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Ch.10: The Pain of Change
- The University of Alabama Press
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10 The Pain of Change Paul Crews Jr. remembers when his mother caught the flying bug all over again. “We had this RV and we used to take it on weekend family trips all over southern California. One day, we were going by the Palm Springs airport and they were offering airplane rides. ‘Oh, please, Paul, can I go up?’ she asked my father. “When she got down, she went right back up again and this time she took Radford and me with her. My brother and I were in the back seat. My mother was in the front with the pilot. She told him she had flown in World War II and he let her fly the plane while we were up. That poor woman got hooked all over again.” Nancy turned forty on February 1, 1960. She was the mother of two healthy, active sons, nine and twelve years old, and a beautiful 18-month-old baby daughter. But a month after Jane was born, Nancy had suffered yet another devastating loss. Elinor, only forty-four, died from breast cancer. “When Elinor died, I went into a depression. It nearly killed me.” In spite of the six-year age difference, Nancy and Elinor had been close. Nancy had looked up to her sister and tried to emulate her—beginning with her desire to, like Elinor, be named “outstanding camper” at Camp Winnataska and then following her into Alpha Gamma Delta sorority. And Nancy had seen a lot of Elinor and her family when she was stationed in Wilmington during the war. The bond they had shared in getting through their brother’s wartime death had grown even stronger over the years. Now, suddenly, Nancy was forty years old, and two of her three siblings were gone. Then in November 1961, her father died. Nancy’s support system was seriously diminished. But as time healed the loss of both her sister and her father and her grief subsided, Nancy began to reexamine who she was 84 • Chapter 10 and what she wanted. Always goal oriented, she realized it was time to get on with the rest of her life. “My mother raised her daughters to be homemakers, but not housekeepers ,” Nancy said. “And keeping house did not appeal to me.” Though she was a typical 1950s stay-at-home mom when the boys were young, by 1960 that homemaker mantle no longer sat well on her shoulders. Inside, she was still a pursuit pilot. When she was a young woman, flying had been her ticket out of a comfortable but potentially stifling existence and Nancy had uncommon aspirations. “I wanted an opportunity and my parents gave me that. We were indulged , but my parents enjoyed our doing things. We were spoiled, but my mother also spanked the hell out of me. She was the disciplinarian. My mother was an idealist. If you achieved, you were rewarded. The standards were there. You behaved! “I knew as a child I wanted to be somebody. But I was a girl in the South. Getting married and keeping house did not appeal to me. Boys had adventures and made money and played games. They had fun. I liked being with boys and they liked me to be with them. It was grand!” But Nancy, too, wanted to have adventures, make money, play games, and have fun. “I had this inner drive, this inner motivation that came from the environment my parents created. When I got to college, I already knew I was a leader, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what I wanted to do until I started flying.” Then Nancy Love, Colonel Tunner, and the Air Transport Command gave her the opportunity to fly the fastest and the best airplanes the Army had to offer. Those memories may have dimmed a bit by 1960, but they were far from forgotten. In the 1950s and early 1960s, athletic, game-loving Nancy played a lot of golf—club championship quality—and enjoyed the active, outdoor, southern California lifestyle. But she found it wasn’t enough. Her temporarily dormant inner drive was returning. As much as she loved Paul and her children—and, as Jane emphasized, “my mother loved us fiercely”—Nancy knew she was cut out for something more than a domestic life and prowess on the golf course. When Nancy went after something, she did so with a vengeance. Competitive by nature, she sometimes let...