As a result, all the extraordinary women she trained with have last names starting with W.
• Vyvian Williams “lived in Charleston, S.C., and she had a job at the Navy Yard,” Brookings said. “When they found out she wanted to do (the WASP program), they helped her all they could. She was privy to a lot of things that were going on at the field.”
• To Brookings, who grew up in Pennsylvania and fell in love with the South when she moved there at age 17, Ellen Wemberly “was a true Southern lady. Her soft voice and her way of speaking” were part of it, as was “her way of looking at situations. We all liked her so much.”
• Margaret “Pinky” Weiss “could breeze an airplane in so you didn’t even know you’d landed,” Brookings said. But things weren’t so smooth in her life off base.
Before training, “she had lost everybody in her family except her father, Little Max. Shortly after graduation, “Pinky lost Little Max, and she was all alone in the world.”
Had it not been for an aunt leaving her a house, “she told me she would have been a bag lady.”
• Katherine “Kay” Wren was “one girl that I really mourned over” when she left the program, Brookings said. “She was from Washington State, and she had learned to fly a plane with pontoons. She was having trouble ground-looping.”
Ground-looping is when a pilot touches a wing on the ground during landing, “and it does quite a bit of damage,” Brookings said.
On her last flight in training, “We all went out there and were leaning on the fence,” Brookings said. When the wing touched down, that was it.
Washed out of the WASPs, she still found a way to serve. “She joined the Red Cross and went overseas,” Brookings said.
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