r

So there I was on a hot summer day, a beer in one hand and a plastic plate in the other, closing the distance between me and the potato salad as three of Moses’s male relatives discussed not golf, but recipes for barbecue sauce, and his niece Pauletta shifted the three-bean salad to make room for a Jell-o mold. These were my kind of people.
        One of the relatives, a burly guy who evidently appreciated his own culinary skills, was holding up thumb and index finger to indicate how much whiskey he added to his sauce, when his face changed. I couldn’t see his eyes beneath his sunglasses, but he frowned and his forehead creased. I heard a sound I couldn’t identify, and turned to follow his gaze past a circle of lawn chairs under the shade of an enormous maple tree. The sound was coming from somewhere past the new fence that marked the border between clipped lawn and a pasture where two brown cows grazed and flicked their tails at flies in the afternoon heat. What I heard was too loud to be an insect. And insects don’t cough.
        Other people had turned now, too. Two women in flower-print dresses had raised their hands to shield their eyes, and three little boys were running toward the fence, pointing up.
        Now I saw it—a small plane, buzzing and sputtering, its wings wobbling, coming in low over the woods at the far end of the pasture. It was trailing smoke. I heard shouts as someone brushed by me, and then everyone was rushing the fence. I dropped my plate and ran.
        The cows appeared to grasp the situation, and trotted toward the fence on the other side. The plane dipped alarmingly. Its landing wheels struck the ground with an impact I could feel through my sneakers. The onlookers gasped and cried out. It bounced two more times, its wheels digging furrows in the soft ground, and then it shuddered and stopped. Flames licked the nose. Dark smoke obscured the cockpit.
        For a heartbeat, no one moved or spoke. Then, the crowd cheered. We saw a moving figure climb out of the cockpit, but the fuselage and the smoke hid most of the pilot from view. The kids were swarming over the fence, while the adults surged through an open gate. I followed. The adults in the lead were warning the kids back, away from the plane, and the kids had stopped in their tracks, as if an invisible barrier prevented them from advancing. Kind of reminded me of that scene in The Thing when the scientists surround the flying saucer embedded in the ice.
        I heard sirens in the distance, so someone must have spotted the plane in trouble and called the fire department. We still couldn’t see the pilot, who remained on the other side of the plane. I saw one of Moses’s brothers giving the tail a wide berth as he rounded it to check on the pilot. The fire truck roared up the drive and into the field. Two firefighters worked on the hoses while a third, the driver, came toward us, waving us back. The water from the hoses hissed against the hot metal. In no time, the flames disappeared, leaving only an acrid column of smoke rising above the plane’s nose.
        We still couldn’t see the pilot clearly, although fire fighters, pilot, and several of the male Foggs were holding a pow-wow on the far side of the pasture. When it broke up, the firefighters headed back to their truck and the men headed our way. With them was the pilot, who was a woman.  She was fairly tall, slender and had an athlete’s stride. She wore khakis and a white shirt with dark crescents of perspiration under the short sleeves.
        “I am so sorry,” she was saying to the assembled crowd as she approached. She was shaking her head. Her hair was light brown beneath considerable gray, short and curly. She ran a hand through it. “I couldn’t be more sorry. I’ve interrupted your party. Really, I am so, so sorry.” She glanced back then, and added, almost under her breath, “Missed the cows, though.”

       

That was how I met Toots Magruder.

       

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

                          

I looked at the photograph again, and ran my finger across the line of laughing faces. I stopped on the fifth one. “You were a WASP,” I said. Sometimes stating the obvious can keep a conversation going, as we trained detectives know.
        “Yep,” she said, “that’s me—a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots. For God and country, and mostly because I was just crazy to fly. All the girls were like that. The lucky ones among us would have puttered our lives away in Piper Cubs, while the unlucky ones would have spent our lives dreaming, if it hadn’t been for the war and Jackie Cochran.”
        “I remember her,” Moses said. “She was kind of like Amelia Earhart, wasn’t she?”
        “She was famous enough to have some clout,” Toots said. She stood, picked up a photo album that was lying on an end table, and came toward us. “Scoot over,” she said to Moses, nudging his foot with hers. He scooted.
        She opened the album. “Of course, before the WASP there was the WAFS, the ferry service. Nancy Love started that. Then Cochran wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, and had a talk with General Arnold, and the WASP was born.”  She was flipping through the album. “Here,” she said, and pointed to a picture featuring an attractive light-haired woman in a military uniform. “That’s Cochran.”
        She leaned toward Moses and lowered her voice, “They couldn’t stand each other, Cochran and Love, but that’s another story.”
       She straightened. “Anyway, women from all over the country got to Sweetwater, Texas, any way they could, just for a chance to fly things they never dreamed they could fly.”

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. People sometimes wonder why, given women's work during wartime, it took so long for women to demand and achieve more equality in the workplace after the war. Eight Miles High suggests some answers to that question, but those of you who lived through that time may have others to offer.

2. The character of Esther Chang commemorates Dorothy Yang, the only non-white WASP. Yang had volunteered to fly for China before the WASP was created, and suffered some ill treatment because of her Asian features. On one occasion, after an emergency landing in a field, she was surrounded by hostile farmers who believed that they had captured a Japanese spy. Toots tells Cat and Moses that WASP founder Jacqueline Cochran could not afford to jeopardize the existence of the WASP by insisting on full racial integration. Was this the right decision at the time? How do you define what's right in this situation?

 

 

 

 

 

3. The case of Shorty Evers and her illegitimate daughter recalls a time when public morals, at least, were far stricter than they are today. The many hasty marriages made on the eve of deployment prepared the way for a record divorce rate after the war. Yet public morals have rarely coincided with people's private behavior, and wartime tends to have a liberalizing effect. Those of you who lived through that time period might describe its complexities to those who didn't. What choices did women like Shorty have?

4. The WASP like to emphasize how different they were, and often claim that their love of flying was the only trait they had in common. Yet, as Cat notes, other commonalities are apparent to outsiders. Clearly, no one could survive the rigorous Army flight curriculum without intelligence. And it took no little courage to return to the flight line on a day when a comrade had died in a crash (n. b. The WASP had a lower fatality rate, even with older equipment, than their male counterparts.). But a third quality evident in all these young women was determination. They could not have survived training, not to mention the actual, verbal, and written flak they took afterward, without it. In a time when their grandchildren are reputed to be coddled by “helicopter parents,” how can we train young people to develop the courage and determination they will need to succeed when they meet the kinds of challenges that their forebears encountered?