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20 Pneumonia, or Something Worse? The cough rattled deep in her chest. A chilly wave of apprehension washed over the scene, leaving me with a sense of dread. We sat facing each other in a booth in the bar of the Hope Hotel, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, nursing glasses of Killian’s Red. Nancy Batson Crews had just given the April 2000 evening lecture at the U.S. Air Force Museum. Her subject, of course, was the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron and her experiences as one of the Originals. This was the talk that had been rescheduled from January when the ice storm blew into Dayton and prevented her from flying in. April in southern Ohio brings not snow and ice but weather of a completely different variety. Earlier that evening, as we met a group from the museum for a pre-lecture dinner, we were under a tornado alert. As the sky darkened outside the restaurant, the TV above the bar announced that a funnel cloud had been spotted south of town and that the whole area was now under a tornado warning. Someone wondered aloud to Nancy if her impending arrival in our fair city was the precipitating factor of inclement weather— since it had now happened twice. We all had a good laugh. We did get a big rainstorm on the way to the museum for her talk and later wondered whether it, along with the local uncertainty over the tornado warning, had kept people away from Carney Auditorium that night. Still, it was a good crowd and they asked good questions. As usual, Nancy captivated her audience with tales of cross-country flights in swift pursuit airplanes; of catnapping on a hard bench in the Alert Room between “gear-up, gear-down” ferry flights from the Republic factory on Long Island to the nearby docks at Newark, New Jersey; and of flying a bunch of her fellow women ferry pilots back to the Republic factory in a twin-engine C-60 following a series of successful P-47 deliveries. The blonde Golden Girl of the Ferry Command never failed to hold her audience breathless. 158 • Chapter 20 Now, suddenly, it was she who was breathless. The date was April 20, 2000. I hadn’t seen her since the reunion the previous June, though we talked frequently on the phone. The cough was new. In February 2000, I had visited the WASP Collection at Texas Woman’s University in Denton to look at the WAFS materials there. In March, I had spent five days in Florida with Teresa James. Teresa’s memory of their WAFS days was excellent and she had the September 1942 to February 1943 portion of the journal she had kept during her early days in the ferrying squadron. Her hand-written words had been typed for her on onionskin paper by a succession of hotel stenographers as she moved around the country ferrying airplanes in those early days of the WAFS. The remainder of the journal had been destroyed in a flood in the family home in Pittsburgh. The two major pieces Teresa had recorded that were of particular interest to me were her version of the Great Falls to Jackson, Tennessee, trip (I had heard Nancy’s version already) and her first coast-to-coast trip for the WAFS ferrying an open-cockpit PT-19 from Hagerstown, Maryland, all the way to Hollywood for use in the movie Ladies Courageous. Loretta Young starred in that movie, which was based very loosely on the WAFS’ story.1 That night in Dayton, Nancy and I discussed the next step in my quest to get the WAFS’ book written. Nancy Love, of course, was the key to the WAFS. I needed to interview her three daughters. I needed to understand Nancy Love and her motivations. I needed to read anything she had written and anything that had been written about her—of which there was precious little. Nancy promised to get addresses and phone numbers for the three girls and get back to me. On Mothers’ Day—three weeks later—Nancy called me. Once again, that excitement—that passion—was evident in her voice. She had just spoken with Nancy Love’s middle daughter, Marky, and she would be willing to talk to me. I was to call her that very afternoon. Marky was a delight to talk to and, yes, she and her sister Allie, who lived next door, would...

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