The Horrifying Deaths of Two WASP and Their Instructor

Margaret Seip

   (24 Jun 1916 - 30 Aug 1943)

Helen Jo Severson

   (2 Nov 1918 – 30 Aug 1943)

& Instructor: Lt. Calvin Atwood

  (16 Feb 1921 - 30 Aug 1943)

( Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP )

 Temperatures had reached 100º just north of Big Spring, Texas, and visibility was good, under partly cloudy skies. Helen Severson was at 2,000 feet, “flying under the hood,” a training device that made sure she couldn’t see anything but the flight instruments directly in front of her. The technique prepared a pilot to fly in the clouds or in conditions where it wasn’t possible to see the surrounding countryside. To Helen’s right was Peggy Seip who, with their instructor, Calvin Atwood, kept watch to be sure no other aircraft were in the area. They had left Sweetwater that afternoon in an UC-78 on a cross-country training flight around Big Spring with a planned return by 2 o’clock. It was the last anyone on the ground saw of them.

UC-78- "The Bamboo Bomber"

When they hadn’t returned by 5 o’clock, Avenger Field officials knew something must be wrong. They called to all of the nearby airfields to say they had a missing plane. A call came back from Big Spring Air Base that said a farmer had reported what looked like a crash in one of his fields.

…  When they arrived on the crash scene at 2:00 the next morning, they were stunned. There had been no fire. The plane had nosed in vertically with the left aileron laying a couple of hundred feet away from the main wreck and the right engine another couple of hundred feet away in the opposite direction. In between there were no marks on the ground. The plane had apparently just fallen apart in the sky. The bodies were horribly mangled, the coroner’s gruesome description of their cause of death exactly the same

WASP Helen Severson

for all three individuals. Identification of the victims would have been impossible without papers found in their clothing.

Helen Josephine Severson died just three days before the first anniversary of her marriage to Robert Severson. Robert and Helen likely met while both were studying at South Dakota State College in Brookings, but the couple married at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where Robert was finishing his Air

Corps training.

WASP Margaret Seip

Margaret June Seip was the second child and only daughter of Harry and Elizabeth Seip. She was born June 24, 1916, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While most of her friends knew her as Peggy, her younger brother called her Maggie. She had been a member of the Ninety-Nines, the Civil Air Patrol, and was a former Link Trainer instructor.

WASP Anna Frankman and husband Calvin Atwood

Twenty-two-year old Calvin Atwood, their instructor, died 190 miles

southwest of his home in Bryson, Texas. . In July 1941, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. After training, he came first to Houston and then Avenger Field as a flight instructor. Not long before he died, he married WASP Anna Frankman, a member of The Lost Platoon, 43-W-3.

On the evening of the tragedy, even before discovery of the bodies, Avenger Field classmates gathered outside the barracks, offering prayers in the flower garden that Maggie and Helen had planted. The zinnias, petunias, and nasturtiums were in bloom, and the morning glories that Maggie had first planted when she arrived in Sweetwater, were beginning to climb the trellis on the barracks wall.

 RIP

The Teacher Wore Bloomers

Teacher wore bloomers

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune - Monday, August 26th 2019

Norma Waltermire was an independent sort. The youngest daughter of a traveling minister and schoolbook salesman, she was fascinated by the stories he brought back to their Wisconsin home.

With sample textbooks always nearby, Norma became an exceptional student, and no one was surprised when she grew up to be a teacher. The real shock came in 1914, when 25-year-old Norma announced that she was leaving for the West Coast — land of her dreams.

Late in the afternoon of May 21, a Southern Pacific train arrived in Ashland. Her eyes were fascinated by tall mountains surrounding the village.

“I will teach here,” she thought to herself. “I must stay in this land of promise.”

To stay she had to prove herself. Although she had taught for three years back home, she had no credentials in Oregon. Norma took her employment appeal directly to Susanne Carter, the county’s school superintendent. Miss Carter agreed to certify Norma if she successfully completed a term of teaching, and she offered the isolated Climax school, where no teacher had ever completed a term. Norma eagerly accepted.

Climax sat in a wide ravine, down a steep and rutted trail, on the other side of Grizzly Peak. The school term began in summer when the trail was still dangerous but usually dry. During the winter, the dusty trail turned into a sticky mass of mud that grabbed at boots, clothes and animals’ feet.

The buckboard barely clung to the twisting path as it banged, bumped and shook on its treacherous journey. Mary Charley, the buckboard driver, slowly urged the team around hairpin turns. Norma planted her feet against the dashboard and hung on in terror.

They arrived at an unpainted ranch house on the side of a hill where a group of smiling faces waited for a glimpse of the new teacher. Norma shook hands with everyone, including Mary’s husband, Dell.

It was sticky and hot the next morning as Dell and Norma walked two miles to the schoolhouse. A pleasant path turned into an obstacle course of fences to climb. Dust as deep as a sandy beach crept into her shoes, tugged at her skirt, and completely covered her teacher’s dressy suit.

Norma decided the only sensible thing to do was wear rubber boots topped by her gymnasium outfit — full bloomers and a middy blouse.

The children loved her immediately. Learning had never been so much fun. They sang and played and giggled at her outfit, but studied hard to please her.

One day, a rather large woman came through the school door. The school inspector! She told Dell she had never seen a teacher dressed in such a crude and undignified manner.

Dell grinned and replied, “She’s the only teacher who has enough brains to dress properly for this climate.”

The offered Norma $25 more a month if she would return for another summer, the children cheered and the inspector stomped out the door.

The summer passed so quickly. The children cried when she left, begging her to stay, but Norma had finished the term and, as promised, was given a school in the city.

Norma continued to teach and spent most of her life in Jackson County. She retired to Florida in the 1950s, where she died in 1967.

By then, her bloomers were gone, but those happy summer memories in the little log schoolhouse always brought a smile to her face.

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.

https://mailtribune.com/lifestyle/teacher-wore-bloomers

WASP Mabel Rawlinson - tTrapped in the Flames

WASP Mabel Virginia Rawlinson

Class 43-W-3

(19 March 1917 – 23 August 1943)

 

WASP Mabel Rawlinson

(Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

For 26-year-old Mabel Rawlinson the problem was a stubborn latch that wouldn’t open on her A-24’s canopy. A latch that should have saved her life in an emergency, but couldn’t, and didn’t.

Born March 19, 1917, to William and Nora Rawlinson, in a remote section of Delaware, Mabel was 8 years old when the family moved to Virginia. It was a simple, country life during the Great Depression and Mabel, the fourth child and third daughter in a family of seven, helped with all the chores. Her mother taught school to help keep the family going. After graduating from high school, Mabel left for Michigan, living with an aunt and attending Western Michigan College in Kalamazoo. She graduated in 1939 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. After graduation, she worked as

Women Airforce Service Pilots - WASP Mabel Rawlinson

personal secretary to Kalamazoo’s esteemed Chief Librarian Flora Roberts.

In 1940, she began flying lessons at Western Michigan College as part of the Civilian Pilot Training program. She soloed on October 31 and as soon as she obtained her pilot’s license joined the local Civil Air Patrol. She rose to the rank of sergeant with the patrol, accumulating well over 200 hours in the air before volunteering for Jackie Cochran’s training detachment in Houston. Mabel was a member of The Lost Platoon, class 43-W-3. After graduation in July, she was one of the elite women that Jackie personally chose to send to Camp Davis.

While still in her six-weeks of training, and just 18 days after she arrived in North Carolina, Mabel was flying her first night mission with flight instructor, Lieutenant Harvey Robillard, Jr. The 24-year old lieutenant studied ceramic engineering at LaSalle Institute and Alfred University in New York, but interrupted his studies in March 1942 to enlist in the Army Air Corps.

WASP Mabel Rawlinson

It was a moonless night, just past 9 o’clock, and Mabel Rawlinson was in the front cockpit of an A-24 dive bomber. It was her first night flight in that type of plane, although she had been flying the A-24 in daylight. At the end of a normal flight, they were circling at about 2,000 feet, waiting for permission to land. “The tower called and told us to shoot a landing on Runway 4,” Robillard told government investigators. Mabel entered the normal landing pattern and at 1,100 feet, reduced power, and let the airplane’s wheels down. Within seconds, Robillard noticed that Mabel was moving the throttle back and forth and he realized that the engine was dead. “By that time we were at 700 feet and were across the runway, and there, turning to the left,” he said. “I took over and told the student to jump.” Halfway through a slow turn at low altitude, the A-24 began to stall, its wheels crashing through pine trees.

Mabel Rawlinson's Funeral

Thrown free of the blaze, Robillard lost consciousness. Mabel hadn’t jumped. She was still alive—the malfunctioning emergency release latch trapping her in the blazing cockpit.

Marion Hanrahan, (43-W-3) should have been flying that ill-fated A-24, but when her time came, she hadn’t eaten supper and Mable offered to switch places

WASP Marion Hanrahan

with her. “We were in the dining room when we heard the siren that indicated a crash,” Marion said. “When we ran out on the field we saw the front of her plane engulfed in fire and could hear Mabel screaming. It was a nightmare.”

RIP

The Wanderings of Dr. Franklin Grube

The wanderings of Dr. Grube

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, August 19th 2019

Early Jacksonville rarely had a shortage of doctors, some with dubious training at best, and others so professionally qualified one has to wonder why they would bring their talent and their family to such an isolated Oregon town.

Dr. Franklin Grube may well have been the most experienced.

Born Feb. 10, 1831, in Pennsylvania, Franklin was the son of Jesse and Elizabeth Staufer. Elizabeth was widowed in 1849, just as Franklin was about to enter Yale College.

After his Yale graduation, Franklin attended the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, graduating as a medical doctor in 1854. Rather than opening a practice, he immediately filed for a passport and set sail for France, where he would study at the University of France in Paris, and work in its hospital as an intern.

Dr. Franklin Grube's Passport Application

A little over a year later, he returned to the United States and established a medical office in Clinton, Mississippi, before moving on to Geary City, Kansas.

With a growing practice and his popularity with the residents, in 1859 he agreed to run for delegate to the Kansas Constitutional Convention, representing the Free State Party. He was already the county coroner, an office he retained until the beginning of the Civil War.

When Franklin took his seat in the newly formed Kansas House of Representatives in 1861, it appeared that Kansas would be his home for the rest of his life, but in the summer of 1862, when the Union government’s call came for physicians, Franklin returned to Pennsylvania and joined the 126th Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers. As the regiment’s assistant surgeon, he would spend most of the next three years living through the blood and dangers of war.

In 1863, he transferred to Camp Dennison, near the Ohio River and not far from Cincinnati. He was the hospital’s executive officer.

Whether on a leave or while traveling back to a new assignment in Washington, D.C., Franklin stopped long enough in Rochester, New York, to marry Adaline Culver on June 16, 1864.

A year after the war ended, Franklin and his wife arrived in Portland and he opened a medical office. While there, the couple’s first child, Lura, was born, but before she was a year and a half old, she died.

Franklin and his wife received a warm welcome in Jacksonville in the late summer of 1867. His expertise was quickly put to use with an almost immediate appointment to the town’s Coroner’s Jury. His examinations in criminal cases proved valuable in subsequent trials.

When Jacksonville was struck with a terrifying smallpox epidemic in 1868, he wrote a newspaper column, carried in most Oregon newspapers, listing preventive measures based on his years of experience with the disease, and an attempt to calm fears.

“There is no need to panic,” he said. “Let the people pursue their usual avocations and avoid only those houses where there is smallpox.”

In the midst of the epidemic, Adaline Grube gave birth to the

The resting place of Dr Franklin Grube & daughter, Lurie

couple’s second son. It was just six months before Franklin, 38, suddenly died after suffering only four days with congestion of the liver.

Before returning to Rochester, Adaline brought daughter Lura from her Portland grave to rest with her father. She buried them together in the Jacksonville Cemetery.

Adaline remarried, but her tragedies were not over. In 1898, Lovell, her youngest son, died of pneumonia. Six months later, a month before her oldest son, Warren, planned to marry, he was murdered. It’s believed Adaline died before 1915.

Dr. Franklin Grube may have spent only three years in Jacksonville, but in that short time he brought more than a lifetime of medical experience to a town that could really use it.

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.