WASP Pilot Bonnie Jean Welz of Class 43-W-6

WASP Bonnie Jean Alloway Welz  of Class 43-W-6

(22 June 1918 – 29 June 1944)

 

WASP Bonnie Jean Alloway Welz

(Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

The fifth WASP to lose her life in June was Bonnie Jean Welz (43-W-6), who crashed into the Texas dust just a week after celebrating her 26^th birthday. Born June 22, 1918, in Bridgeport, Washington, redheaded Bonnie was the fourth child and fourth daughter of Lee and Grace Alloway. When she was 4 years old, her father died, and by the time she graduated from high school, her mother had already remarried twice and was about to remarry again.

Bonnie’s first assignment was Dodge City Army Airfield in Kansas, where she received transition training in the B-26 Marauder, a medium, two-engine bomber. It was 75 hours of flying instruction, 30 as a copilot and 45 hours as first pilot. In addition to ground school and Link training, the flying included nine hours at night, 20 hours on instruments, and 10 hours on navigational flights. The program had two main purposes—teaching the women to fly heavier aircraft, especially for tow target flying, and developing a program to show fearful male pilots that the B-26, known as the “Flying Coffin,” was safe.

Just past 11 in the morning, June 29, 1944, Bonnie took off in a BT-13 trainer on a “routine administrative cross-country flight” across the West Texas oilfields, bound for Laredo, Texas. Her passenger was Major Robert Stringfellow.

After about an hour in the air and 40 miles short of Laredo, something happened—and no one was really ever sure what it was. Stringfellow, sitting in the rear cockpit with his canopy open, said they were flying at about 1500 feet when he noticed Bonnie had entered a slow turn to the left and had begun a slow descent. Her cockpit canopy was closed. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary and Stringfellow thought she was probably lining up for a normal landing, but there was no conversation between them. On the ground, Lloyd Staggs saw the plane coming down in a wide circle, and to him, it sounded like the throttle was wide open. The

WASP Bonnie Jean Alloway Welz

plane disappeared behind some trees about a mile away and exploded in a fireball. Staggs raced his truck to the scene and found the BT-13 engulfed in flames and lying on its back. About 50 yards away, a seriously injured and confused passenger was pointing at the wreck and mumbling something about “her” and “she.” Trapped inside the flaming cockpit, it was impossible to rescue Bonnie.

RIP 

 

Dick Posey: Riley of the Rogue

Riley of the Rogue

---

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, June 24th 2019

Professor Richard Campbell was an Indiana native who, by 1890, was principal of the Aberdeen, Washington, grade school.

Ever since he began to read, he had admired the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier Poet.” Now, as an adult, he was frequently reading Riley’s poems to his classes, church groups, school assemblies, and to anyone else who would listen, changing his voice to match the Indiana dialect Riley featured in most of his verse.

Poet James Whitcomb Riley

“The homey scenes of rural Hoosier life,” said one reviewer, “were depicted by the professor in such a striking manner as to alternately convulse the audience with laughter and melt them to tears. The poems were widely appreciated and loudly applauded by all.”

Campbell was many things in Aberdeen — teacher, wallpaper merchant, real estate agent, town clerk, postmaster, and in 1899, at age 35, a married man. She was 15 years younger, but Myrtle Barrett had won awards for her essays in high school and was a perfect match for a man who held literary dreams of his own.

Campbell might have spent the rest of his life in Washington had it not been for the weather. In late 1906, after bouts of on-again, off-again flu for nearly a year, Campbell decided his health demanded he move the family to Ashland. Myrtle’s father and mother had moved there a few years before.

In Ashland, Campbell sold insurance and worked as a real estate agent. By the 1914 Chautauqua season, he was occasionally performing Riley’s poetry; however, now he was beginning to write his own verse, often styling it and performing it as his Hoosier idol would.

He adopted the pen name “Dick Posey,” often claiming Posey as his middle name; chosen, he said, because he had lived his early years in Posey County, Indiana. If he did, census records show that it had to have been before he was 6 years old. More likely, his “P” middle initial stood for Pearson, his father’s middle name and the maiden name of Richard’s grandmother.

By 1921, he was a widower, and now known as the “Riley of the Rogue.” He had published three books and, at age 57, had signed a contract to perform on the West Coast Chautauqua circuit.

Poet Richard "Dick Posey" Campbell

“This is my first year as a professional,” he said. “I’ve been speaking pieces for mostly free for 20 years or more, but never made it a business until this summer.”

It was a business that would support him and his family for the last nine years of his life.

Dick Posey was an oratory magician who could make his audience roar with laughter one moment, and then drown them in a silent sorrow a moment later.

“Anybody can make people laugh,” he said. “It’s when people’s hearts are touched and they are so still you can hear a pin drop that I feel I am doing my best work.”

Richard “Dick Posey” Campbell, 66, died in his Ashland home, in the afternoon of May 7, 1930. A cold of just two days had become a deadly flu. He was buried in the Mountain View Cemetery, next to Myrtle, who had died in 1917.

“O, our lives grow sweet with laughter,

And our hearts are purified.

For the radiance of our smiling

Leaves no spot where sin can hide.”

— “Smiles,” Dick Posey

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.

WASP Lea Ola McDonald - 4th Women Airforce Service Pilot Death in June

WASP Lea Ola McDonald, Class 44-W-3

 (12 October 1921 – 21 June 1944)

(Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

On June 21, while House members were debating the militarization bill, Lea McDonald, Class 44-W-3, was flying in a type of airplane she had never flown before. She had just returned from a three-week leave and planned to resign the following day so she could get married, but because she hadn’t yet officially announced her plans, she first had to fly solo in an A-24 dive bomber.

WASP Pilot Lea Ola McDonald

In a letter to Mary Martin, her former classmate, Lea said she was afraid to fly this “danger ship” that ever since the deaths of the WASPs in North Carolina the previous year, still had a bad reputation with the women.

Gripped by her fears, she asked for someone to fly with her, but superiors denied her request. After flying around the Biggs Army Airfield near El Paso, Texas for a while, she turned toward a landing approach.

Martin later said she believed that Lea was so nervous flying the A-24 that she set the unfamiliar flaps incorrectly. Instead of slowing her speed for a landing, she sent the plane into a sudden

A-24 "Dauntless

dive toward the Texas prairie. Her throat mike failed and she was unable to get help from the ground controller. One mile from the end of the runway, at great speed, the A-24 smashed into the ground and immediately erupted in flames.

“My best friend was killed in a crash,” Mary Martin said, “and we had to collect money to send her home.”

Four days after that fiery crash, Lea returned to Seagraves for her funeral in the Gaines County Cemetery.

The 38

RIP

The Crash of Iowa born WASP Pilot Gleanna Roberts

Iowa born WASP Gleanna Roberts 44-W-9, Trainee

(11 January 1919– 20 June 1944)

 

WASP Pilot Gleanna Roberts

(Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

Gleanna Roberts (44-W-9) had only been training for nine weeks when she took off from Avenger Field on a solo flight in a PT-17 Stearman biplane. Barely 20 miles west of Sweetwater, near Lorraine, Texas, Gleanna was practicing low level flight. Flying downwind, she decided to reverse course and entered into a too steep 180º turn. The plane lost lift, stalled, and began to fall. As the Stearman spun in, its left wings struck the ground and the plane began a cartwheel that tore it apart, killing 25-year-old Gleanna.

WASP Pilot Gleanna Roberts

Born January 11, 1919, Gleanna grew up on her father’s farm near Sharon Center, about 10 miles southwest of Iowa City in eastern Iowa. She was the fourth child and second daughter of Robert and Elizabeth Roberts; although, she never really knew her sister, Evaline Joyce, who died when Gleanna had just turned 3 years old in 1922.

A journalism graduate of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, it didn’t take Gleanna long to get her first reporter’s job with the Cedar Rapids Tribune, where she also was a writer in the editorial department …  In

WASP Gleanna Roberts reporter/columnist

February 1942, she accepted a reporter’s position with the Moline Dispatch newspaper in Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from Davenport, Iowa. By 1944, she was also the paper’s Radio Editor and Writer. While living in Moline, she began taking flying lessons and before she reported to Avenger Field, she had accumulated 65 hours in the air.

WASP Pilot Gleanna Roberts with a Stearman at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas

Martha Sarager, one of Gleanna’s roommates, escorted her body home to Sharon Center and the white, wood-framed First Welsh Congregational Church. In the small churchyard cemetery, Martha stood silently in her dress uniform. There, Gleanna would rest near her grandparents—and the sister she never really knew.

RIP

The Oregon Legend of “Little Phil” Sheridan

 

The Oregon legend of “Little Phil” Sheridan

By BILL MILLER

For the Mail Tribune

Long before the Civil War split ranks between north and south, the Oregon frontier was the proving ground for future leaders.

Isolated and lonely at Fort Vancouver, U. S. Grant fought against the bottle, wishing he was home with his beloved wife, Julia.

Ft./ Vancouver, Oregon Territory

With him was Captain Rufus Ingalls. Ingalls had supervised the construction of the fort and with Grant had opened a side business, growing 100 acres of potatoes.

George McClellan, Joe Hooker, and Philip Kearny were just a few of the future Yankee generals who would share time in Oregon with their Confederate counterparts, George Picket, John Walker, and John Bell Hood.

Of all the men who served here, perhaps no one stood taller than “Little Phil” Sheridan—that’s how early Oregonians remembered him.

 

West Point Cadet Philip Henry Sheridan

Phil was short even for his day. He claimed to be 5 feet 5 inches, but, then again, Phil was always claiming something. He told some he was born in Albany, New York; others that it was Ohio, and, shortly before he died, he told the Sheridan Monument Association that he first saw light of day on the seas between Ireland and America.

Little Phil didn’t like his nickname and, even though he was a scrawny 115 pounds, he was also a tenacious fighter. A rough scuffle during his third year at West Point got him a one-year suspension and delayed his commission as a 2^nd Lieutenant.

Phil graduated in 1853, 34th in a class of 52. He headed west to Texas and, a few years later, it was on to the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation in Yamhill County. Here he would watch over Southern Oregon Indians brought to the reservation after the Rogue River Wars.

 

Lt. Philip Henry Sheridan

In his memoir, Phil remembered entering Oregon with Lt. Williamson’s railroad survey party, trekking northward through the Klamath Basin. This was the closest that Phil would come to the Rogue Valley for nearly 20 years.

His memoir continued with stories of Indian battles and his official duties on the reservation. But it was his description of the American Indians on the reservation that added fuel to his Oregon legend.

“Many of them were handsome in feature below the forehead, having fine eyes, aquiline noses, and good mouths,” he said.

Although whispered rumors and written exposés of his illicit affair with an Indian girl have never been confirmed, the contemporary Jacksonville newspaper had no doubt at all.

They glibly wrote of “Sheridan’s Widow,” and how she had captured the heart of “the youthful, impressionable, and susceptible Lieutenant. … It was a case of love at first sight.”

The newspaper claimed the couple married in a ceremony sanctioned by the tribe, yet denied by the whites. Within the year, “their union was blessed by a beauteous daughter.”

 

General Philip Henry Sheridan

As he left for the Civil War, the newspaper mockingly compared Sheridan to a Greek warrior who was forced to choose between love and duty, “leaving his bride and their fat little child behind.”

The day he left for war and immortality, he puffed himself up as large as possible and, with a finger that marked every word, he yelled. “When you see me again boys, I’ll be wearing the shoulder strap of a General!”

His circle of cronies nodded in agreement. Little Phil might be short, but he never lacked confidence and no one doubted he could do whatever he said he would.

When Sheridan and his wife finally did pass through Jacksonville on a stage in 1875, the newspaper was politely cautious. They never mentioned the Indian “widow” and only reported that he stayed overnight and stopped in Ashland to have lunch with an old friend.

That was it. He was gone for good—but Little Phil had left Oregon a genuine legend.

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.