To Live and Die a WASP: The Tragedy of Betty Stine

WASP Betty Pauline Stine 44-W-2

(13 September 1921 - 25 February 1944)

#The38

(Quote from To Live and Die a WASP)

Betty Stine, WASP Class 44-W-2 prepared to leave on her final cross-country flight before graduation. …

Betty graduated from Santa Barbara High School in June 1939 with dreams of becoming an airline

WASP Pilot Betty Stine

stewardess. Her father, Jake, was born in the oil fields of Oklahoma, but when his mother died when Jake was eight years old in 1909, his father sent him to live with Jake’s grandparents, in Castleberry, Texas, near Fort Worth. … There, in late 1920, Jake married Mary Allen.

Betty, their only child, was born the following September. Because Jakes uncle was humorist Will Rogers, he named Betty after Will’s wife, Betty Blake. For his daughter’s middle name he chose Pauline, after Pauline McSpadden, a daughter of one of Will Rogers’ sisters. …

On February 24, 1944, Betty, along with 12 of her classmates, were returning to Avenger Field from their final cross-country training flight. Graduation

was 16 days away. She had just taken off in an AT-6 Texan from Blythe Army Airfield in southeastern California, and had crossed over the Colorado River into Arizona. A little after 4:00 in the afternoon, officials believe an exhaust spark set fire to the fabric-covered portion of the Texan’s tail assembly. With the tail on fire and about to separate from the plane, Betty bailed out over the mountains surrounding Quartzite, Arizona; less than 25 miles from Blythe.

Lewis Aplington, owner of mines around Quartzite, saw the burning plane and Betty’s parachute dropping to the ground. It took over 45 minutes for Aplington and two other miners, riding in a truck, to find her in the rugged terrain. Betty was unconscious, but still alive. The high winds had dragged her chute over sharp rocks and

Plomosa Mountains, Quartzite, Arizona

boulders and her body was beaten, broken, and bloodied. …

Returned to a nearby Army base hospital, she died within hours. The 22-year-old’s body was sent home for burial in the Santa Barbara Cemetery.

 

WASP Betty Stine and Her Instructor

If only Betty Stine had known how to control her parachute on the ground in strong winds, she never would have died. Officers at Avenger Field hadn’t anticipated the need for advanced training in parachute jumps and landings, but Betty’s death had changed all of that almost immediately. …

RIP

History Snoopin': The Short Shorts affair

The short shorts affair

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by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, February 24th 2020

“Yes!” said the boys.

“No!” said Medford high school officials.

It began with a fad sweeping the nation in the mid 1950s. The sight of men’s knees was suddenly appearing on the main streets of America. It was mostly the young; however, the Bermuda shorts invasion had even snuck into business board rooms from New York to San Francisco.

One poll noted that only 1 in 5 Americans said they would ever wear Bermuda shorts, yet some major retailers reported selling one pair of men’s shorts for every three pairs of slacks.

The shorts had become a fashion statement for men and an inspiration for women’s fashion designers. The introduction of the Bermuda skirt was sweeping college campuses. The skirt was one-inch longer than the Bermuda shorts worn beneath it. My female sources tell me this sounds somewhat like the beginnings of the divided skirt or culottes.

By 1956, the fad was most popular with college and high school males, leading to school boards all over the country banning Bermudas and shutting down student protests.

On April 6, 1956, just before the morning bell, 30 young men arrived at Medford High wearing Bermuda shorts. It didn’t take long for school officials to confront the boys and, after a very brief discussion, tell them to go home and return in more conventional and appropriate attire.

While officials huddled together in conferences with the school board to decide an acceptable dress code, the boys took their protest to the streets. Strolling down Main Street in temperatures rising from an early morning freeze, there wasn’t even a shiver as they laughed and hooted at each other for the next few hours, including a slight diversion to the Mail Tribune newsroom on Fir Street, where they presented their case to reporters.

Leonard Mayfield, school superintendent, laughed when told the students were parading through downtown.

“Yes, the boys have a legal right to wear what they want,” he said, “as long as it is within the limitation of decency.”

He explained the school’s efforts were aimed at educating the students to “commonly accepted proprieties and customs,” including attempts to discourage girls from wearing shorts or slacks to school.

Just before noon, when the boys returned to school, they told officials they had planned the demonstration earlier that week and admitted it might not have been the best way to approach the situation.

Officials explained that they didn’t want to make any hard and fast rules about clothing, and they halfway sympathized with the boys but said extreme and unconventional dress were “distracting to the educational process.”

An agreement was quickly reached. The boys could wear shorts as long as they came within an inch of the knee. In addition, there would be no other extremes allowed in the length of shorts or in other clothing.

A member of the school board, Bill Barker, admitted he had a lighthearted conflict in the controversy. Barker owned a men’s clothing store in the city.

“I wear them myself,” Barker said. “I like to wear them and to sell them. From a strictly non-school board and biased viewpoint, I vote for ‘em!”

In less than a few hours it was all over, and the girls had won too. Occasional Wednesdays were designated “Slack Day,” where some of the young ladies were also allowed to wear Bermuda skirts or shorts, and even that newest of newfangled fads — pedal pushers.

The “educational process” would never be the same again.

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

To Live and Die a WASP: Mary Ann “Marian” Toevs

WASP Mary Ann “Marian” Toevs

#The38

Class 43-W-8

 13 May 1917 – 18 February 1944)

Marian Toevs’ parents, John and Nelle, were at their daughter’s graduation, proudly pinning on Marian’s silver wings. After the ceremony, they

returned to Aberdeen, Idaho, where Marian had a week to relax in her girlhood home. On January 1, 1944, she reported to LeMoore Army Airfield, an

BT-13

Army flight training school in California’s Central

Valley. Her primary assignment was to test fly BT-13 and BT-15 airplanes, recently repaired by the field’s maintenance crew. …

Marian was born May 13, 1917, in Aberdeen, Idaho, where her father, John, owned a grocery store and ran a successful wholesale dry goods business. For a number of years he was also the superintendant of Aberdeen’s Agricultural Experiment Station. Marian had four brothers and

WASP Marian Toevs

was her parent’s only daughter. Marian graduated from high school in 1935, and that fall began studies at Albion State Normal School, a small teachers college in Albion, Idaho. Two years later, with a teaching certificate in hand, Marian spent the next three years teaching. …

Early in the morning, Friday, February 18, 1944, Marian checked out a parachute, walked to the flight line, and climbed into a BT-13. She fired up the engine, completed her preflight check, then taxied out to the runway. Sources say she was

BT-13s

flying to Fresno, California, and perhaps that was her ultimate destination, but Fresno is barely 30 air miles from LeMoore, hardly enough time in the air to fully checkout a previously damaged or faulty airplane. Add the fact that Marian’s BT-13 finally wound up nearly 125 miles northwest away from Fresno, in the eastern foothills of San Jose, California, and a simple flight to Fresno just doesn’t make any sense. If Fresno was her ultimate destination, she was first flying a much longer cross-country flight.

Twenty-six-year old Marian crashed just a block away from where her Uncle Otto Toevs lived in a San Jose, California neighborhood. 

She had visited with Otto and his wife just two weeks before and it was Uncle Otto who ultimately identified her body for authorities. “The motor was still going when it hit,” Anthony Gullo said. He had been only 75 feet from the crash. …

After Marian’s crash, Marian’s body was returned to Aberdeen for her funeral. 

As she was laid to rest, Edgar Toevs, Marian’s cousin, was one of the speakers.

 

 “She had given everything she had,” Edgar said, “and she did all she could.”

 RIP

History Snoopin': Welcome Mr. President

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, February 17th 2020

As difficult as it seems for our presidents to visit us in the Rogue Valley, there have been a few who actually made it.

They came by stagecoach, train or airplane; however, only a few managed to even touch the ground. Some were dying, or at least very sick, and if rumors were true, one was poisoned. Some even slept through their visit.

Rutherford Hayes, our 19th president, in 1884 was the first sitting president to visit Southern Oregon. He stayed overnight and was the only one who came in a stagecoach. Hayes, a Republican, was elected with fewer votes than his Democrat opponent, so his Jacksonville reception in a stronghold of angry Southern Oregon Democrats was courteous, but not overly enthusiastic.

Our 23rd president, Benjamin Harrison, passed through the valley by train in 1891, the first “whistle-stop tour” of the nation by a U.S. president. He too had won the presidency with fewer votes than his opponent.

President William McKinley broke everyone’s heart in May 1901, canceling his Medford visit because his wife was ill. He promised to return sometime in the future but was assassinated four months later. It was his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, who kept the promise.

 

“Teddy’s” first arrival in Oregon came on the “Presidential Special,” chugging into Ashland May 20, 1903. Only seconds before its arrival, gusty winds blew away a 34-foot welcoming arch of Oregon Grape that spanned the tracks near the depot. Within 15 minutes, the train vanished, bound for an early morning stop in Salem.

William Howard Taft had two problems during his rail trips through the valley. He was ballooning to 340 pounds and he suffered from sleep apnea.

In 1909, his train stopped, but Taft stayed in bed. Returning in 1911, he disappointed the crowd again, saying his voice was too hoarse to say anything more than “thank you.”

When Woodrow Wilson came through in 1919, he was on a grueling railroad trip of 8,000 miles that would devastate his health. Facing the Medford crowd, he clutched his wife’s arm, smiled, waved, and said nothing. Nine days later he suffered the first of many strokes that would eventually kill him.

His successor, Warren Harding, was also heading for a date with death in July 1923 when he passed through the valley. “The president is unable to appear,” said the newspaper, “due to a slight case of ptomaine poisoning.”

He died of a heart attack in San Francisco 5 days later. Rumor said Mrs. Harding had poisoned her husband because of infidelities.

Gerald Ford took a tour of the MEDCO plant in May 1976.

Ronald Reagan landed at the airport in Air Force One in October 1984. He gave a rousing speech and left for Portland.

George Bush Sr. stayed a bit longer, campaigning in September 1992 at Burrill Lumber in White City.

His son, George W. Bush, came in 2002, to see the damage caused by our summer of smoke and fires. He returned for the 2004 campaign and became the second president to stay overnight in the valley, sleeping only blocks away from the hotel where Rutherford Hayes had stayed in 1884.

So, as we mark another President’s Day in the midst of the political season, we start to wonder. Who will it be? Who will be the next sitting president to come to the Rogue River Valley?

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

https://mailtribune.com/lifestyle/welcome-mr-president