The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Woman, 92, among WASPS getting medal today in D.C.

Frances Winters Brookings values her service experience.

Bishops: New birth control rule ‘a first step’
2/11/12
Police headlines for Feb. 11
2/11/12
Local Focus: Clark County for Feb. 11
2/11/12
Local Focus: Champaign County for Feb. 11
2/11/12
Cold, wind to keep roads slick today
2/11/12
> More headlines

By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer Updated 2:30 AM Wednesday, March 10, 2010

SPRINGFIELD — This summer will mark 66 years since Frances Winters Brookings completed her Women Airforce Service Pilots training at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas.

Today, March 10, she will be one of about 300 living WASPs to receive a Congressional Gold Medal to honor her service. About 800 will be honored posthumously.

The 92-year-old Brookings will have plenty of company at the ceremonies in the nation’s capital.

“Fifteen members of my family are coming from far and wide,” said Brookings, who relocated to Springfield from Shreveport, La., two years ago to be closer to son Jeff, who teaches psychology at Wittenberg University.

She hopes also today to see friends she shared living quarters with in the pilot training program: Ellen Wemberly, Margaret “Pinky” Weiss and Eileen Wright Ferguson.

The first minted medal for WASPs will be of gold and will go to the Smithsonian Institution.

“Ours are going to be bronze,” Brookings said.

“With the state our country is in right now,” she added, “I’m just amazed that they’re willing to do this at all.”

In a News-Sun story published Aug. 31, 2009, Brookings said it wasn’t so much fun as it was satisfying to complete the WASP training program.

“It was a challenge every day,” she said.

She also saw it as a privilege to be part of the training with so many other enthusiastic young women. Twenty-five-thousand hopefuls applied for the program that accepted just more than 1,100.

“Very few of us could have afforded that kind of aeronautical training,” Brookings said.

A licensed pilot when she entered the program, she said she was taught about flying all over again, enduring both the “Vibrating Vultee” trainer that “about shook your teeth out” in a spin and the high anxiety of e-rides (e for elimination) that came her way.

“You lived in trepidation they were going to send you home,” she said.

Because she took her training late in the war, Brookings never carried out the mission of WASPs, which was to fly military airplanes to locations they were needed around the country.

When the program wound down late in 1944, Brookings took early leave, was married nine days later and went on to raise four children.

Although she never flew again, Brookings considers completing her WASP training one of the signature accomplishments and privileges of her life.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.

Share this article