he would go to them.
Letson: So how did, did you have a pretty good time with the CPT? Were there any problems, or –
Story: Not really. Because, you know, you’re going to school at the same time, you know, your regular classes. Fortunately, I got an early morning time slot, and that’s the most beautiful time to fly, particularly on the deserts.
Letson: Oh, I guess so!
Story: And then, you know, I’d be through by about eight and back in town, and going to school.
Letson: Ooohhh.
Story: But it was the best thing in the world.
Letson: You liked it, huh?
15 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: Every day when I’d go home from my first lesson, mom, not knowing very much about this, would ask, did you solo today [laughing]. Finally, when I got enough hours and soloed, she didn’t ask me that! I was really disappointed [both laughing].
Letson: So she was really pleased that you were doing this?
Story: Oh yes. It didn’t bother her. She only said something about flying once, and that was when I was in the WASPs, and my flying partner was killed in a BT on an administrative flight. And when I wrote her about it, well, she, when she wrote back she said, I wish women didn’t have to fly in the war. Something like that. That’s the only time she’s ever said she worried or anything like that.
Letson: Right. So after CPT, you’re still enrolled at the junior college?
Story: Yes, well I, you know, graduated about, in June. That’s the time I –
Letson: When would that have been? That would have been –
Story: 1941.
Letson: 1941?
Story: I went to junior college for three years actually, and ______, it turned out to be at my advantage, because that was the year they started the CPT program.
Letson: Oh, the third year, uh-huh.
Story: And I may not have had as good a chance to get in.
Letson: Right.
Story: Meg had already finished her schooling and then came back, and got in; and a lot of the boys did.
Letson: Uh-huh.
Story: But, you know, all we had to do was take the ground school.
Letson: Right. Where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked? Just, you remember?
16 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: Yes. I was, actually I was at a friend’s. I’d gone to work in September for Lockheed Vega Aircraft.
Letson: Oh really?
Story: And, so I was staying with, I ended up by staying with my sister. She had married and moved to Glendale, and so I lived with her. A friend that was a school teacher, a family friend that taught up in the high school in Lancaster, and her mother was a nurse at the county hospital in L.A.; so, [on her way] to L.A. on Friday night, a lot of times she would stop and pick me up and then go spend the weekend with them, and we happened to be at her mother’s place on Pearl Harbor Day. A doctor and his wife lived in the little apartment next door, and he was from Lancaster. The doctor’s father had been the superintendent of the high schools, and his mother was a teacher up there. But, he came out and he said, did you hear Pearl Harbor was bombed, and he told us. So we ran in and turned on the radio; and Beth’s mother worked at night, so she slept in the daytime; so we tried to, we didn’t turn on the radio or play the records or things, you know, during the day to wake her up. But –
Letson: Were you just horrified when you heard the news?
Story: Yes, it was –
Letson: Scary?
Story: -- kind of scary. We didn’t know what would happen. Then Monday when Beth would drop me back in Glendale, on, Sunday evening on her way back to Lancaster, and Monday, traffic was all right and stuff, but they hadn’t started blackouts.
Letson: Oh. Uh-huh.
Story: But in a day or two they started the blackouts. Well, in the wintertime, it was, you know, pretty dark, and things. So, it was a little hairy getting to work, and the traffic got worse and worse as they had the blackouts –
Letson: Sure.
Story: -- because instead of having your traffic signals, what few they had, there was stopping. Just stop signs, so –
Letson: Oh for heaven’s sakes! Yes.
17 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: -- it kind of slows the traffic down.
Letson: What were you doing at Lockheed? What was your work?
Story: Oh, I started out as a detail assembler.
Letson: Oh really?
Story: Just like riveting, things like that.
Letson: Uh-huh.
Story: And, uh, I got promoted into better jobs because I was familiar with tools and things from my brother.
Letson: Were there many women doing that?
Story: Oh yes, lots of women.
Letson: This is pre-World War II still, so –
Story: Yes, but it was just at the beginning.
Letson: At the beginning.
Story: The men had already started being drafted.
Letson: Oh had they? Oohh.
Story: Or they had gone into the service. So I was there about, let’s see I went in September of ’41, and I left, I went into the WASPs in April of ’43.
Letson: April of ’43.
Story: Yes.
Letson: So you were there from September ’41 to April of –
Story: About a year and a half, I guess.
Letson: Uh-huh. Wow. That was really some time.
18 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: So, I had worked up until I was a group leader and had my own little section. When I got my notice about the WASPs –
Letson: Did they send you a letter, or a telegram?
Story: Yes. Sometime prior to that, because I’d learned to fly in CPT, and of course you had a license. And I got a, kind of a survey from the CAA. It didn’t have Cochran’s name on it, but there was rumors that there was going to be some kind of a program or something.
Letson: Ahh. Were you still flying at this time while you worked at –
Story: No, you couldn’t fly when the war started. Flying was out.
Letson: Oh that’s right! Even in Lancaster?
Story: Yes, well, there was a hundred and fifty miles from the coast. There was an imaginary line at a hundred and fifty miles, and you had to go outside of that.
Letson: Outside of that.
Story: So, Olancha, California, that happened to be on that little corner, and you could fly right there, or you could go out across the river in Blythe.
Letson: Blythe?
Story: And there was some flying schools, at like desert centers.
Letson: Right.
Story: And, of course in that area there was some flying schools opened up.
Letson: Right.
Story: People that had flying schools like, in the Los Angeles Basin moved out to that area.
Letson: Right. Huh!
Story: But, before the war started I had joined the Lockheed Recreation Club. The recreation deal had a flying club, and I joined that. So I did fly just two or three times before the war started.
19 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: Umm hmmm. How many hours had you gotten? You were, how many were required for you to go into the WASPs, do you know?
Story: Only thirty-five.
Letson: Only thirty-five? But, okay.
Story: The class ahead of me, W-5, was the first one that had thirty-five. So as they learned more about it, and they got down to that, well, then I thought, man I’ve got a chance now.
Letson: Right.
Story: And, so I couldn’t, I was supposed to go into that class after I’d taken my interview, and –
Letson: Do you remember who interviewed you, who was the –
Story: Yes, um –
Letson: Was it Ethel Sheehy?
Story: No. Maxine Howard. Maxine Howard.
Letson: Oh. I’ve never heard that name. Huh.
Story: Oh. Oh I knew of her, she and her husband. In fact I’d probably passed my interview by talking to her husband waiting, because he was Benny Howard; not Bevo Howard that did the acrobatics, but Benny Howard that designed airplanes. He was an engineer then for Douglas.
Letson: Oh really?
Story: And, the Howard DGA was manufactured, in fact, when I was, later on I owned one, and the crop dusting company, we had one just for fun. But, he happened to be sitting in the living room while I was waiting, because Maxine was interviewing somebody ahead of me, and there was a picture of a Douglas DC-4 or something that they never built; but there was one there. When we were talking, he asked me where I worked, and I said, well I’m working at Vega on the B-17F; they were doing B-17s. Well, he was on the B-17 program at Douglas, and we were about two months ahead of them all the time. So I kind of needled him a little bit [both laughing]. But, first I’d seen this airplane because it had triple-tail, and I recognized it, because I looked at every picture I could see
20 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection anyway. And that kind of impressed him that I knew what it was. So we started talking about the problems that we were running into with the F, because there weren’t complete drawings for all the changes on it.
Letson: Oh.
[End of Tape 1, Side A. Beginning of Side B]
Letson: -- that you were out, what you were doing, and your brothers. This is all so very important.
Story: But it, you know, you hear about Rosie the Riveter and stuff.
Letson: Yes.
Story: My share of that started, and –
Letson: You sure did!
Story: -- and then I got into more of it, because, just, well, probably because I was interested, and I had learned a lot, you know, mechanics and like that kind –
Letson: You knew a lot more about the mechanics than most of the girls going in, didn’t you?
Story: Yes. Yes. Like, Lockheed had a deal with this Fletcher Aviation School that taught you to rivet and stuff like that; that you’re supposed to go through before you can even get hired. Well, I didn’t go through it, but I didn’t even know about it. But I did have my pilots license, and when they were interviewing me to hire me, that’s the only thing that was circled on my application was the fact I had a pilots license. So that got me in.
Letson: Oh. But you think talking to this husband –
Story: Oh well that was interview for the WASPs.
Letson: -- you think that got you in, huh?
Story: That got me into the WASPs.
Letson: What was she? Why was she the interviewer? She wasn’t really associated, was she, with –
21 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: Oh she was a good friend of Jacqueline Cochran’s, and an old time pilot. She was an excellent pilot.
Letson: Oohh! I see.
Story: She and her husband were in one of the cross-country races with his airplane; it’s called a Howard DGA, because air, the CAA said, well it’s Howard but you have to have some kind of a designation like 1, 2, whatever.
Letson: Yes.
Story: So he thought, and he said, okay DGA. And they wrote it down, and they said, what’s that mean? He says, damn good airplane [both laughing]. And it was!
Letson: And it was, huh!
Story: It was a cabin airplane for four passengers.
Letson: Uh-huh.
Story: It was just a real –
Letson: How neat!
Story: With a four hundred and fifty horsepower engine on it. It’s a nice airplane. But, anyway, she interviewed me and accepted me, and so I would go in March. So I went back to Vega and told my supervisor that I got accepted, and of course when they heard about it they knew I wanted to go. So they okayed it, but Lockheed didn’t, or Vega didn’t. They said, you’re frozen to your job. I said, I gotta go, because I had a telegram from my, my deal happened to be a telegram signed by General Arnold. It said, you will report for the interview; and I said, it says I have to go, that’s WILL. It doesn’t say I shall, or I can, or whatever. It says you WILL.
Letson: Right.
Story: Here I am just barely twenty-one years old, and arguing with these people in the factories. So finally they left it up to my supervisor. Well, there was no question then. But they gave the stipulation that I have to train somebody to take my place.
Letson: Oh.
22 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Story: I had this one little section, and so I did. I had a month and a half. I was, because I was –
Letson: So that’s what kept you out of 43-5, huh? I’ll be darned.
Story: Yes. So I went to, so I put in my one month and trained the best girl that I had working for me; and then I heard after I left that they disbanded that section anyway [laughing]. One, because they were coming to the end of what they were doing and had a lot of spares built and things like that.
Letson: Right. Oh. Yes.
Story: So, but, I think that it was good that I was held back that one month because then I had the better chance of, well, I got into the B-26 class then, their first deal.
Letson: Ooohhh.
Story: Otherwise I would have been out on ferrying command for a month, and maybe not have had that chance.
Letson: Not have had that chance. What, so how did you go to Sweetwater? You’ve got a great memory for details. Tell me how –
Story: Short term memory [both laughing]. But, anyway, when I was ready to go, then I found out Meg, that had learned to fly with me, was going –
Letson: Oh really? Uh-huh.
Story: Because she, her mother was a school teacher for the Borax Mines, and I guess, you know, occasionally; anyway, she contacted my mom, and so when I got back home to pack my stuff to go. I don’t know whether somebody took us down to L.A.; anyway we left by train.
Letson: Oh uh-huh. But you went together?
Story: We went together. We left –
Letson: Were your parents okay? You don’t, you mentioned your mother. Was your father okay with all of this?
Story: Oh, oh sure.
23 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Letson: Oh is, that was great, huh?
Story: I’d never had a chance to take them up though before that. But later I flew them. My mom was a pretty good navigator. I used to fly her –
Letson: Oh is that right?
Story: -- and give her the map. She would tell me where we were and stuff [laughing].
Letson: Yes.
Story: But, we went by train, and Meg wanted to spend a day in Phoenix; and I, it was Jerri that got her eye hurt, that worked there. She was a tower operator at the airport. And, you know, air traffic deal. So I’d gotten in touch with her, and so I stayed one, we stayed over together one night so that we still got to Sweetwater together.
Letson: Did the one that had her eye hurt, was it still hurt? I mean would that have kept her out of the WASP?
Story: Well, it kept her from passing a class two physical.
Letson: Isn’t that amazing that shaking out a rug, that something like that would happen? What a twist of fate. Where did you get your name “Babe?” I forgot –
Story: The baby of the family.
Letson: The baby. So you were called that by your brothers and sisters and parents?
Story: Everybody in town.
Letson: Everyone.
Story: I didn’t even know my real name until I went to work for Lockheed [both laughing]. I had to sign it on time cards every day; and half the time I’d sign “Babe” just unconsciously, and the timekeeper would come back and bawl me out, don’t you know your name? [laughing]
Letson: Ooohh. So you all spent a night in Phoenix.
24 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: Yes, and then we caught the same train the next day and went to Sweetwater. We got there April 23, 1943.
Letson: Sweetwater was a –
Story: -- it was a Sunday.
Letson: Oh, uh-huh.
Story: And, started Monday. Two girls that were in 43-5, for some reason, decided they’d come down and meet the train and see the new recruits. So here’s two girls, sunburned faces, goggle marks; you knew that they had to be girls in the WASP. [Letson laughing] It turned out to be Pat Pateman and Mary Ann Wetherby.
Letson: Oh really?
Story: And then, the neighbor baymates with Edna and some other girls in W-5.
Letson: Is that right?
Story: We, just because of that we became good friends, even though Mary Ann ended up by leaving the WASP at the end of primary because her father was ill. She was from West Virginia. But we always stayed in contact, and then she finally moved out. My mom just about adopted her; she was a, she called her a West Virginia girl [Letson laughing]. Most of my friends all called my mother “mom” and stuff.
Letson: Huh!
Story: Until Mary Ann passed away, well, I don’t know how many years, four, seven or eight years ago, we were always good friends. I’d go through and stay, and she’d come out from West Virginia once and stayed. My mother and I drove back to West Virginia once and tried to get her to come back out here.
Letson: Is that right?
Story: So she could get a job in California.
Letson: So her father became ill and she had to go home?
Story: Yes, she had to go home. Her mother wanted her to go home.
25 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: Oh. That must have been heartbreaking for her.
Story: Yes. So, yes, but she, in the mean time, had gone up to Pennsylvania and worked at Martin’s Creek Airport. She liked the man that ran it, but I don’t know how long she stayed there. After I got home, after the war, you know after WASP was disbanded, we still couldn’t fly on the west coast. So I kind of piddled around for a year, I couldn’t go –
Letson: Oh well, let’s get back to the WASP! Now wait. You got, this is really where we really need – What was training like? How did you –
Story: Well training was, I thought the training was excellent. I had an excellent primary instructor. I had good instruction in the CPT. So, primary and basic was pretty, pretty easy –
Letson: Easy for you?
Story: -- as far as you know, not like learning from scratch or anything like that.
Letson: Right.
Story: Just a little bit bigger airplane, which was a really easy airplane to fly. My instructor just couldn’t wait until I got enough hours where he could do some acrobatics with me. I don’t really care for acrobatics, because I get –
Letson: Oh really?
Story: -- carsick and seasick and things [Letson laughing].
Letson: But not, do you get sick just flying straight in an airplane?
Story: No.
Letson: Oh!
Story: As long as I can see out. But, I’ll tell you, it took me a long time to get used to riding in the back end of an airliner.
Letson: Oh.
Story: After I had to start traveling, it was pretty hard to sit back there –
26 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: I’ll bet it was! So he wanted to teach you acrobatics, and you were going, no, no!
Story: Yes [laughing]. You know, I learned what we were supposed to learn, but I just, I didn’t ever want to be an acrobatic pilot, or that kind of thing.
Letson: No. I wouldn’t think so.
Story: But he was, it was really good.
Letson: Do you remember going into Sweetwater? Did you ever have any contact with any of the local people?
Story: Not much. They, we couldn’t. There was, you know, we were, first two weeks we were pretty restricted.
Letson: Umm hmm.
Story: I don’t even remember. I don’t think that we even had open post the first weekend.
Letson: Umm hmm.
Story: You go in, and then we could. Naturally the upper classes are telling you what to do. Like, we weren’t supposed to go to Lake Sweetwater, so that’s the first place we went [both laughing].
Letson: You did, huh?
Story: With an upper class, some upper class five.
Letson: Right. So there was some interaction between the classes?
Story: Oh yeah. An upper class, I think she was from 43-3 or 43-4, was our, like our class mother, or so to speak.
Letson: Uh-huh. Oh! Oh really?
Story: Then there was somebody in the next flight that would, that was our flight leaders, you know, for a while, just to lead you on. And we did the same thing for, as, you got down. Just, kind of teach you the ropes and –
Letson: Right. Who were among your baymates? Let’s say, were your, who were your best friends? The ladies –
27 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: Well, Meg and I, we could pick our own baymates. Well, Meg had worked for the CAA up in Bishop, which was outside the hundred and fifty mile mark. So she knew some girls that were flying at Bishop, or Lone Pine, or Olancha. I think three of them she knew, and me. So there was five of us, and so we had to pick somebody else.
Letson: And you got to pick? It wasn’t alphabetical, huh?
Story: No, not then.
Letson: I’ll be darned!
Story: They let us pick. So Meg knew, of course Meg and I knew each other real well; and then Meg knew these other three in various stages. One of them had been a flight instructor; we called her “Ma.”
Letson: Who was that?
Story: Evelyn Tomlinson. She was older. She was one that just barely got in agewise. But she was really a good pilot. She was teaching her primary instructor how to fly, because they were just coming out of school; and she knew so much more than them, that she ended up teaching him how to fly and instruct.
Letson: That’s nice that he took it from her, that he recognized her greater skills, too.
Story: So, then the sixth person, we just picked somebody that apparently didn’t know, you know, hadn’t tied up with anybody else. Her name was Florence Niemiec, and she was from Buffalo, New York.
Letson: Oh really?
Story: So, here’s five Californians and one person from New York, and she would set us on our ear once in a while when we’d needle her about California and New York.
Letson: Oh, I’ll bet! How cute.
Story: All of us were used to the desert type area.
Letson: Oh and of course she wasn’t, was she? What, how important were your baymates, and others, in getting all of you through? I mean, did you depend on each other and learn from each other, or was it more independent work?
Story: Well, we had this Evelyn Tomlinson -- she helped us a lot.
Letson: I’ll bet.
28 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: Because she had, you know she had been a flight instructor for so long, and she knew what we needed to know. Navigation and meteorology and things like that; theory of flight and stuff. So, if we had questions, we didn’t have any problem there. But you know, we had our ground school, and we all had learned to fly either in CPT or some way; and you have a lot of this, too. Because a lot of it was repetition and you go on; and it gradually got harder as we got more advanced. But primary and first starting, I don’t think anybody had that much trouble really. It was when the only thing I probably hadn’t had was code, and things like that. We had our PT every day and stuff. Some of the older girls it may have bothered. You know, they had gotten away from being high school students [Letson laughing] and stuff. Then some of them were more physically active, so they didn’t have that much problem.
Letson: Right. Did you have any close calls while flying in your training?
Story: Not really.
Letson: So, pretty steady pilot, sounds like you are.
Story: But, later after I was in B-26, we got, I wasn’t sitting in the left seat, a boy was actually; because this was after Bonnie Jean was killed.
Letson: Now this is after you graduated, right?
Story: Yes.
Letson: So you graduated, what month was that?
Story: I graduated in October of –
Letson: ’43?
Story: -- I think it was the ninth of ’43. We were a few hours behind, and they graduated us anyway. But we had to stay there and fly a couple of days to make up our time. So they were pinning our wings on our mechanics coveralls, and they gave us an airplane and they just said, just go get in your time.
Letson: You had to get your, how did you all get behind?
Story: Weather.
Letson: Weather? Oh so you’re –
Story: But it was just the end, toward the end of advanced. You know, we had two types of advanced then; we had single-engine and multi-engine. So, instead of, we had to have thirty hours in each instead of sixty hours in something. Up through, I don’t know when
29 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection they changed, but they changed a little bit after that. Because they were training us for the ferrying command, and so you needed to fly those training kind of airplanes. So we got both.
Letson: And later what did they do, they dropped one?
Story: I don’t know if they, no, the girls flew, but they, what they did was drop the BTs, except for instruments. I think they used those for instruments.
Letson: Oh that’s right, okay. I had heard that before.
Story: But they had AT-6 time and they had UC-78 time.
Letson: So after you graduated, did you have time off? Did you go home, or sometimes they got some leave?
Story: Well, they’re supposed to, but because I got picked for this special assignment, what they did was, they wanted us to fly and see what we could fly. You know, the whole program, as you all noticed, was experimental, and they were trying to prove different things. Well, when the girls were doing so good out -- after they got out -- in the ferrying command and things like that and getting checked out, and bigger multi-engine and things, they picked 25 girls in W-6 about a month before we were to graduate, and –
[interruption in tape]
Story: -- twenty-five girls from W-5 that were already out in the ferrying command. I don’t know what they did with the girls in the ferrying command, but the twenty-five of us in my class, they kept different track of us. We took an extra physical, and we were supposed to eat together. They kind of monitored us differently.
Letson: Before you graduated?
Story: Yes. The last month. Then they gave us our assignments. Mine was to go to B- 25 school at Mather Field. I thought, oh that’s great, because I get my ten days delay. So I shipped all my clothes home, and just kept what I wanted for graduation, and something to wear home. You know, in the mean time, Meg’s mother came to our graduation, so she pinned my wings on me. In from Edwards, I guess it was, because, Borax Mines and Edwards school is together. Meg and her mother both knew some pilots. There was one that was arranging to come through and I had a ride back to California.
Letson: Fabulous!
Story: You know, an AT-6 or whatever he was flying; but, it was the last, my last cross- country in UC-78s. What was her name? Evelyn Stewart and I were flying together, and we were to go Sweetwater to Wichita Falls to Amarillo and back. Well, we got caught in
30 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection weather between Wichita Falls and Amarillo, and landed at a farm field finally. Then, somebody had to come in and pick us up and fly us to Amarillo. We ended up by having to stay there overnight and then home. But, when we got back to Sweetwater, our orders, B-25 orders had been changed to B-26; but we didn’t get any delay en route. We had to be up in Kansas on the thirteenth or fourteenth of October, and we still had these couple of extra days to fly after the ninth. So we flew them, and one of the girls that was going up there, whose mother had came to our graduation, made train reservations for us, for our group; I think about eight or nine from, of the fifty girls they divided them into three; you know, B-17s, C-60s, and B-26s. They did divide them, not by flying ability, because we were, the girls on special assignment were a cross section of flying ability and ground school ability, and stuff like that.
Letson: Oh really?
Story: So some of the girls were a little, you know, not quite as good as some of the others and one of these. We had to be five foot four.
Letson: Oh there was a height –
Story: Yes, there was a height limit on it. Or, a minimum, yes. So the biggest girls they sent to B-17s, the middle to C-60s because it takes a little more muscle to fly those because they were to tow gliders, and the smallest group went to B-26 school. But, the most, the majority of us were all approximately the same size. We had one girl that was really bigger in our group, and she did graduate from B-26s. We went to Dodge City, and went to two months of transition with the boys group.
Letson: Oh, so you went, not to Mather, but to Dodge City? Okay.
Story: Yes, so we went to Dodge City, got transferred. But, we had to be up there earlier, so we didn’t get any vacation time.
Letson: Any vacation. So you had to have your clothes sent back to you, didn’t you?
Story: Yes. Went up there with these light suntans like we wore, and I don’t even think I, I didn’t even have a sweater, I don’t think.
Letson: Oh my gosh.
Story: In suntan shirts, you know. We got up, and then, civilian you know, I had like a suit and skirt that had a regular coat with it I’d kept for the graduation party. When I graduated and partied, and that’s, and dress shoes and I had my other shoes. So, that’s what we went up there with. Well, they found some sweaters for us, and they ordered some long underwear [laughing].
Letson: Oh man!
31 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Story: Some of the girls had already bought like ODs and things like that, but you don’t know where you’re going. So I think I had bought a pair of suntans, and I didn’t buy ODs until I finally did get home. It’s before we had uniforms. You know, I had never been in such cold weather in my whole life.
Letson: Oh, in Dodge City.
Story: In Dodge City, in late October, you know the middle of October to the middle of December. In one week, the highest it got for almost four or five days or more, was like five above zero.
Letson: Oh my gosh!
Story: Well that’s an extreme cold from where I live. I’ve never lived in that kind of weather. I’d never seen dry snow, but it snows in California, and its wet and sticks. It just goes straight across the ground with the wind.
Letson: I guess so!
Story: You know, we lived in these, in the tar paper two-story barracks that they gave us. Of course there wasn’t very many of us, so we just filled one wing, about half with coal stoves; and German prisoners of war would come in and stoke the stove in the morning.
Letson: They did, huh?
Story: They had a few on the base for maintenance work, or janitor work, and stuff. We ran everyplace. Well, they issued us flight suits and those leather sheepskin lined. I wore those, mine to ground school until my clothes got; I telegraphed my mother when I knew where I was going to; when she got it, you know, in freight, I’d shipped it freight, to just turn around and ship it back; I had to give her the address. Well, my stuff finally got there; there was a lot of things I couldn’t use, but at least I had some other things. But they, I think I went up there with one pair of pajamas, and I wore my pajamas underneath my –
Letson: [laughing] Wear everything you own, huh? What was the ground school like? How different was it from --
Story: At Sweetwater, well up at Dodge City, it was all geared to multi-engine and combat – meteorology, navigation, code, aircraft and naval recognition, etc.
[interruption in tape]
Story: Then there was, oh, celestial navigation, I can remember, because I happened to miss that. I was on cross-country. But there was a lot of one and two day type things.
32 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Then you had to spend the, I don’t know if it was an hour a day or so many hours a week, in what they called the “war room,” which is just keeping up with the war and things like that.
Letson: Bet that was interesting.
Story: We had aircraft recognition, we hadn’t; if any, if we had it at Sweetwater I don’t remember. We had a lot more code. We had code at Sweetwater.
Letson: Oh gosh so you had quite a bit of ground school with it.
Story: But they were little short things.
Letson: Short things.
Story: Then there were a lot of, like we had weight and balance and things, which isn’t very long, but you had to learn it for multi-engine airplanes. But, maybe a two or three day, hour course. We had a lot of things like that. Plus our flying. We flew most of our cross-country at night, and our instrument; we flew a lot of our instrument at night up there.
Letson: How did you like the B-26?
Story: Oh it was great. Best airplane ever built.
Letson: Really?
Story: Yes. That’s why, you know, we were sent there really, to fly it. Because the boys could refuse to fly it and not lose their wings. When we soloed, a telegram went to Washington, and before we got down, there was four of us that had soloed on this one day. The other flight, I think they were a little bit ahead of the flight that Bonnie Jean and I soloed on. But anyway –
Letson: Bonnie Jean?
Story: Welz.
Letson: Welz. Yes, I’ve heard her name. Uh-huh.
Story: She’s one of the thirty-eight. But anyway, they, the answer had come back that the boys could not refuse to fly it.
Letson: So if you all could fly it?
33 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: Yes. We flew it, we soloed at about twelve hours instead of twenty-five hours. I had three landings in the left seat, dual, only brakes are on the left seat; and soloed on November 5, 1943!
[End of Tape 1, Side B. Beginning of Tape 2, Side A]
Letson: They actually changed their policy because of you all? I’m trying to understand.
Story: Well, I don’t know if they changed it for the men. But they changed it for us. Because they wanted this to happen in a hurry. And it did, whether they; and we were able to keep on going, because we didn’t have any casualties or anything with the –
Letson: It was a great plane to fly?
Story: -- but by then, they had already washed out the girls that were not going to make it.
Letson: Oh they had? Uh-huh.
Story: Like, each instructor, and they made no bones about it, they gave us their best instructors. They started out with four, and ended up with three. At least my instructor and some of the others.
Letson: They were good, fair instructors? They were, they didn’t mind –
Story: They were so eager, they were so helpful. They wanted us to fly.
Letson: Why? I don’t get it.
Story: Well, they did. Because the instructors, it wasn’t, they didn’t pick somebody that didn’t want women to fly, because it might take their job. Like, the girls in the ferrying command ran into that more than we did in the training command. Because those were true service pilots; they hadn’t gone through the training, and they didn’t want to go in, be drafted. So they got in the ferrying command. But, the –
Letson: Oh. These instructors loved their plane and wanted to show how easy it was maybe.
Story: Well, no they were just good instructors. They’d want their students to be good.
Letson: Good, huh?
Story: That’s, that’s what they gave us.
34 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: How many, did a lot, I guess I could get this out of a book somewhere, but did quite a few of the girls wash out?
Story: I, um, let’s see, twenty, let’s see; I’m not sure how many went there, but I know, eleven of us graduated. I know of, I know of three that were in my class that washed out. I really don’t know if any of the girls from Edna’s class washed out that went.
Letson: Is Edna –
Story: Edna Davis.
Letson: Edna Davis? Okay. They just had a hard time handling it with –
[Interruption in tape]
Story: I really didn’t know.
Letson: You really wouldn’t know, would you?
Story: Well, I would if I had a picture that had all of their faces in it. But, when they took, the pictures I have, the group of us from Sweetwater got there a day earlier than the others. So we happened to all be in one picture. Then as they checked through, and the girls were checking through, they came from the ferrying command, or –
Letson: I wonder –
Story: -- or either that or they got there in the afternoon, and so they ran them through. But they’re not in any pictures that I had, other than, I know the ones that were with the eleven that graduated, there was Shirley Slade, Margie Sanford-Thompson, and Edna Davis, and Jeanne D’Ambley. There was four of them that graduated, so that means that there was seven of my class that graduated; and I know of three that washed out. But, just the total number, there may have been one or two. But they divided the fifty into three.
Letson: But you had no trouble flying it, it sounds like. You just –
Story: No, I didn’t. It’s just a matter of learning, and having a good instructor.
Letson: A B-26 is a twin-engine?
Story: Twin-engine.
Letson: Twin-engine.
Story: A medium bomber, but it had a bad reputation.
35 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: It did?
Story: It was the fastest landing airplane that they had. If you, and also, if you lost an engine on takeoff, it was hard. It was called the “Flying Prostitute” and “The Widowmaker.”
Letson: And “The Widowmaker,” uh-huh.
Story: But, and planes we flew up there were war-weary, short-wing B-26s. They were in various stages of being stripped down, so it didn’t cost so much to fly.
Letson: Sure.
Story: You know, some of them would have the turret on them, and some, most of them still had the armor plating on it, and things like that. That gradually were, as they were older and all, they were stripping them down, and it didn’t take so much flight. But, when we towed targets, our job was then towing targets. Eight of us went to Harlingen and three went to Del Rio, Texas.
Letson: You went to Harlingen?
Story: Yes, I went to Harlingen, yes. There was, we got what they designated as an AT- 19. Anyway, it was a B-26, made from the factory. It had six feet longer wings, so it didn’t land quite so fast. Didn’t have all this other stuff on it.
Letson: And you’d tow targets with it?
Story: We’d tow targets with it. Because it didn’t have this other stuff, it had to have some ballast in the tail and things. But other than that, it was basically the same airplane, but the longer wings. The longer wings, once, there was some of those went to combat. But some of ours had been to combat and come back, and used for training at Dodge City Army Air Base (AAB).
Letson: Really?
Story: That’s why –
Letson: So the shorter wing, you’d have to land a lot faster?
Story: They landed like a hundred, you’re lucky to get it slowed down to like a hundred and thirty-five miles an hour; the long-wings, generally around a hundred and eighteen. But, and they handled a little bit different in the air – you know, made it a little bit safer an airplane, too. But, as far as losing an engine in a single-engine, that was still bad, on takeoff.
36 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: That was bad. To control it, because, hmmm.
Story: Yes. Lot of torque. Big, two thousand horsepower each engine. Big, flat, four- bladed props.
Letson: Wow. Did it take a lot of strength, once, if an engine wasn’t –
Story: Not really. Well, single-engine, yes, by the time you get it trimmed up. If you’re landing on single-engine, you quick have to un-trim these things as you pull back on your power on the one engine.
Letson: Yes. So you graduated from Dodge City, B-26 school?
Story: On, yes, on December 18, 1943. I went up there on my birthday. That was the best twenty-second birthday!
Letson: Did the other ladies like it as much as you did?
Story: Oh I’m sure they did.
Letson: They did, huh?
Story: You couldn’t help but like that airplane.
Letson: So what was Harlingen, and you were shipped immediately to Harlingen?
Story: Yes. Well, no, we got our –
Letson: Got your vacation?
Story: -- vacation. Ten days. So, I got a, Bonnie Jean and I got a ride to Los Angeles, and then I took the train up. Her mother took us over to the, took me over to the train station and I went home. Then, I think I took the train back down and met Bonnie Jean, at the train station, and we went to Harlingen.
Letson: Considering you’re traveling by train, that’s a long trip for a ten-day –
Story: It is.
Letson: -- because you’re spending a lot of it just traveling, don’t you? But, it was good to see your mom, huh?
Story: It was almost three days to get, I tell you, well we had orders, you know but; to get, you can go east and west across Texas; but to go north and south, you hit every border [laughing].
37 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Letson: Oh yeah.
Story: When we went from Harlingen, Texas, or from Sweetwater, to get up to Dodge City, we went, I think we went down to Houston, across to Del Rio, up to El Paso, across Oklahoma to something, and then back to Dodge City probably.
Letson: Oh brother!
Story: All on this, you know, land grant –
Letson: That’s crazy!
Story: -- trains, or troop trains, or something.
Letson: That must have been exhausting!
Story: I know. We got on one for a little bit that had a bunch of boys that had already come back from the Pacific. Man they were happy to talk to somebody, you know, because they were on their way home for a while. They were unwrapping their souvenirs and showing us.
Letson: Oh how neat!
Story: That was kind of interesting.
Letson: I guess so. So –
Story: But, I tell you, you hit every border going there.
Letson: Oh my gosh!
Story: Then when I was at Harlingen, I got, I went to the school they had in Florida.
Letson: OCS?
Story: Well, it was, yes. Our quickie, five-week wonder, or four-week wonders, we were; and then one week of other stuff.
Letson: Now when was this? In, you went to Harlingen, we’re in ’43 now.
Story: I graduated, and then –
Letson: What month would that have been, in ’44, right? You graduated from Dodge City –
38 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Story: I graduated from Dodge City in December ’43, and I went home, and just practically New Years we had to be back to Harlingen.
Letson: Okay.
Story: Bonnie Jean and I went together on that. Finally ended up in Houston, and then took another train down. She was sick when we were, apparently when we were, well when we flew home from Dodge City, she had had a cold and was kind of sick, and didn’t feel good. Well, she was sitting back in the radio operator seat, and I had gotten up, we were flying with a major, and he took a student, you know, so that he could legally fly out to California. We were going to land in L.A., so just out of, I had gotten up and was kneeling behind the co-pilot, and ended up by staying there through landing, which you’re not supposed to do; because that’s in line with the propeller. When the pilot, the major, was landing, and it had been raining, and the old Mines Field, L.A. airport stopped, you know, from the east it stopped right at Supelveda Boulevard. So it was only a little over five thousand feet long. We had to have a minimum of five thousand feet to take a B-26 in. So the pilot made a good landing, and short; he didn’t use up any runway, but he couldn’t stop because there was water and some sand and stuff. There was a whole line of brand new P-51s, because the factory was right there. I saw him reach up, and he started to pull the air bottle that locks the wheels, emergency deal. Then he hesitated, because he didn’t want to go in the, he didn’t know where the airplane would go once he did that. He didn’t want to hit those brand new airplanes, so he waited a little bit longer and pulled it. We just barely went off the end of the runway, and it was kind of muddy, and the plane sunk down, went sideways and the gear broke and went down on the wing. So, I, being where I was, I was, you know, we were all okay. But there was four, chest-pack parachutes behind the pilot’s seat, and I’m over here behind the other one; and now, that’s like, you know, with my head down and my arms on the back of the co-pilot’s seat, and the corner of my eye could see these four parachutes go up. It’s like slow motion across! Hit me on the side of the face, and each time it happened I bit my lip [laughing].
Letson: Oh no!!
Story: Finally, that quit and we settled down, and the pilot and co-pilot opening the top; and I thought, oh, Bonnie Jean didn’t feel good, I’d better see how she is. I ducked back in the other crew, and they were up on their seats opening the escape hatch in the top where the dome would go, you know, when they would use this accident and stuff. Pulling that down to climb out, I swear I was the first one out. I must’ve climbed over Bonnie Jean and the engineer and everything. In the mean time, there was a GI in the, way in the back, and I had not checked the airplane when I got in, because I wasn’t flying or anything. It’s the first time I had never checked an airplane. Anyway, I had stuck my foot back in the bomb bay, and here’s a bomb bay gas tank; and I’ll tell you, that made me get out of there in a hurry. Of course, he had to go out another door, you know, at the back.
39 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Letson: Oh for heaven’s sakes!
Story: There was, and he got out all right. But when I saw that bomb bay, because I had been thinking on it as we were going out, I wonder why he didn’t, the pilot didn’t land at March Field for gas. But he had this extra tank that I didn’t know was there. Which was my fault.
Letson: Would he have gotten in trouble for that, or were they just grateful he didn’t hurt any of the P-51s?
Story: Oh, the pilot?
Letson: Umm hmm.
Story: I don’t think anything happened to him. Because he couldn’t, it wasn’t his fault.
Letson: It really wasn’t.
Story: It was weather. I don’t know what they did with the airplane. They probably just salvaged it there.
Letson: Right. Wow! Close call!
Story: Yes. But that’s the only time that I have been in an accident.
Letson: So what, tell me about Harlingen.
Story: When we got down to Harlingen, I started to say, Bonnie Jean was sick. When we got on this train, her mother, or her sister brought her over, and Bonnie Jean didn’t look like she felt very good. So, her sister told me that she’d been sick almost all the time she went home. She’d gone to the doctor for medicine, you know, for a cold and stuff. She, you know, it was so long and uncomfortable, and we didn’t have bunks or anything like that; and trains were so crowded you couldn’t stretch out. We finally got on the train, we walked back and found our train, and asked the; and you had to carry your bags and stuff. By then we had B-4s and everything you owned in it, until you can’t lift it off the floor. The conductor let us on the train early, so we each grabbed a full seat, you know, so we could lay down, and try to keep it but we couldn’t keep it. We go this way to El Paso or someplace, you know, and that’s a full days trip or more. She’s feeling worse, and I could tell she was running a fever and stuff. So in El Paso she didn’t feel very good, but we didn’t have to change trains, I don’t think, there. But, you know, you had some time, but we stayed on the train and again we got full seats, and couldn’t keep them.
Letson: People got on?
40 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: Well, yeah, El Paso had a big army base and air force base, so it was full of GIs again. Then you go clear like this and get to Houston, and in Houston we had a layover and had to get off and change trains; and so we go to the terminal, and there’s no place to sit except the floor, with our big bags. Finally, Bonnie Jean says, well I know someplace we can find chairs to sit in. I said, well, let’s go, where is it. It’s the Christian Scientist reading room.
Letson: Oh how interesting!
Story: Her family, her mother was Christian Scientist. So we went to Traveler’s Aid and asked where the nearest Christian Scientist reading room was. This lady just was being, oh these nice little girls! [both laughing] In the mean time, because Bonnie Jean felt so bad, she would never take aspirin for anything, you know, being a Christian Scientist. But, she would drink Southern Comfort.
Letson: Oh really?
Story: So while we were doing this wandering around wondering what to do because we couldn’t find anyplace to sit, she went by, we went by a liquor store, and she bought a bottle of Southern Comfort; and we had, by then we had these GI sweaters, still in our brown stuff, because we still didn’t have uniforms; she had it wrapped up, one of us had it wrapped up underneath our arm and carrying it. You know, there wasn’t any lockers or anything to store our stuff. So here we –
Letson: Had to carry everything?
Story: -- trudged down the street to the Christian Scientist reading room, to go in. We told a lady that, you know, we wanted to stay until it was time to go to the train and sit down and rest. So that’s fine, she thought this was great, these two service girls coming in [laughing]. We immediately just konked out on the table – sitting in a chair and on the table, and went sound to sleep, both of us. That bottle of Southern Comfort went scooting out on the table! [both laughing] Finally, this lady came in and woke us up and here it is! We laughed for fear; we wondered what she thought about these two nice little girls!
Letson: Little girls! [laughing]
Story: But we got back to the train and finally got on again, and talked our way into getting on early.
Letson: Oh that’s precious!
Story: She really, Bonnie Jean by then was really, really sick.
Letson: Oh bless her heart. I can’t even imagine.
41 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Story: So then, again, we grabbed seats and hoped we could keep them, and we did for a while after the train started. But just about the time the train started, I felt somebody lift my head, and I thought, there goes my seat, so I tried to pretend like I was still sound asleep. I opened an eye and somebody was doing the same to Bonnie Jean. It was these two, I think they were Marines. Anyway, they’d bought pillows and was putting a pillow underneath our heads.
Letson: Ooohh. How sweet!
Story: Finally, we lost our seat and had to sit up. But this one Marine, because she was just so – just held Bonnie Jean across his lap all the way until they got off.
Letson: Awww.
Story: When we got down to Harlingen there was, you know, even the CO wanted to meet us. So when we were checking in, whoever it was said, well, the commanding officer would like to see you first, and then we’ll check you in. Well, we went in to his office, they took us into his office, and this WAC officer that was leading us around, and you could tell she was sick; and finally, our CO said something about not feeling good, or are you sick, and so he ordered this WAC lieutenant to take her over to the hospital. She had scarlet fever.
Letson: [gasping] Are you serious??
Story: Yes [laughing]. I often wondered what happened to that Marine that’d held her in his arms!
Letson: Oh yes! Oh my gosh.
Story: Fortunately I didn’t get it, because we’d been, you know, right close together on that, almost –
Letson: So he was a pretty nice CO?
Story: Oh yeah, everybody was nice. So she spent, I don’t know, ten days or so in the hospital. In the mean time, they didn’t have room for us on the base then. We stayed a week, or maybe two weeks; they finally cleared out half of the WAC, one WAC barracks. But they had more WACs going to be coming in. We settled there until they found us a place in town.
Letson: Oh! Uh-huh.
Story: I don’t know what, it had been an office building. It was upstairs above a paint shop. It had stairs going up the side, and some stairs in back. It had, they’d taken one
42 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection little, one great big room and put up a little plywood petition. There was a kitchen back there, and it had a little sofa, rug was wrapped up; I don’t think we ever did unwrap it and put it on the floor. But there was, one bedroom was made into like, two bathrooms, clear down to the far end toward the back door, then had these seven rooms around. Kind of –
Letson: How many WASPs went to –
Story: -- before; and there was eight of us. There was one room back in this corner that was pretty big. So I said, well, Bonnie Jean and I will take this, because she was in the hospital when we moved there; and because we get along real good, and we’re really not the party animals like some of the others. So, we got that room back in the corner; besides, I figured it would be the quietest. So we lived in there about six months before they finally got room in a, half of a nurse’s quarters.
Letson: Oh really? Out at the base?
Story: Back out on the base then.
Letson: That’s better, because you’re closer.
Story: Oh yeah, well we were flying from the main base, so it really wasn’t too bad because they had a shuttle bus going to the base every morning, and you know, all day long. We were split; of eight of us, four of us flew one flight, and four the other. We flew with the same person all the time.
Letson: You always had a co-pilot?
Story: Well, we alternated. Had to be two first pilots; so, every day we alternated. One would fly left seat and one right seat. But you both, in the air towing targets, one makes the left pass, one makes the right pass. You can’t see past, you know, past the engines anyway, so you’d have better visibility.
Letson: So it’d be two women though that were –
Story: Yes. So, which kind of surprised me. We, at least in our flight. I flew a couple of flights with a fellow, and he showed us, taught us what we had to do; and then they put us together. So, Bonnie Jean and I flew together, and Shirley Slade and Margie Thompson, because she had become friends in the, you know, in training and stuff; and they flew together. I don’t know –
Letson: You’d just do this every day? For how long? Half a day?
Story: Well, morning and afternoon flights. Basically. But, it was like from six o’clock in the morning on the flight line until noon we’re off.
43 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: Really? Now, and you were towing targets for other airplanes to shoot at, or from the ground?
Story: Yes. Oh, it was an aerial, flexible gunnery school is what it was called. It was to train students, gunners obviously. They trained, there was like seven thousand student gunners there.
Letson: Wow!
Story: A thousand would come in a week, and a thousand would graduate.
Letson: Wow!
Story: They went through this course of different things, and then last, in the last week is when they did this aerial work.
Letson: Did you fly a straight line, or would you try to be evasive?
Story: Oh no, no. We attacked them. We were, we flew like we were a pursuit plane with this target behind us, and so it was kind of a tricky little maneuver to get your airplane out of the way and stuff. They ended up, because we would, you know, here’s a B-24 flying, and we’re up here someplace, and we’re going to attack that B-24; in the mean time, he’s moving and we’re moving, and you come like this and attack him. But we were trying to –
Letson: You do that attacking with a B-26? With a bomber?
Story: Yes. With a bomber. But the thing was, the target was back here a thousand feet. When it got to be nine hundred feet we got a new cable. But what we would get in here, and the student gunners had been trained to estimate, you know, about a thousand feet or nine hundred feet or something; and so then, as the target was getting into that position, we had to kind of slide our airplane out a little way, a little bit to give them a little more room. Because they had to shoot, kind of under your wing and behind you. If they’re, if they shot –
Letson: Was this live ammo, or were they using –
Story: Oh yeah. Fifty calibers. A lot. There was generally about eight student gunners; they had, you know –
Letson: Per flight?
Story: Per flight. You had, you flew kind of different patterns if you’re trying, if you’re flying for the nose turret, which is the hardest to do; you had to get way ahead of him, and –
44 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Letson: Oooo. That could be a little tricky, couldn’t it?
Story: So, we, at least I don’t know what the other girls did, but I finally figured out because the B-24 was making a big rectangular pattern out over the Gulf of Mexico. So when they made their turn, that gave me a chance to get ahead. You know, at least, at, four corners, and sometimes we went around that two or three times before the mission was up. They had to shoot up their ammunition. So you could catch them on these corners.
Letson: Then they’d look at the target afterwards of towed –
Story: Yes, and they had colored codes. Like, each position was a color.
Letson: I’ll be darned.
Story: They’d pick up the target, not a lot. But their shooting position anyway.
Letson: Right. How interesting! So it was a little tricky flying for them?
Story: Yes. It was tiresome, because as you’re pulling up to get up here, and then making your turn one way, you know, the props help you down because of the torque the other way; your right leg would be on the rudder; well you’d have two feet on the rudder and then release it. It was physically a little tiresome, particularly if the mission was a little long. You’d get down on the ground and your legs would be a little shaky.
Letson: Really? Did they like you there? Did you have a sense that they appreciated –
Story: Oh yes, they loved us there. They needed us when we got there. We were really treated good.
Letson: Oh that’s wonderful! That’s what, let me look at our time and see how –
[Interruption in tape]
Letson: No, you’ve got wonderful details. That’s what makes these really useful. So you were there, were you there until the –
Story: Well, I was assigned there for a year, because we were de-activated in December.
Letson: Right. So you were at Harlingen. And you did go to OCS then?
Story: In June I went to Florida, and I was checking in on D-Day, so I didn’t know it until I was checking in. The people at the desk –
45 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: Is that right?
Story: -- told me about it.
Letson: I’ll be darned.
Story: While I was there, and a couple of other girls went, but they didn’t send Bonnie Jean, and she was ill about two weeks before I returned to Harlingen Army Air Field (AAF), and did not fly for a week.
[End of Tape 2, Side A. Beginning of Side B]
Story: She was released for flying. But, this trip in the BT to take a non-flying officer up to Hondo or someplace came up, and our flight squadron commander asked if she wanted to go and take it. So she said she would. I have my theories about what happened and so does everybody else, I think.
Letson: Really? But they both died in that crash?
Story: No. The man got his hands burned and stuff. He said he tried to help her out, but I don’t believe he did. But I think he was the cause of the accident.
Letson: You do?
Story: He was, we’d been warned about him by the boys that he always wanted to pull his rank and fly the airplane, and he was a non-flying officer.
Letson: You think he pulled rank and wanted to, insisted on flying?
Story: Yes. Probably. Bonnie Jean may have just kind of dozed off, or not paying attention. He may have tried to give her, you know, you shake the stick to give the controls back, and he may have done that and she didn’t realize it. What the plane did was, you’re flying about a thousand feet, and a BT’s always wing heavy; and it made a big, shallow turn, gradually losing altitude, about full circle. It just went in real flat, and hit a tree and then caught on fire.
Letson: How peculiar!
Story: I know when I got back and they were, the director of flying was telling me about it; and I asked him if I could take a BT up and I did, and went a little higher and let go of the controls, and it was just, lost a thousand feet in a three-eighty. So I was positive that’s what, that’s what it went in.
Letson: That’s what caused that.
46 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Story: But, and it would do that with nobody on the controls.
Letson: So you think she might’ve just fallen asleep? But you think he took over –
Story: Well, either that or she may have fainted. She didn’t have a high threshold for pain. She, later, her sister told me that she had been talking to the family about resigning, because she just didn’t think she had the health for it.
Letson: Bless her heart.
Story: Didn’t resign soon enough.
Letson: But you blame, you suspect him, that there was something –
Story: Well, I suspect that he had been flying, to start with. She probably let him, if she didn’t feel good particularly, because she knew that she –
Letson: Bless her heart. Oh, that must’ve been so hard for you.
Story: They started to send a B-24 after me when they found out I was probably just getting on the train, so I didn’t know about it until I got home. Edna was going to meet me at the, and just missed me, but she met me at the gate and told me about it.
Letson: Hmmm.
Story: All my clothes were, they had moved us onto the base while I was gone, and all my clothes were locked in her room until I got permission; I had to send a telegram to her mother to get permission to get in and get her clothes and turn the stuff that had to be turned in in. Her mother was, because she hadn’t heard from me a little bit sooner, she thought I was flying with her. She sent back the okay, and sent me a letter saying that she was afraid that I had been with her because she knew we flew together.
Letson: Oh yeah. That, I’m glad you told me about that though. So when did this happen?
Story: This was in early, in July. I think the actual date is probably in that little memorial book.
Letson: Yes it is. It is.
Story: But I didn’t get back until, I think, fourth of July, or something. That’s why I thought it had happened in July. It may have happened a few days earlier. Then she had made, well then, the Air Force wanted, thought you know, I would take her body, or ashes, whatever, back to California. But she had already gone to her church and made arrangements that if anything happened to her, she wanted to be cremated and her ashes
47 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection scattered. So, the boy that had been assigned to our airplane as flight engineer got on the flight and scattered her ashes just before I got there. But he told me about it and showed me. He kept the name deal off the top. He’d been our flight engineer up in Dodge City [together with Letson]. He ended up later down at Harlingen on a B-24. So I got him transferred to B-26 –
Letson: Oh neat!
Story: He’s an excellent B-26 man, flight engineer. I liked him, so, supposed to have him.
Letson: So you were, but you were at Harlingen for the rest of your –
Story: Yes. Other than that school and I went to instrument school for a month.
Letson: Uh at –
Story: Back up to Sweetwater.
Letson: Sweetwater wasn’t it? Uh-huh.
Story: We lived at Sweetwater. It was, basically, a, I forget; the army and air force had an instrument school someplace. We had, our instructors that we had, they were civilians, but they had gone down there and gone through that. But they didn’t have any place for us to live. Every day we’d get in the BTs and fly down to Abilene and fly out of Abilene.
Letson: Oh really?
Story: Because that’s where the radio station and stuff were. We didn’t have radio beams, you know, to land.
Letson: I’ll be darned. I didn’t realize. Because people have told me they went back to Sweetwater for instrument school, and I assumed it was at Sweetwater.
Story: Well, we at, we lived there.
Letson: Lived there, but you went down –
Story: We took our planes, but, back and forth.
Letson: I’ll be darned.
Story: But we actually flew, you know, around Abilene and we’d land there.
48 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: Yes. I’ll be darned. Oh I didn’t know that. That’s the first time I’ve heard that.
Story: And use the low frequency. They didn’t have radios or anything like they have now.
Letson: What, when de-activation came, how did Harlingen, did they throw a party for you? Or just wave goodbye, or what?
Story: I don’t know. We all buzzed the, we flew from a sub-base by then, and we all buzzed the field a lot. I broke all the lights in the commander’s office, I came so low. I came from a different direction, and didn’t expect; they knew we were going to buzz. But everybody was going up and down the runway out in front of everything. So I decided I was going to fly across. Here’s the tower, and here’s our little one-story, you know, ready-room and things like that, and our squadron commander’s office. So I came from the back, and just before we were getting to the tower, our co-pilot was a man, because I didn’t have Bonnie Jean anymore; he picked up the mic and said, look behind you, tower. Willy, or what we used to call the tower was William something or another, so we’d call it Willy. About that time I went behind them, just ______, looked right into it, and just barely over the building and across the ramp in the airport [Letson laughing]. When I finally, we went in and made our pattern, went in and landed and taxied in and parked, and I was walking with the parachute, towards the office, there was a commanding officer standing like this acting really mad. He says, come into my office. So I followed him in, and here’s all these light bulbs on the floor [both laughing]. He says, good buzz job!
Letson: [laughing] Did he really??
Story: Yes!
Letson: Who was he? Do you remember his name?
Story: Grace.
Letson: Oh really? How sweet. Well, what can he do, fire you? [laughing]
Story: Yes, yes. Fire me, and I’ll be gone and on the train the next day.
Letson: Yes. Tell me, we don’t have much time left, but, what did you do after the war? Can you –
Story: Well, I went, that’s why I went home, and I may have had a job for Martin in Maryland; because they had interviewed some of us and thought, well then, we would hire girls that had flown the B-26 that maybe had some engineering background and stuff. I really wanted that, and I was going to follow through with it. They had interviewed some of us. So when I made the mistake, I went down to Lockheed, or Vega, to visit, and the people that still worked there, and my ex-supervisor turned my name in as asking for
49 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection my job back. When I was talking to Martin, they were checking up on me, you know, because that was still war and stuff like that. So they found out I was frozen to my job.
Letson: Really??
Story: Yes. That’s being real military. They froze me to that job, which meant I had to go back to work for Lockheed when I came home if I went to work at all.
Letson: No kidding!
Story: To get out of it, you had, couldn’t work for six months. Well I sat out my six months, and by then the war was over. I volunteered down at the USO, and then finally went to work for them at, about a block from my house.
Letson: Really? What did you do at the –
Story: Oh I just ran the snack bar, and you know, they had crafts and things like that, and I did a little bit of their bookkeeping. It’s run by National Catholic Community Service, and I was the only Protestant on their payroll. Then, you know, they started opening up the flying; so I was looking for an instructor’s job. Before, different flight schools were beginning to get back to activating where there was some. A mechanic that rented a room from my folks during the war when I was gone that was out at Miraloma Flight School, and he and his wife took, got a lease on Manzanar – the old Jap prison place that had an airport – and they were going to start a flight school and mechanic shop and stuff up there. So they asked me if I’d go to work for them, and I didn’t have a job so I said, yes, temporarily. But I would have to go back to Ohio and pick up an airplane for them. So I rode back east with the director of the USO, because it closed about the end of the year.
Letson: Oh sure.
Story: In November I think it was. She was taking another GI couple back and letting them off, so I stayed up with her family for a little bit, and the weather was bad and kept being bad. Forecast wasn’t good, so I went down to West Virginia on the train to visit Mary Ann.
Letson: Mary Ann?
Story: Wetherby.
Letson: Wetherby, okay.
Story: Yes. And convinced her that she should ferry an airplane. So we called the dealer in L.A. and got permission, you know, got two airplanes to deliver for him. The weather was still so bad in Ohio that finally they called me and said that the planes left by train. They were boxed and stuff, and they would assemble them in California. So, with
50 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection that, I’m stuck in West Virginia. So I went back, I contacted this same lady that had been, the director that I’d driven back there; and I knew she wanted to go back to California, and she would get the same type of job at, in Oxnard. So I called her, and I said, are you going back to Oxnard to work? She said, well, I want to, but I don’t want to drive alone. I said, well, I have to drive back. So I went back up to their place, and I went through, friends met me, friends of Mary Ann’s met me, in New York at the train station; they lived right across the river in New Jersey. One of the daughters of this family had learned to fly out at this Martin’s Creek, and Mary Ann wanted me to see it on the way. So I went out there, and I ended up with a job out there.
Letson: Oh really?
Story: So I went home, and had Christmas in March with my folks, and went back and I said I’d stay a year, but I stayed eight months. When I went home for Christmas the next year, I just couldn’t go back to that climate. By then, you know, they were flying in Lancaster and so I ended up by flying –
Letson: What did you do at, what was the name of it?
Story: Martin’s Creek.
Letson: Martin’s Creek?
Story: I was flight instructor –
Letson: Flight instructor of everything?
Story: I got chief flight instructor. It was a good field and I learned a lot, because I hadn’t, I’d passed my written when I was down at Mary Ann’s, and I passed my flight check after I got up there.
Letson: As an instructor.
Story: You learn more in your first hundred hours of instructing than you’ll ever learn in a thousand hours of just flying.
Letson: Is that, I bet that’s right. I’ll bet that’s right. That’s a good point.
Story: So that was, it was good experience.
Letson: So you got into crop dusting, I remember you telling me that.
Story: Yes. After, I flight instructed after I got home and about, at the end of that year, that would be what, ’46? Then you have flight school that I worked for, and we leased facilities out at Pancho’s and I flew out there a lot.
51 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
Letson: Oh did you?
Story: Yes, because we had to hangar our airplanes, and we had more than we had in Lancaster. More hangar space and stuff. Part of the flying was out there and part of it was in Lancaster. It was all over the valley. Anyway, we, I flew, the flight school ended up by closing because one of the owners insisted on breaking the rules. So then I did just some freelance flying and charter and stuff for about a year, and then I went to work as a corporate pilot for an electrical company. Had a real nice 310 Cessna to fly. After that electrical company, well no, in the mean time, I skipped a deal. A crop dusting company was just forming, and a couple of kids that I’d gone to school with and one other person started this company. So, because I still had some students and I had an airplane adding to my freelance flying, and just mainly run the airport you know, and pump the gas and stuff like that. Like fixed base operator and take the phone calls for the crop dusting and stuff. Then got into it, crop dusting.
[interruption in tape]
Letson: I know you do.
Story: So, it was –
Letson: So you stayed in flying for quite some time?
Story: Yes, I stayed altogether about twenty years.
Letson: Is that right?
Story: So that, because crop dusting was all of 1950, and then I flew for the electrical company, and that got me into a job with a general contractor. They were just starting, and grew up with them. I stayed with them for thirty-two years.
Letson: Flying for –
Story: No, I didn’t fly for them.
Letson: Oh you didn’t?
Story: Actually I didn’t miss flying too much, because the work was so interesting for me. Then I ended up by doing a lot of traveling for them, because we worked all over.
Letson: How neat! How neat.
Story: I was managing, and I had jobs assigned to me, and I did all the scheduling.
52 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Letson: Now what was the, and what was this company called?
Story: Santa Fe Engineers.
Letson: Santa Fe Engineers. Well, I’ll be.
Story: We did military work.
Letson: Uh-huh. That’s fascinating! I know I’ve got to let you go. This has been fabulous! No, you’ve got so many wonderful –
Story: I can remember –
Letson: I appreciate it. The thing is –
[end of interview]
53 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection
A B
accidents · 15, 39, 40, 45, 46 Barnes, Florence "Pancho" · 13, 14, 51 Welz, Bonnie Jean Alloway · 47 bases · 43, 47 acrobatics · 20, 26 Blythe Army Air Base · 19 administrative flight · 15 Dodge City Army Air Base · 36 advanced training · 29 Edwards Air Force Base · 9, 30 airplanes · 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 20, 26, 29, Harlingen Army Air Field · 45 32, 39, 43, 50, 51 March Army Air Base · 39 AT-19 · 36 Mather Army Air Base · 30, 31 AT-6 · 29, 30 Wright Field, Muroc Dry Lake · 10 B-17 · 20, 30 basic training · 25 B-17F · 20 Borax Mines · 23, 30 B-24 · 44, 47 B-25 · 30 C B-26 · 22, 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 44, 47, 49 California · 25, 28, 30, 31, 38, 47, 50 BT-13 · 15, 29, 45, 46, 48 Bishop · 6, 27 C-60 · 30 Burbank · 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 Cessna 310 · 51 Filmore · 14 Douglas DC-4 · 20 Glendale · 16, 17 Howard DGA · 20, 21 Lancaster · 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, Jennys · 10 50, 51 multi-engine · 29, 32 Lone Pine · 27 P-51 · 38, 39 Los Angeles · 16, 23, 37, 38, 50 pursuit plane · 43 Los Angeles Basin · 19 single-engine · 29, 36 Olancha · 19, 27 Story Time Builder · 11 Oxnard · 50 twin-engine · 35 San Francisco · 5 UC-78 · 29, 30 Canada · 11 airports Castle, Margaret Walters "Meg" · 14, 16, Lancaster Airport · 12 23, 27, 30 Los Angeles International Airport · 38 check rides · 34, 51 Martin's Creek Airport · 25, 50, 51 Christian Scientist · 40, 41 Alloway family · 40, 46 Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA) · 13, mother · 37, 40, 47 18, 21, 27 sister · 40, 46 Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPT) · Antelope Valley Junior College · 13, 16 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 25, 28 Arizona Cochran, Jacqueline · 18, 21 Phoenix · 23, 24 Commanding Officer (CO) · 41, 42, 48, Tucson · 4 49 Arnold, Henry H. "Hap" · 22 crop dusting · 20, 51, 52 cross-country flights · 21, 30, 32
54 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection D K
D'Ambley, Jeanne Perot · 35 Kansas · 30 Davis, Edna Modisette · 24, 34, 35, 47 Dodge City · 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 47 Douglas Aircraft Company · 20 L E Lake Sweetwater · 27 Experimental Aircraft Association Lockheed Vega Aircraft · 16, 17, 19, 20, (EAA) · 11 21, 22, 24, 49
F M
Federal Aeronautics Authority (FAA) · Manzanar War Relocation Center · 50 11, 13 Marston, Florence Niemiec · 28 ferrying command · 23, 29, 30, 34 Martin Aircraft · 49 Fletcher Aviation School · 21 Maryland · 49 flight instructor · 27, 28, 51 Massachusetts Florida · 38, 45 Boston · 5 Michigan · 4, 6 G Miraloma Flight School · 50
ground school · 13, 16, 28, 30, 32 N Gulf of Mexico · 44 National Catholic Community Service · H 49 New England · 5 Hawaii New Hampshire · 5 Pearl Harbor · 16 Chester · 6 High Sierra Mountains · 6 Nashua · 5 Howard, Benny · 20 New York · 4, 28, 50 Howard, Bevo · 20 Buffalo · 28 Howard, Maxine · 20 night flying · 17, 23, 24, 32
I O
instrument training · 29, 47, 48 Officer Candidate School (OCS) · 38, 45 Ohio · 50 Oklahoma · 37 J Oregon · 11 Jackson, Evelyn Stewart · 30 Portland · 11 Junior College Flight Program · 13
55 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection P T
Pateman, Yvonne C. "Pat" · 24 Teer, Shirley Slade · 35, 43 Pennsylvania · 25 Texas · 37 primary training · 25, 28 Abilene · 48 Amarillo · 30 R Del Rio · 35, 37 El Paso · 37, 40 Ritter, Beulah "Jerri" · 13, 14, 23 Harlingen · 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 47, 48 Hondo · 45 S Houston · 37, 38, 40 Santa Fe Engineers · 52 Sweetwater · 23, 24, 26, 30, 32, 34, See B-26" · 37, 47, 48 See B-26” · . Wichita Falls · 30 Severski · 14 Thompson, Marjorie Sanford · 35, 43 Sheehy, Ethel · 20 Tomlinson, Evelyn L. · 27, 28 solo flights · 33 towing targets · 35, 36, 43 Spofford family · 5, 6 training command · 34 grandmother · 5, 6 Trout, Bobby · 14 great-aunt · 5 great-grandfather · 6 U great-uncle · 5, 6, 7 Story family · 4, 9 Union Oil Company · 7, 9 brother · 9, 10, 12, 17, 20, 24 United Service Organization (USO) · 49, brother, Tom · 10, 12, 14, 15 50 father · 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 23 United States Air Force · 47 grandfather · 6 great-aunt · 5 W great-grandfather · 6 great-uncle · 4, 6 Walters family mother · 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 15, 23, 25, 32, mother · 23, 30 37 washing out · 33, 34 nephew · 10 Washington D.C. · 33 niece · 7, 10 WASP class parents · 4, 23, 24, 50 43-W-3 · 27 sister · 9, 16, 24 43-W-4 · 27 uncle · 4 43-W-5 · 19, 22, 24, 30 uncle Tom · 4 43-W-6 · 4 Story, Irma "Babe" · 4, 24 WASP instructors · 14, 26, 27, 33, 34, Story, Jr., Nathaniel · 4 48 Story, Tom · 12 Grace · 49 Welz, Bonnie Jean Alloway · 28, 33, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48 West Virginia · 25, 50
56 Texas Woman’s University The WASP Oral History Project The Woman’s Collection Wetherby family Women Air Force Servie Pilots (WASP) father · 25 · 24 mother · 25 Women's Army Corps (WAC) · 41, 42 Wetherby, Mary Ann · 24, 25, 50, 51 World War II White Mountains · 6 Normandy (D-Day) · 45 Women Air Force Service Pilots Pacific Theater · 37 (WASP) · 4, 15, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 42
57