Iowa born WASP Gleanna Roberts 44-W-9, Trainee
(11 January 1919– 20 June 1944)
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| 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.
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| 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
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.
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| WASP Gleanna Roberts reporter/columnist |
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| 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
