The Fall of WASP Pilot Mary Elizabeth Trebing

WASP Mary Elizabeth Trebing 43-W-4

(31 December 1920 - 7 November 1943)

(excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

 Mary Trebing (43-W-4) was at Love Field getting ready for her train trip north to Cimarron Field, just west of Oklahoma City, where she and two other WASPs from the 5th Ferrying Group would begin ferrying Fairchild PT-19’s trainers back to Dallas.

 

WASP Pilot Mary Trebing

Mary was born December 31, 1920, in Royalton, near the coalfields of Southern Illinois. …

Not long after 1935, the family moved to Gowen, Oklahoma, where a relative who had an interest in a coal mining company was able to get Mary’s father a job. …

Here, in the southeastern Oklahoma coal district, Mary finished high school and in 1941 entered Eastern Oklahoma A&M College as a mathematics major. When not in class she worked as a stenographer for the district attorney’s office and in her free time she took flying lessons. At the end of 1942, she left to join the WASPs. …

There are two different versions of how Mary Trebing crashed and died on November 7, 1943. About 20 minutes after taking off from Cimarron Field, near Oklahoma City, there was trouble. Her brother William said he heard that, “her plane ran into difficulties somewhere in the vicinity of Blanchard, Oklahoma. At the time, this was a

WASP Pilot Mary Trebing

heavily forested area with only an auxiliary field where there might have been a chance to crash land a plane.” With a dead engine, Mary had barely missed crashing into a farmhouse and found herself flying under a power line. “The vertical stabilizer of the plane caught on the high lines,” William said, “and nosed her down into the ground. …

  Two months shy of her 23^rd birthday, Mary Trebing returned to Boulder, Colorado for her burial.

RIP

War of the Worlds

'War of the Worlds'

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, November 4^th, 2019

The sun had set behind the Jacksonville hills. Sunday was almost over, and the boy had not finished his homework. If only he could listen to Charlie McCarthy on the radio.

Charlie McCarthy

With a click, the Crosley radio in the living room corner began to hum. An announcer’s voice faded in. “The makers of Chase and Sanborn Coffee bring you Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.”

The boy, pencil in hand, stretched out on the carpet and began his homework. But then — a woman began to sing. Time to turn to something else until Charlie came back.

As his mother entered the room, she heard what sounded like a news reporter.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed. ... Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out.”

Mother turned up the volume.

Radio Cast, War of the Worlds, October 1938

Snake-like creatures were coming out of some sort of cylinder and, with streaming jets of flame, burning barns, cars, and people. 

A government official who sounded like President Roosevelt confirmed that this was an invading army. Was this the long anticipated attack of the Nazis?

A neighbor woman was banging on the door. “They’re wiping out the East Coast!” she screamed. “We’re next!”

The mother called the Mail Tribune. A reporter assured her that the newswires were quiet and nothing was happening.

She turned back to the radio, where a reporter was pleading, “Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone?”

There was a pause and then another announcer. “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of 

“The War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells.

 

The next day, Oct. 31, 1938, newspapers laughed at those “elite easterners” who had exposed their ignorance.”

Mail Tribune humorist Arthur Perry poked fun at “those hometown half-baked morons” and reported that “everybody scared by that radio broadcast on Sunday is now back from the hills and out from under the barn.”

The Ashland Tidings reported that City Attorney Frank Van Dyke had called the police station three times, worried that the Granite City was in danger.

Not everyone thought the Sunday evening panic
 was humorous. 

In a long Mail Tribune editorial, Editor Robert Ruhl defended hysterical radio listeners, reminding smug readers, “It is always so easy to be wise AFTER the event. BUT do you remember that extraordinary broadcast of the burning

Zeppelin that graphic, breath-taking eye-witness account?”

The Hindenburg Zeppelin had crashed only a year and a half before, but the horrified reporter’s voice was still fresh in everyone’s memory. “Oh, the humanity!”

The Tidings called the panic “making a Mount Ashland out of a mole hill.”

In an unscripted epilogue given the night of the broadcast, 23-year-old Orson Welles had apologized. “We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed CBS. You will be

relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business.”

Could Martians really invade the Earth? Reporters sought assurance from science.

“It is a remote possibility,” said University of Oregon astronomer Hugh Pruett. “But don’t be alarmed. Mars is so far away it would take hundreds of years for a space ship to travel that far.”

Years in a spaceship, perhaps, but what if they traveled on imagination?

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

History Snoopin': Once There Was a Ballpark

There used to be a ballpark

---

by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, October 28th 2019

 

“There used to be a ballpark where the field was warm and green

And the people played their crazy game with a joy I’d never seen.”

Frank Sinatra recorded those lyrics in the summer of 1973. Written by Joe Raposo, famous for giving the Muppets happy songs to sing, this plaintive tune seems to mourn the passing of a baseball park; yet, Sinatra’s style somehow gives the song a wistful sense of a love affair gone astray.

 

Mile Field, Medford, Oregon - Abandoned 2003

Baseball fans in our valley once had their own love affair with a now-vanished ballpark. The 2004 leveling of Miles Field in south Medford to make way for a new Walmart saddened local baseball fans. Lifetimes had smelled its grass and tasted hotdogs in the stands, but few remembered the beginning.

Claude Miles was born in 1887 and spent most of his life in Medford. There he found his passion for sports, especially baseball, a game played in the valley since at least the 1860s. Most of the serious games were played on a dusty diamond in Fordyce Grove, not far from today’s Central Medford High School.

In the spring of 1904, wealthy investors set up the Rogue River Baseball League with teams in Medford, Ashland, Gold Hill and Jacksonville. They signed quality out-of-town players, but also signed local talent. Claude Miles, youngest player in the league, got a contract to play second base with the Medford Grays.

 

Medford Grays - Baseball 1904 - Shorty Miles bottom right

They built a new ballpark north of town and built a covered grandstand and laid out a field surrounded by a wooden fence.

Because he was the shortest player on the town’s baseball team, Claude Miles earned his lifelong nickname, Shorty. He pitched a few games, but usually he played infield.

When the old ballpark was sold and the field covered over by today’s McLoughlin Middle School, Medford’s ballclub needed a place to play.

In March 1926, what would become Miles Field opened at the new county fairgrounds just south of town. Home plate sat 45 feet from the grandstands in the middle of a half-mile auto racetrack.

Local schools didn’t play baseball there; so various semi-pro leagues came and went as Medford struggled to keep a team on the field. When the Depression hit, the ballpark began to fall apart and soon the city’s only baseball field was called “the worst in Southern Oregon.”

Hope returned after WWII when the field was modernized. Baseball fans discovered a refreshment stand, modern restrooms, repainted fences and an electric scoreboard.

 

Miles Field, Medford, Oregon

Medford’s joy lasted until the summer of 1951 when a midnight fire of suspicious origin leaped through the wooden grandstands. Flames, fed by team uniforms and equipment, ate through the clubhouse and ignited the fence. The scoreboard, the hotdog stands — everything vanished in a soggy pile of charcoal.

Claude Miles believed that baseball kept young boys out of trouble. “Youth baseball needs a decent place to play,” he said. He badgered everyone for donations, including himself, and a new and better ballpark rose on the same site.

When he died, Oct. 22, 1968, Claude “Shorty” Miles was Medford’s “Mr. Baseball.” A year later, it just made sense to call “his” ballpark Miles Field.

The new Walmart opened in 2012. A memorial plaque out front of the store is dedicated to Shorty and his ballpark.

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