| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : NOVEMBER 15, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Passionate Pilot DAUGHTER OF THE AIR The Brief Soaring Life of Cornelia Fort By Rob Simbeck Atlantic Monthly 263pp $24 As a young woman, my mother was a misfit in a world of debutantes and doilies. Her Nashville family, like those of many other well-to-do Southerners of the 1930s and '40s, had a butler, a chef, and various accoutrements of comfort. But Mom wasn't comforted: Among my early memories are her tales of how much she hated attending vapid and rigidly formal society dances. As soon as she could, she fled east to the intellectual safe haven of Wellesley College. Imagine my inward glee, then, when I read in Rob Simbeck's Daughter of the Air of another young Nashville woman who had resented being forced to attend the very same dances at that city's Belle Meade Country Club. This woman, Cornelia Fort, eventually escaped her privileged past for the relative independence she discovered at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. Fort went on to live an extraordinary, if truncated, life as one of the first noteworthy female fliers in U.S. aviation history. Fort fell in love with flying after watching daredevil pilots who passed through town perform high-altitude tricks. Much to her family's chagrin, she quickly took up flying and showed remarkable aptitude. Eventually, she found her way to Hawaii as a flight instructor. She was one of the few to witness the attack on Pearl Harbor from the cockpit of her plane. She managed to get her aircraft (and her student) back to the relative safety of the tarmac and ran for her life as Japanese fighters riddled her plane with bullets. In 1942, Fort joined the first women's flight unit in U.S. military history. The female fliers' duties were limited to ferrying planes across the U.S. They faced a myriad of obstacles in a male-dominated world. Some of these were merely annoying--such as arriving at a military base after many hours of flying, only to learn there were no proper sleeping quarters. Others were more serious, like receiving far lower pay for doing the same work as male pilots who had considerably less training. Nonetheless, Fort passionately loved her work. She flew alongside many of the nation's most skilled women aviators, including Catherine Slocum, an heir to the Luden's cough-drop fortune. Fort died in 1943 in a midair collision while ferrying military planes across the West Texas desert. She was 24. Nashville writer Simbeck weaves together Fort's tale largely through interviews with dozens of people who knew her. What make his narrative so compelling, however, are the excerpts from Fort's introspective and articulate journals and letters. If the author is to be faulted, it would be for not sharing more of these. ''I loved flying,'' she wrote, ''because it taught me utter self-sufficiency, the ability to remove oneself beyond the keep of anyone at all.'' Far more than just a tale of a fascinating and rebellious woman, Daughter of the Air provides an accounting of issues that would give rise to the modern women's liberation movement as well as of the conflicts faced by the U.S. military over the presence of women in the ranks. By WILLY STERN _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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