WASP Pilot Elizabeth Scott - Gave Her Life in WWII

Womens Airforce Service Pilots

WASP Elizabeth “Betty” Mae Scott,

Class 44-W-3

 (26 July 1921 – 8 July 1944)

(Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

On July 8, the day before Susan Clarke’s funeral and the day after Paula Loop’s death, another woman was already falling from the sky.

Bettie Mae Scott (44-W-3) was engaged to be married. It had been a whirlwind romance with Lieutenant Frank Cramer, a flight instructor and P-38 pilot stationed at the Waco Army Airbase near

WASP Pilot Bettie Scott with Fiance Lt. Frank Cramer

Waco, Texas. The two had met not long after Bettie’s graduation from Avenger field in mid April and her returned from a ten-day visit home. They planned to marry at the end of July 1944, perhaps on Bettie’s 23rd birthday. Bettie was born July 26, 1921, in Monrovia, California, a small town at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, a few miles east of Pasadena. Her father, Frank, had been police chief in the town since 1926 and had been a city policeman since 1913. Bettie was Frank and Virgel Scott’s oldest daughter and the third of their four children. …

Less than three weeks before her 23^rd birthday, July 8, 1944, Bettie was walking beside a BT-13 Valiant on the flight apron at Blackland Army Airfield in Waco.

WASP Pilot Elizabeth Mae Scott

She had already checked the maintenance sheet on the plane and before taking off was doing her final preflight walk-around. The damaged Valiant was now repaired and it was Bettie’s job to see if it was airworthy enough for a male trainee pilot to fly. Just before 8:30 that morning, she climbed into the cockpit, continued her preflight checklist, and fired up themotor. As she left the runway, the plane began to climb at too steep of an angle. Reaching 100 feet and no longer able to gather enough wind under its wings, the plane stalled, began to roll, and dropped. It smashed down onto its back, instantly killing Bettie.

Later investigation would show that mechanics missed defects in the tail section of the aircraft and Bettie never saw them during her walk-around.

 

WASP Pilot Elizabeth Scott

 RIP

The Covered Wagon -a 1923 Movie Review

Nature seems to smile a welcome

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, July 8th 2019

Last week, I wrote about the excitement brought to Southern Oregon in 1924 by the silent motion picture “The Covered Wagon.”

The Mail Tribune gave surviving pioneers free tickets to a

performance, inspiring those aging folks to write dozens of stories about their wearisome treks across the Plains.

Oregon editorial writers, reporters and other folk who were much too young to have ever experienced a four-month walk across the continent, enthusiastically proclaimed the movie “the greatest America has ever produced. This is a good thing for Oregon. Nine out of 10 people east of the Appalachians don’t know whether Oregon is a national park or an outdoor sport.”

 

William Mason Colvig

William Colvig, one of Southern Oregon’s earliest pioneers strongly disagreed.

“I cannot entirely agree with you in regard to the advertising value to Oregon of the motion picture,” he said.

Nearly a year earlier, Colvig had attended the West Coast premiere of the movie at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood (April 10, 1923).

“As I am one of the Argonauts that came to this state, I am presumptuous enough to believe that I am a better critic of that picture than those to whom it was submitted,” he said.

Colvig offered a long list of perceived inaccuracies in the production, starting with the gathering of the wagons in 1845 in Westport, what the film said was the name of Kansas City at the time.

William Mason Colvig

“Humbug,” Colvig said. “I don’t know what it was called in 1845, but we lived within six miles of that place continuously from 1847 until we left in 1851. It was always known as Kaw Landing, it being at the mouth of the Kaw River.”

He noted that the 200 movie covered wagons were all covered in “snow white sheets” in the beginning, and, at the end of the movie, they were still just as gleaming white.

Yet, even worse than that, “Each wagon had a brake. Mankind had not yet devised such a useful contrivance.”

Most upsetting to Colvig was the differing portrayals of the pioneer arrivals in California and Oregon.

“There are some fine pictures shown of the California end of the journey, beautiful valleys and rich gold mines,” even though it was supposedly 1845 and the California Gold Rush wouldn’t start for three more years.

“Contrast that,” he said, “to the miserable ending on our Oregon Trail.”

 

"Oregon at Last"

The picture ended with wagons huddled together in a small mountain valley covered in a foot of snow. Mothers held babies and pleaded to the heavens, “Oh, my God. Will this journey never end?”

“Just then,” Colvig said, “a mountaineer appears, and to answer the women’s wails, he tells these travel-worn people, ‘Why, you’re already in Oregon.’

“Now really? No one ever knew the ground to be covered with snow in Oregon in early October.”

Colvig preferred that the movie show one of Oregon’s “fair valleys that border the sundown seas; a land of fertile soil, warmed by genial sun, and where nature seems to smile a welcome.”

What would the millions of people who would see the movie see instead?

“They will wonder why anyone would undergo the hardships, struggles and privations that were endured by these pioneers to reach such a miserable Godforsaken-looking place as that shown in the final picture.”

Even though Judge Colvig didn’t like the movie, like other pioneers, he penned an essay for the Mail Tribune about his crossing the prairie in 1851.

But, that, my friends, is a column for another day. See you then.

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/nature-seems-to-smile-a-welcome

Paula Loop - The Fall of an On Duty WASP (Womens Airforce Service Pilots)

WASP Paula Ruth Loop

Class 43-W-2

(25 Aug 1916 - 7 Jul 1944)

(excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

Paula Ruth Loop was born in 1916 about 15 miles from the family farm in Manchester, Oklahoma. She was the first child of Elton Loop and Nettie Bartlett. She grew up near the town of Wakita, on the 160 acres claimed by her grandfather, George Loop, in the Oklahoma land rush of 1893. As the oldest child, Paula soon learned how to milk cows, can fruits and vegetables, sew, clean

Paula Loop in college

house, cook and take on all the chores expected of a farm child. She was a hard worker and when her three brothers and sisters began to arrive in 1920, she easily moved into the role of babysitter and attentive teacher. …

In early 1939, President Roosevelt asked Congress for $7.3 million to establish a Civilian Pilot Training program administered by the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA), forerunner of today’s

Paula Loop CPT at Ponca City, Oklahoma Airport

Federal Aviation Administration. Europe was already moving toward war and there was a sense that if war broke out, the United States might need more pilots for self defense and also combat pilots if the country was drawn into the conflict.

In December 1939, CAA announced that it would offer 700 flight scholarships to non-college students between the ages of 18 and 25 who didn’t have access to the pilot training program. … Students paid $30, which include a medical examination, ground school expenses, and insurance, with all other costs paid for by the CAA. At the end of the ground training, a competitive examination determined which 10 students received free flight training. There was one restriction. Of the final ten selected, only one could be a woman.

Maintaining a grade point average of 94.9, Paula was the first

WASP Paula Loop Class 43-W-2

Oklahoma woman to receive one of the flight scholarships, entitling her to 35 hours of flight training at the Ponca City Municipal Airport. After her solo flight on September 22, 1940, she received her private pilot’s license.

With the announcement in September of a training program that would allow women to fly military aircraft, Paula, and eventually over a thousand other women, were finally able to use their flying ability in support of the United States war effort. She applied and met all qualifications, the most stringent of which was proving that she had flown over 200 hours. On December 13, 1942, she reported for training at the Howard Hughes Airport,

Ellington Field, Houston, Texas. She was a student pilot in the second class given by the Army Air Force Women’s Flying Training Detachment. Six months later, her class graduated and Paula reported to the 3rd Ferrying Group at Romulus Army Air Field, near Detroit, Michigan. …

One of her first assignments was to ferry a BT-13 Valiant two-seat trainer, from Enid, Oklahoma to Seattle, Washington. …

Before leaving Sacramento, California, on her way north Paula wrote the last words the Loop family ever heard from their

daughter and sister,  “Next stop Medford, Oregon and then Seattle.”

In July 1944, just a few weeks shy of her 28^th birthday, and 330 miles away from her destination, Paula  died alone in a fiery crash.

Paula Loop’s trainer airplane, a BT-13 Valiant, had begun slicing through tall cedars in the middle of the afternoon. The left wing, nearly intact, sheared off from the fuselage and dropped about 150 feet from where the airplane ultimately struck the ground. The 60-gallon left wing fuel tank, still attached to the plane, erupted on impact, its contents exploding in a violent fire that quickly turned the remaining fuselage into a twisted skeleton framework of metal.

Why Paula’s plane had suddenly crashed, just a few minutes after refueling and takeoff from the Medford, Oregon airport, was never determined.

RIP

Paula is why I began writing To Live and Die a WASP.