Tom Brokaw (18 page)

On one occasion a familiar young man insisted on dancing with Marion, all the while saying, “Betcha don't know who I am.” Of course she did. It was Mickey Rooney.

Other memories linger in a darker corner. Once at a dance the young women were asked how many could type. Marion volunteered. “We were taken to the camp hospital where all the beds and stretchers were filled with the wounded. They were being shipped to hospitals near their homes and we rolled typewriters from bed to bed, taking information off dog tags, talking to the men, placing phone calls for them. I have never forgotten the sight of so many broken bodies. I wondered how many of them had been on those trains going off to war when we ran up the railroad banks with our baskets of fruit and candy. That evening turned into twenty-four hours, and I think I remember every moment.”

A
LISON ELY
married midway through the war and left the shipyard to follow her husband, John W. Campbell, to training camps before he shipped out for the Pacific. It was the beginning of a life of learning to fend for herself, including getting to the hospital on her own when their baby was due, with no other family around.

W
HEN SCOTTIE'S HUSBAND
, Dale, was released from the hospital, they moved to Schenectady, New York, where he had a job with General Electric. Before long they decided they wanted to return to the Midwest. They moved to Carthage, Missouri, a small, quiet town, and he went to work for the Smith Brothers company, the famous cough drop concern.

It was a pleasant, prosperous life. They had two children: a girl, Cynthia, and a son, Randy. Dale was promoted to vice president. The future looked bright, but at the age of forty-five, Scottie's carefully ordered world came apart. Dale contracted melanoma and died. Scottie faced a world not very friendly to single women.

She had difficulty obtaining credit after Dale died simply because she was a widow. Sears gave her a hard time. So did a pharmacy where she tried to open a charge account. She was stunned and angry. She learned not to tell businesses of her marital status. “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. You can give up or decide to do something with your life. I had a degree in business administration but I knew I would never rise higher than secretary, so I thought, Where can a woman make the most money?”

This was 1968. Job opportunities for women had yet to catch up with the rising tide of feminism. Like many women of her generation, Scottie is strong and self-reliant but a little reluctant to be closely identified with the women's movement. She speaks for many in her age group when she says, “I'm not a radical person because I believe that has done more to turn people off.” At the same time she's quick to add, “But I've always believed in equal access to jobs.” Still, she was practical enough to realize that her choices were limited to what were considered to be women's jobs in a community the size of Carthage.

So Scottie went the traditional route and qualified for a teacher's certificate. Besides, it was where she could bring to life that junior high motto from so long ago, “Enter to learn, go forth to serve.”

She became a civics teacher at a high school in nearby Neosho. She set out to bring to the children of the sixties and seventies the values that marked her generation. Patriotism. Respect for the presidency. Love of country. She felt a special obligation to tell them about World War II, the war of their parents. It was the beginning of the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies, but at Neosho High she could still get the attention of the kids by staging mock political conventions. When she taught a section on the Roaring Twenties she came to class dressed as a flapper. Now, ruefully, she doubts she could have the same success.

It was hard enough, she says, to talk to the young people during Watergate. At first she believed in President Nixon and said so. When she realized he was lying, however, she shared her change of heart with her students. “It was hard, because I was trying to teach respect for the presidency.” As for President Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Scottie says, “Watergate was hard enough, but what do you tell the students today?

“I don't think my teaching would be the same now,” she says. “I learned about patriotism through my school and family and I don't think you can get those values across in schools now. It's a little square to say you're patriotic. I would like to think that if the United States were attacked we'd band together, but I'm not sure.” If there's a common lament of this generation, that is it: where is the old-fashioned patriotism that got them through so much heartache and sacrifice?

M
ARION RIVERS, WHO
married Karl Nittel after the war, wonders about that when she visits cemeteries to decorate graves on Memorial Day. “They never found my husband's brother, who was lost at sea. For many years I kept his gold naval wings in my jewelry box. Recently I gave them to his daughter, who was just two months old when he died. She never knew him. The war never ends; there are so many memories.” Marion's husband keeps his World War II Army uniform hanging neatly in his closet wherever they live, a mute reminder of a time when he answered the call to duty.

Marion and Karl stayed in the Attleboro area, raising a son and a daughter. In 1968 she went back to work and developed a successful career as a writer for a technical company, the first woman in that firm to head a department. Nonetheless, she worries that too many women these days are more interested in work than they are in their family, simply because they want to have more things. As a child of the Depression, Marion doesn't remember that being a bad time because “all the neighbors got together to help each other. At Christmas they would go into the basements of their homes to make the gifts. No one has time for families anymore.”

Marion's connection to the war years was brought painfully home when her daughter died of cancer at the age of forty-three. She then knew the full force of losing a child, and she thought of all those parents whose sons didn't return from the war. She was middle-aged when her daughter died, and it was a difficult flashback to the time that was at once so exciting and so difficult.

A
LISON CAMPBELL
had a similar midlife challenge. Her husband left her when she was fifty-five. She had not worked since the war. “That experience made me fairly tough. I took unfamiliar steps then, and I could do it again.” She was also reading Betty Friedan's seminal book on the place of modern women,
The Feminine Mys
tique.
It spoke directly to her own conflicted life. Here she was, a highly educated woman, and yet when she had to go back into the workplace she took secretarial classes because she was so stuck in the strictures of her generation.

She got a secretarial job, but she moved up steadily before retiring as a technical writer and editor for IBM. Now she volunteers at a women's center, where they often refer to her a new generation of women who suddenly find themselves alone. Alison shares her stories of the war years, the husband abroad, the midlife divorce, and the lessons she learned.

A
FTER FIVE YEARS
as a teacher, Scottie Lingelbach studied for a real estate license and started still another career. “The war made me self-reliant,” she says. “I went to Washington not knowing anyone. My parents helped shape me. My father was very stern. He said, ‘I'll educate you but then you're on your own.' When he gave me money to pay my way to officer's training, you can bet I had to pay it back.”

Scottie stayed in real estate for eleven years, until the downturn in the eighties, but then she grew restless again and decided it was time to return to her origins. She moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where she had begun her adventurous life as a KU freshman in 1940. When she returned, the world had changed, but Scottie's values had not.

One of her daughters is divorced, a fact of modern life Scottie still finds unsettling. “Never did I realize it would happen in my family. Divorce was so uncommon.” Not just uncommon, a bit of a scandal for Scottie's generation. That's not all that troubles her.

“What concerns me most about the future is the breakdown of the family. We were willing to make sacrifices so that I could stay home with the children. Now couples both work so they can be more affluent. We would rather delay gratification to ensure that our children had a nice home environment.”

A
LISON CAMPBELL SHARES
similar sentiments. “During the war . . . we learned to deal with deprivations—rationing, being away from our husbands and families. I look at my daughter's generation and their big influence was television—and that's created a tremendous demand for material goods. My brother and I used to play and build things but my grandchildren don't build things, they only buy them!”

And there are other memories of that time when her life took a sharp turn from the conventions of her upbringing. She has an indelible photograph in her mind “of getting to the shipyard at seven
A.M
., when it was still dark in the west, and the stars would be out and there would be these giant cranes, which looked like dinosaurs against the sky, and sparks flying from the big machines.” It was a daily reminder that her world of Oregon affluence and California graduate school was forever altered.

These days, Scottie keeps busy as a docent at the Spencer Museum on the KU campus and as a student at the Citizen Police Academy three nights a week. She's also started discussing her experiences as a WAVE with her grandchildren and with students at elementary and middle schools in the Lawrence area—about what America was like during World War II.

And when Scottie comes home at night after a trip to one of those schools, or after a meeting of one of the committees she serves on at KU, or after a round of golf—she now rides nine holes and walks nine—she can, at the age of seventy-five, look back on a life of service and self-reliance, a life of strong values and of an unapologetic love of country.

When she goes into her modest kitchen in Lawrence, Scottie is reminded of that long-ago time when she began her life of service. When she was leaving the WAVES in 1945, the staff at the Joint Chiefs of Staff allowed her to take from the metallic war maps a handful of the tiny magnetic airplanes used to mark battles around the world. Then, they were symbols of terrible battles in distant places, of the powerful struggle to preserve freedom. Now, they keep in place on her refrigerator Scottie's reminders of what's coming up next in her long, rich life.

MARGARET RAY RINGENBERG

“My father said, ‘I didn't get to serve and I don't have any
boys, so I guess you'll have to do it.' ”

A
LL OF
the military and political leaders of World War II were white males, sharing the attendant attitudes characteristic of their gender at the time. A woman's place was not in the military. A manpower shortage, however, and some clever visionary women forced them to correct their myopia.

A famous woman pilot of the era, Jacqueline Cochran, persuaded the legendary Army Air Corps general Henry “Hap” Arnold that if women were permitted to handle the domestic flying duties, he could send more male pilots into combat overseas. A few women were already working as military ferry pilots, shuttling planes from base to base or from factory to training site. General Arnold decided to expand the operation, so he authorized the formation of the WASPs, the Women's Air Force Service Pilots.

More than twenty-five thousand women applied, and the requirements were tough: candidates had to have a pilot's license and a minimum of two hundred hours in the cockpit. They had to pass rigorous physicals and submit to a series of interviews. In the end, only a thousand were assigned to Army Air Force bases around the country. They received their orders through the military chain of command but technically they were civilians, so when the war ended they received no veterans' benefits, even though thirty-eight of them died in the line of duty.

Margaret Ray, wartime portrait

Margaret Ray of Hoagland, Indiana, was an original WASP. She was raised on a farm but at the age of seven she had an experience that changed her life. “We were going for a ride south of Fort Wayne when we saw a small plane landing in a field. My dad was the curious type so we approached the pilot—and he offered us a ride. My mother said, ‘No!' She was sure we were going to die but when we all crawled in, she did too. I remember the instruments on the panel. I was fascinated. I decided I had to fly but I thought I couldn't be a pilot because I was a girl, so I decided to become a stewardess.”

When she graduated from high school, Maggie, as she was called, had a change of heart about being a stewardess because she didn't want to go through nurse's training, which was required for flight attendants. She went back to her original goal: to fly.

In 1940 she started taking lessons at the local airfield and earned her license by the time she was twenty-one, just in time for the Army Air Force to recruit her for the WASPs. “I was flabbergasted,” she remembers. “What an opportunity. My father said, ‘I didn't get to serve and I don't have any boys, so I guess you'll have to do it.' ”

After six months of rigorous training in a wide variety of military aircraft in Sweetwater, Texas, Maggie was sent to Wilmington, Delaware, the 2nd Ferrying Division, assigned to testing and transporting the planes used to train young men for combat flying.

“I was a copilot on the bigger planes because I was only five foot five and you had to be five six to be a pilot on those. It was very exciting and very demanding. We worked seven days a week, sunup to sundown, but only when the weather was good because some of the planes didn't have radios yet. We'd fly a plane to Kansas, for example, turn right around and come back for a few hours of sleep before heading out again.”

She piloted the PT-19, a single-engine, open cockpit training plane; the AT-6, an advanced training plane; and the C-45, a small passenger and light cargo plane; she copiloted the B-24 and the four-engine C-54. Many of the planes she flew were new designs, right off the assembly line. At first the male pilots didn't know what to think about this invasion of their territory.

Somehow word got around that these WASPs were a bunch of rich women who were taking the safer domestic flying jobs, forcing more men into the line of fire overseas. The latter half of the rumor was true, but these were no privileged princesses of the air. They were crack pilots and, at eighteen hundred dollars a year, they were underpaid as well as underappreciated.

Their missions were often dangerous. Some of the WASPs piloted radio-controlled low-target planes. They sat in the cockpit while a mother ship guided the target plane through a series of low-level maneuvers by radio control. If the radio signals failed, they were there to take the controls. Other WASPs towed practice targets for antiaircraft batteries and airborne gunners to shoot at, and more than once a WASP pilot returned to the base with more bullet holes in her plane than in the target.

Maggie had a harrowing experience ferrying a worn-out plane to the boneyard, a remote airfield where aircraft with too many hours on them were parked. She lost an engine and radioed her superiors with the information. She was told to get out, to parachute to safety. Maggie knew getting out of that cockpit was a difficult proposition, and besides she was confident she could nurse the plane down. It was a tense but successful landing. Everyone was full of praise except the commanding officer who had ordered her to jump. He chewed her out for not following his orders.

When a WASP died in the line of duty, there were no military honors, even though they were performing vital and dangerous military assignments. As civilians they did have the option of resigning, but few did. In fact more than nine hundred were still flying when the Army decided in December 1944 that it no longer needed their services. The combat ranks were full and the manufacturing of new military aircraft was dropping off. The WASPs were told to go home.

Maggie couldn't believe what was happening to her. “Here I was, this farm girl with this new life, and it was so exciting. And now I'm going home knowing all of my girlfriends have married or moved away. During the war I had more in common with the guys than with the girls who were getting their hope chests ready.”

She was determined to keep flying. She decided to get her flight instructor's rating. “I thought, ‘I have all this military experience. I'll start teaching.' Well, I got my instructor's license, but who wanted to take flying lessons from a girl? No one!” Instead she took a desk job at the local airfield, worked on the sidelines directing and fueling planes, and waited for her chance.

Margaret Ray and other WASPs

Margaret Ray

“If a flight instructor didn't show up I'd give the lesson. Once I got them in my plane I usually kept them. My method was different than the men. In the early days it was a rough business. Men used a lot of swear words and intimidated the students. My idea was to tell you what to do and let you do the best you can. It's sort of a mother's instinct.”

It was also very successful. Marvin Berger was also a pilot by the time he signed up with Maggie for instrument training. “She lets you fly the plane,” he says, “and when you think you're doing pretty well she'll say simply, ‘What are you doing?' That's a wakeup call. She never took the wheel from me but she never let me get in trouble.”

Maggie did have one final World War II experience before going full throttle into her civilian flying and teaching life. She was at her desk job in August 1945 when the local radio station called to say it appeared that Japan was about to surrender. The local newspaper was on strike and people weren't near their radios during the day, so the enterprising station had an idea: a news drop, so to speak. It hurriedly printed up thousands of leaflets with the news of the impending surrender and hired Margaret to drop them over Fort Wayne. “I got to fly right over Main Street,” she says. “Over the factories. I was flying real low—at only about a hundred feet, almost below the tops of some of the buildings.” It must have been some sight in that small Indiana community. A small plane piloted by a woman at treetop level, papering the town with the news that the war was over.

That memorable flight was just the beginning of another life and another aviation career for Maggie. The following year, even though she hadn't paid much attention to her hope chest, she was married to a local banker, Morris Ringenberg, a veteran of the combat Army Corps of Engineers in World War II. They settled into a comfortable life in Grabill, a small town in the middle of Amish country just north of Fort Wayne. They raised a daughter and a son. They also had a compact: whenever he wanted to go golfing, she didn't complain. Whenever she wanted to go flying, he didn't complain. She also changed from Maggie to Margaret, explaining, “I thought it was more dignified for a banker's wife”—one of her few concessions to convention.

In the mid-fifties she discovered a new dimension to her flying: the Powder Puff Derby, a cross-country air race for women pilots. For the next twenty years she was a competitor in the Derby, later named the Classic Air Race. She won it in 1988 and finished second six times. That was a warm-up for her big race.

In 1994 Margaret Ringenberg, the former farm girl who fell in love with flying at the age of seven and learned in the WASPs that she could hold her own against the best of the best, decided to compete in a race around the world. Twenty-four days in a small, twin-engine plane, a Cessna 340, more than a hundred hours in the air. She was seventy-two years old at the time, the oldest entrant.

Her daughter, Marsha, had grown up with her mother in the cockpit. “I just accepted it as normal. When I flew with her I read comic books in the back. But later, when people began making a fuss over her, I thought, ‘Maybe this is a big deal.' ” Then Marsha saw the plane her mother would pilot around the world. “My heart just dropped. I thought, how could she go around the globe in such a tiny plane?”

Margaret remembers the consternation among her family members, including her ten-year-old granddaughter's getting everyone in her Sunday-school class to pray for her. She wasn't worried. By then she had more than forty thousand hours in a cockpit. “A lot of sitting” is her understated way of describing that estimable record. The 'round-the-world race went off without a hitch. She didn't win, but then she wasn't in it for the trophy. She has a roomful of those already, testimony to her place as one of the most skilled and experienced small-plane pilots in the world today.

When she flies out of the Fort Wayne airport, the flight controllers take an almost reverential tone when speaking with her. “Notice the difference?” she asks. “I think they talk different to a woman pilot.” She's at the controls of her single-engine Cherokee and we're going for a short ride over the prosperous Indiana countryside. For my part, I think they use a different tone of voice for her too. I notice they call her “Mrs. Ringenberg.”

In the cockpit, Margaret settles her matronly figure comfortably into the small seat and her eyes run easily over the control panel. This is where she belongs. She crooks one hand behind the yoke, or steering wheel, of the small plane and guides it up to twenty-five hundred feet, then lets me take over for a short lesson in the Margaret Ringenberg school of flying. I try to keep the plane headed in a straight line and at a level altitude as we look down on the large, new homes and golf courses that have replaced the farmland where her father struggled to make a living while working in the nearby GE factory. Her instructions are specific but parenthetical: “Yes, I never thought I'd see so many houses here—you're drifting left a bit, try to get back to a zero reading; use a light touch. Good. Oh, look, there's Smith Field, where I soloed more than fifty years ago.” Actually, it was almost sixty years ago, but as she looks down at the small airstrip she says she can almost see herself taking off on that memorable day that changed her life.