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Document 1 Female WWII Pilots: The Original Fly Girls Margaret Phelan Taylor grew up on a farm in Iowa. She was 19, had just completed two years of college and was ready for adventure in 1943 when a Life magazine cover story on the female pilots caught her eye. Her
Document 1 Female WWII Pilots: The Original Fly Girls Margaret Phelan Taylor grew up on a farm in Iowa. She was 19, had just completed two years of college and was ready for adventure in 1943 when a Life magazine cover story on the female pilots caught her eye. Her brother was training to be a pilot with the Army. Why not her? She asked her father to lend her money for a pilot's license — $500, a huge amount 5 then. "I told him I had to do it," Taylor says. "And so he let me have the money. I don't think I ever did pay it back to him either." But there was a problem. She was half an inch shorter than the 5-foot-2-inch1 requirement. "I just stood on my tiptoes," she says. When she arrived at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, 10 Texas, where most of the WASPs2 were trained, "Well, there were a lot of other short ones just like me, and we laughed about how we got in." 1 5-foot-2-inch: 1.57 metre 2 WASPs: Women Airforce Service Pilots 18AN2TEMLR1 Page : 2/7 Short, tall, slim, wide, they all came in knowing how to fly. The military trained male pilots from scratch, but not the female civilian volunteers. "They didn't want to bring in a bunch of girls who didn't know how to fly an airplane," says 15 Katherine Sharp Landdeck, associate professor of history at Texas Woman's University, who's writing a book about the WASPs, tentatively called Against Prevailing Winds: The Women Airforce Service Pilots and American Society. "So you have women who are getting out of high school and taking every dime they had to learn how to fly so they could be a WASP." 20 Once when Taylor was ferrying an aircraft cross-country, somewhere between Arizona and California, she saw smoke in the cockpit. Taylor was trained to bail out if anything went wrong. "But the parachutes were way too big. They weren't fitted to us," she says. Her plane was smoking and Taylor faced a defining moment. "I thought, 'You know what? I'm not going until I see flame. When I see actual fire, then I'll 25 jump.'" Was she scared? "No. I was never scared. My husband used to say, 'It's pretty hard to scare you.'" From Susan Stamberg, www.npr.org, March 9, 2010 18AN2TEMLR1 Page : 3/7 Document 2 'Well, would ya