Q: What kind of women came? Can you characterize them?
Well, most of the women really didn't look like pilots as you expected. I
don't know what we expect a pilot to look like. But they were all so glamorous
looking when they came in. Especially Nancy, she was so gorgeous. And Betty
Gilleys was this tiny little gal. I remembered Mary's blue eyes and her
dancing when she would talk about flying. She was an excellent pilot. She
owned her own Grommen Amphibian Airplane. But she was so short I was thinking,
"How does she reach the rudder pedals." But her husband had made rudder
extensions to put on. It was like you driving a car, you know, it had an
extension on a brake, that much extension. You know, you push on it. And I
thought that was really ingenious when I heard about the rudder pedals. And,
Cornelia Fort, she had been in the air in Hawaii when Japan bombed them. She
was up in the air with a student. I think that she applied right after she got
out of Hawaii and came straight to Wilmington. And she was a very charming
person.
We had Catherine Slocum, who was Catherine Luden from the Luden Cough Drop
firm. We didn't know about this until later. And she was another excellent
pilot. But, she was the mothering type. We didn't know she had four children.
But it was just such a mixed match of all those that came in. And we had the
glamour queens. Nancy Bassen, a blonde from Alabama. She was flying in
California when she heard about the WASP so she took a train back to
Wilmington. Evelyn Sharpe came from Oren, Nebraska. She was a flight
instructor and an orphan. And they're always so interesting. But the first
two or three months we all became acquainted and swapped stories of how we got
in, and how we got there and how much time we had in.
back to Interview Transcripts | next
|
