To Live and Die a WASP pilot - Frances Fortune Grimes

WASP Frances Fortune Grimes  Class 43-W-3

A champion amateur tennis player before she flew.

Died shortly after take-off from Otis Field, Massachusetts in an A-24 attack bomber.

(7 October 1914 - 27 March 1944)

 

Frances Fortune Grimes had begun her training at Houston’s Municipal Airport in January 1943, and graduated at Sweetwater with “The Lost Platoon,” class 43-W-3.

Frances competed in and won many amateur tennis tournaments in the 1930s and early 1940s, including the Maryland and West Virginia championships. She even ranked number one for a while in the Middle Atlantic Lawn Tennis Association. She attended West Virginia University in Morgantown and then the University of Pittsburgh, where she graduated in 1937 with a Bachelors Degree in business administration. She learned to fly in Morgantown as part of the university’s Civilian Pilot Training program

On Monday, March 27, Frances Grimes was taking off from Otis Field in a Douglas A-24 Banshee on another routine target-towing mission. She was still climbing when her engine stalled and the assault bomber spiraled into the ground. Friends believed her carburetor had iced up and caused the crash, but no one was ever sure. “We hadn’t seen her since Christmas,” her sister, Ellen, later told a reporter. “Frances was killed the day before she was to come home to Richmond. That was a tragic weekend.” Three days after her crash, funeral services for the 29-year-old aviator were held at precisely 4:30 in the afternoon, at both Otis Field and at the All Saints Episcopal Church in Richmond.

( An excerpt from: )

 

Part Two: Train robbery goes to court

Train robbery goes to court

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune Monday, March 25th 2019

Last week’s column was about the daring night holdup of a Southern Pacific train north of Riddle, July 1, 1895, and the case came to trial six months later.

Of the three men charged for robbing the train and stealing the U.S. Mail, John Case was believed to be the masked man who, with six-gun in hand, brazenly walked the cars of the train, robbing passengers and the train crew, while partners James and Albert Pool lit up the sky with a pyrotechnic display outside the train; their dynamite blasts and gunshots meant to terrorize and intimidate passengers.

Prior to the robbery, Case had just been released after serving two years in the state penitentiary for

burglary. He had served a previous term for armed robbery. James Pool, Case’s cousin, had been in the penitentiary three times, convicted of horse stealing, extortion and manslaughter. Albert Pool served two years for theft.

On the bench in the Portland courthouse was U.S. District Court Judge Charles Bellinger, who took an active part in the proceedings, at one point reprimanding the government prosecutor for mentioning the defendants’ previous convictions in front of the jury.

“The government,” Bellinger said as he glared at the prosecutor, “ought to be cautious to see not only that justice is done, but that no error is made!”

By the second day of the trial, Bellinger was already annoyed with both attorneys.

“Judge Bellinger infused a little ginger into the cross examinations,” wrote an Oregonian reporter, “by commenting on the lawyers’ propensity to drag and repeat themselves and go over and over the same testimony until it became tiresome.”

Conflicting testimony from a number of witnesses and physical evidence that was questionable left the outcome questionable. When the jury quickly returned with a guilty verdict for Case and James Pool and acquittal for Albert Pool, Bellinger expressed his concern.

“I am frank to say that I am not entirely satisfied with the verdict.”

Bellinger granted the defense an appeal hearing, and at the end of June 1896 issued a 35-page decision, setting aside the guilty verdicts and immediately releasing Case and Pool from prison.

Bellinger said the identification of Case by eyewitnesses “does not tend to similarity, but rather in the opposite direction.”

Among other discrepancies listed by Bellinger were horse and boot tracks, allegedly found at a camp believed occupied by the train robbers before the robbery. Discovered July 2, the tracks were not compared until July 8 — four days after a heavy rain.

“There is nothing to sustain the guilty verdict,” he wrote. “It is against the evidence and must be set aside, and it is so ordered.”

Judge Bellinger may have believed Case and Pool were guilty, but he was following the law. He said he believed they were convicted only because of their past criminal history and because evidence was gathered hastily in pursuit of the $3,000 reward offered by Southern Pacific Railroad.

The robbery was never solved and never again went to trial.

Writer Bill Miller is the author of “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com or WilliamMMiller.com.

Cornelia Fort - Second Womens Airforce Service Pilot to Die on Duty During WWII-

Pilot Cornelia Clark Fort

 WASP (Womens Airforce Service Pilot)

WAFS (Womens Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron)

Second woman to join Nancy Love's WAFS.

Second of  the 38  WASP pilots to die during WWII.

Her BT-13 collides near Merkel, TX.

21 March 1943

(5 February 1919 – 21 March 1943)

(excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP 

 

At dawn on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Cornelia left her apartment across from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and drove to John Rodgers Field for another day of takeoff and landing practice with one of her students. Just after 6:30, up in the air in one of the company’s yellow Interstate Cadets, with her student at the controls and flying in for another touch and go landing, Cornelia looked casually around. “I saw a plane coming closer,” she said. “It was in violation of the air traffic rules.” She waited for the plane to give ground as it was required to do, but when it didn’t, “I jerked the controls away from my student and jammed the throttle wide open to pull above the oncoming plane,” she said. “He passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently and I looked down to see what kind of plane it was.” With a large red sun along its fuselage and on its wings there was no doubt—Japanese! She

could see smoke rising from the harbor and Cornelia tried to convince herself it was only an exercise—a simple drill. “Then I looked way up and saw the formations of silver bombers riding in,” she said. “Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down. My eyes followed it down, down, and even with knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor.”

 Now it was a dash for the relative safety of the ground. A shadow passed over and a burst of bullets spattered around and into her plane’s body. “Suddenly,” she said, “that little wedge of sky above Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor was the busiest, fullest piece of sky I ever saw.” Her student was mystified, and when Cornelia landed, still running across the field toward the hangar with machine gun fire strafing the ground in front of her, the oblivious student asked her when he would ever be able to solo. Her response was curt and to the point. “Not today, brother. NOT TODAY!” 

History Snoopin': A Jesse James trick on the old SP

A Jesse James trick on the old SP

BY  Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune 

Finally free of the twists and turns of the Cow Creek Canyon, just five miles south of Riddle Station, the Southern Pacific “Overland” was running full throttle with straight track ahead.

At 10:10 p.m., July 1, 1895, the moon was hidden behind canyon walls, its soft light no match for the headlight beam on the northbound train flickering across the steel rails.

There was a thud, a flash and a loud explosion. Engineer Jasper Waite reached for the airbrakes, but too late. Two more

Train Robbery

blasts rocked the train. Its wheels screeched to a stop. Its front truck twisted and scraping along the rails.

When Waite tried to leave the cab, there was a pistol pointed at his nose. The bandit wore a white flour sack over his head, with holes cut out for eyes, nose and mouth. Ordered to keep their hands stretched above their heads, Waite and fireman Everett Gray jumped down.

“I saw three men,” Waite later testified. “He marched us on around to the express car and told messenger Donahue to throw up his hands. I helped the robber up into the car as he told me to do.”

In the smoking car, a foolishly curious young passenger put his head out the window and instantly felt the barrel of a pistol pressed against his forehead. In the words of a newspaper report, the young man heard “the magic words:”

“You d—d son of a b—, keep your head inside!”

Two of the gang walked beside the train, occasionally firing their pistols and tossing lit dynamite sticks into nearby fields.

The first masked man pushed the captured engineer and fireman through the express and mail cars, grabbing whatever he found valuable.

Then, accompanied by the hostage train crew, the bandit made a slow walk through the passenger and sleeper cars, relieving trembling passengers of their valuables.

“The very audacity of the deed by which several hundred men were temporarily deprived of their manhood and their

valuables,” wrote an Oregonian reporter, “stamped the perpetrator as a cool, nervy rascal; a real, live, dime-novel hero, who could give pointers to Jesse James.”

A headline in the Salem Capital Journal called this “Daring Robbery” a “Jesse James Trick.”

An hour after it began, the robbery was over. The first bandit warned Waite not to move the train for another hour and, before he left, he shot out the locomotive’s headlight.

With a damaged front truck on the engine, it took nearly three hours to travel the five miles to Riddle. There the crew turned the locomotive around and backed the entire 28 miles to Roseburg, where the only replacement locomotive was available.

The Southern Pacific Company offered a $3,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the robbers, a reward that inspired detective George Quinn to begin a search for evidence that within three days led to the arrests of Albert and James Pool and their cousin, John Case.

The robbers were handcuffed and taken to Portland for a trial that made headlines across the country.

Next week, the trial — with overwhelming evidence of guilt presented to a jury — yet, also evidence that may be suspect, tainted and very worrisome to a highly respected Oregon judge.

Writer Bill Miller is the author of “History Snoopin’,”a collection of his previous history columns and stories. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com or WilliamMMiller.com.

http://mailtribune.com/lifestyle/a-jesse-james-trick-on-the-old-sp