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4 The WAFS “I was sitting there on the cot in my room in BOQ 14 wondering what to do next, when this tall brunette stuck her head in the door and introduced herself. “‘I’m Cornelia Fort from Nashville,’ she said. Her voice was deep but with a distinct Southern drawl. ‘Would you like to come down to my room and have a cocktail, then go over to the Officers’ Club for dinner?’ “Well, I was so delighted to hear another Southern accent, I said ‘yes,’ even though we didn’t have cocktails in our home in Birmingham. Ladies in Birmingham didn’t drink cocktails.” Cornelia’s room was down the hall from Nancy’s on the second floor of the women’s barracks. “I was fascinated by the array of liquor bottles lined up on the dresser. I felt quite sophisticated. When she asked me what I wanted, I said ‘bourbon’ like I had been drinking it for years.” During the first month of the WAFS’ existence, while undergoing their Army indoctrination before they began ferrying, the earliest arrivals had established a ritual. Nancy Love, Betty Gillies, Pat Rhonie, Cornelia Fort, Helen Mary Clark, and Catherine Slocum gathered at 4:30 p.m. in Nancy’s or Betty’s room for cocktails. Cocktail hour was a time-honored tradition in the homes of these socially prominent women. Rum and Coke, also known as a Cuba Libra, was the odds-on favorite that year. All but Cornelia were married and older, but Cornelia, at twenty-three, carried an elegant maturity about her, despite her youth. Pat was divorced, and Betty, Helen Mary, and Catherine had left children at home with their draft-exempt husbands and a grandmother or housekeeper. The next group of early arrivals—Teresa James, Del Scharr, and Esther Nelson (all married) and Barbara Poole—gravitated together and, as the even younger girls began to join the squadron, they, too, banded together. Nancy Love, noting Nancy Batson’s Southern birthright and wishing to 30 • Chapter 4 make the young woman feel at ease, had asked her other Southern-born squadron member, Cornelia Fort, to look after her, to help her get introduced and made to feel one of them. Cornelia’s friendliness made an impression on Nancy. “She reached out to me—a newcomer, a stranger.” More WAFS wandered into Cornelia’s room and Nancy was introduced to them. They walked over to the Officers’ Club together for dinner. Now she saw that there were others her age. The women seemed at ease with themselves and at ease with each other. Nancy couldn’t put her finger on why, but though they were all professional women pilots with the same patriotic commitment, hired to do the same job, each was distinctly different from the next. That was when Nancy knew she had just entered a new and very different phase of her life. Though the group had all the earmarks of a sisterhood—a sorority of sorts—this was very different from the University of Alabama.1 The following morning, “they gave me one of those flight suits to put on, a helmet, goggles, and a parachute. Lieutenant Starbuck was my check pilot. We went out to a PT-19 (the single-engine Fairchild primary trainer—that’s what PT stands for) and I got in the back seat and he got in the front seat. He told me what he wanted me to do. The Civilian Pilot Training Program instructors had taught me very well. I was ready.” Nancy taxied out, took off, and made climbing turns up to three thousand feet. After checking to see that no one was beneath her, “I closed the throttle, pulled the stick back real slow, held it all the way back, kicked the rudder, went into a spin, came out in two. I had learned how to do this. As you went around you counted a half, one, a half, two—you got out of the spin, came on out, gave it the throttle, came back up.” She did one to the right and one to the left. “Then I did a chandelle. Close the throttle a little bit, stick the nose down to gain some airspeed. Then you put it into what you call a climbing turn. Pull on back. And what you do is when you get about halfway around you start what is a reverse turn. It’s an advanced maneuver . They learned this in World...

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