Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II

Chapter 23: Fighting Spirit

23 Fighting Spirit T he best description of her two-year battle with cancer is given by Nancy herself, in a letter written June 16, 1976, to her old friend, Jack Ray, her flight instructor in her Vassar days. June 16, 1976 Dear Jack, Many thanks for the nostalgic photographs— could we possibly have been so young—ever? I’m sorry for the delay in thanking you, (they arrived early in April) but I have a very legitimate, if not very happy excuse. This old healthy Amazon came down with cancer in the spring of 1974. I joined the distinguished company of Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Rockefeller , and promptly decided to ignore the whole thing. However, the pesky thing popped up a year later in my neck, and after another operation I tried to ignore it again. Now it’s in my throat and inoperable except for the wretched cobalt treatments, which I’ve had too many times already. I’m just out of the hospital at this point, and feeling very chipper, but have to go back to the cobalt horror, starting tomorrow.1 266 Fighting Spirit 267 That’s how Nancy began her letter to Jack, with whom she had corresponded off and on for nearly forty years. Nancy had undergone a radical mastectomy in the spring of 1974. Her reference to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Rockefeller in the 1976 letter is because both had been diagnosed with the disease and had had highly publicized surgeries. It was the first time that breast cancer had been that widely talked about in the press and in public. It took Mrs. Ford (wife of then President Gerald R. Ford) and Mrs. Rockefeller (wife of then Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller) to bring the hush-hush topic out into the open. Once on the mend, in typical Nancy fashion, she set her sights on the next project: getting ready to take an anticipated trip up the West Coast to Alaska with Allie who by then had graduated from Pitzer and was working at the Alaska Methodist University in Anchorage. “When I moved to Alaska and saw how incredibly beautiful it was, I told Mum ‘you’ve got to see this,’” Allie says. “She and Dad came to visit me in September 1974. We met in Seattle and took the Alaska Marine Highway part of the way, then the state ferry system, and finally drove the rest of the way to Anchorage on the Al-Can Highway. Then we took the train to visit Mt. McKinley. Mum was fragile, but she did well and enjoyed the trip.” Nancy and her youngest daughter shared some very personal moments during that trip—moments Allie has never forgotten, but moments she never expected because of her mother’s attitudes toward outward displays of emotion and talking about personal things. “She asked if I wanted to see the scar. That was out of character . I think she needed validation—that it was OK. It made me feel that she trusted me. It was personal, and Mum wasn’t always personal. The mastectomy was a wake-up call.”2 Nancy had written to Marky that she was gaining strength following the surgery, was looking forward to the trip to Alaska, that she had just seen the doctor and he had cleared her for “anything she felt like doing.” Then she added that she regretted “my stubborn refusal to believe that I was not impervious to 268 Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II the evils of drink and the terrible times I put my long-suffering family through before I got the word.” In a series of letters to Marky during the summer and fall of 1974, as Nancy was dealing with the reality of the cancer and what had happened to her, she wrote about her beloved poodle, Sprite. She adored the little dog and took great comfort in her. “It’s a bit lonely here, I must confess, but Sprite is my salvation. She’s the most sympathetic, fun and altogether charming dog I’ve ever known…. Much as I adored Nugget and a few of the others in our long list of canines, they were all too big to cozy up on the sofa when they knew the old lady was low!” In her letter of August 16, 1974, Nancy did something else she rarely did—she spoke...