Boundary Waters
Pre-takeoff checklist
- Joined
- Sep 24, 2021
- Messages
- 153
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Luscombe Driver
One of my heroes growing up.
Growing up, my father flew DC-3s, and then C-46s for Gene Zerkel and Duane Zantop in Fairbanks Alaska. Then John Coghill, owner of a fuel company and later a State Senator, bought one of the Zantop brother's 46s and dad flew fuel oil all over the state in it. All his friends were pilots. Two of them kept a Taylorcraft and a Sikorsky S-58 (U-34) at Phillips.
I loved going there and hanging out. Mom didn't think it was a very wholesome environment. Ruffians piloted barges full of fuel oil up the river, and only slightly more civilized pilots flew it into the interior-- in her opinion. I started reading everything I could about female pilots... Marjorie Stinson, she taught a young Ohio race-car driver named Rickenbacher to fly. She was Ed Stinson's sister. Their mother owned the flying school in San Antonio. Eddie and Marjorie's sister Katherine also taught at the school.
Marvel Crosson, who with her brother Joe, bought a WWI surplus Curtis floatplane in San Diego. Neither had any experience in aviation, but they taught themselves to fly it and took it to Alaska to start a business there. She set an altitude record in a Travel Air and then died during the 1929 Women's Air Derby when she bailed out at too low of an altitude for her 'chute to open.
There were tons of examples, like Edna Whyte who trained pilots for WW2. But the most exciting were the Russian women who actually flew combat missions during the war. Both of my grandfathers had served in Europe during WW2. Dad had tromped around the Michelin Plantation (on what he called "an all-expense paid walking tour") when I was a baby.
No matter how many biographies I read or shared with her, mom just didn't think that flying was the sort of thing a young woman should set her sights on. I should do something "ladylike," not something crass. Well, the engineering college I attended had a male:female ratio of about 8.5:1 in the mid 80s...
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