Fly Girl

FEATURE

FLY GIRL

CELEBRATING CORNELIA FORT’S LIFE AND LEGACY

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ornelia Fort’s father, Rufus, was a medical doctor (1894), one of five founders of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company (1902), the owner of Fortland Farms (1909), and an expert on Jersey dairy cows. In fact, Dr. Fort’s cattle were regular blue-ribbon winners at state and local fairs. While at the Tennessee State Fair, in the early 1920s, he witnessed an air show that shook him to his core. The crowd watched in horror as one of the planes lost its engine and nearly crashed. Shortly after, Dr. Fort called his three sons into his study where he sat holding the family Bible. “I want you to promise me you will never fly,” he said. Each placing their hand on the Bible—Rufus Jr. (age 13), Dudley (age 12), and Garth (age 10) solemnly swore to uphold their father’s request.

Watching and listening, Cornelia (age 5) stood in the hall by the doorway. Sixteen years later, in 1940, Cornelia took her first flight in a two-seater plane with Jack Caldwell of Miller’s Flying Service.

Taking off from Nashville’s newest airport, Berry Field, the flight was meant to be a simple afternoon joyride, but Cornelia was hooked and immediately signed up for lessons. When her brother Dudley found out about her escapades, he was outraged: “How dare you fly knowing father forbade us to do it?” With a twinkle in her eye she turned and said, “Daddy gave that oath to you boys—not to me.”

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HALLWAYS

by Mary Ellen Pethel

Born in 1919, Cornelia Clark Fort grew up at Fortland, a 350-acre farm on the edge of East Nashville. She attended Harpeth Hall’s predecessor school, Ward-Belmont, and graduated with a high school certificate in 1936. Cornelia Fort was smart, athletic, and articulate but struggled to find a passion that matched her adventurous spirit. She was on the yearbook staff, and teachers remembered her as a prolific writer and reader. Rather than join one of the school’s established sorority-like organizations, Fort co-founded a club called SAP—a reference to the popular “Little Orphan Annie” newspaper comic.

The majority of Ward-Belmont’s high school and junior college graduates continued their higher education at four-year institutions, but the school also sought to prepare daughters of the elite for their roles as club women and members of society. As historian Rob Simbeck noted, “Cornelia spent much of her adolescence taking part in social rituals she disliked and hiding her intelligence from boys.”

After her graduation from Ward-Belmont, Cornelia Fort wrote, “I want to see new faces, gain a new outlook on life. I think it will do me good to stand on my own two feet.” After one year at Ogontz School and Junior College in Philadelphia and two years at Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, she returned to Nashville in 1939. Just a few months later, Fort’s life took flight, literally, as she rose through the

FEATURE

clouds in Jack Caldwell’s two-seater plane.

It was in that moment that she became a “fly girl.”

After her father’s death in 1940, Fort pursued flying full-time and earned her private license by the end of the year.

On February 8, 1941, she received her commercial pilot wings, and a month later, Fort became the first woman in Tennessee to get her instructors license.

She went to Fort Collins, Colorado to train civilian pilots before taking a job in Honolulu, Hawaii. Cornelia Fort might have spent her life as a successful flight instructor and commercial pilot—but history and fate intervened on the morning of December 7, 1941.

That morning began as any other. Fort drove to the Waikiki air strip before dawn for a flight lesson with a civilian student.

As they prepared to make their last landing, Fort was startled to see a military plane flying straight towards them.

Fort’s life took flight, literally, as she rose through the clouds in Jack Caldwell’s two-seater plane. It was in that moment that she became a “fly girl.”

She grabbed the controls from the student and narrowly avoided collision. She recalled the rest of the events that tragic morning: “The painted red balls on the tops of the wings shone brightly in the sun. Honolulu was familiar with the emblem of the Rising Sun on passenger ships but not on airplanes. I looked quickly at Pearl Harbor and my spine tingled when I saw billowing black smoke. . . . Something detached itself from an airplane. My eyes followed it down, down and even with knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor.

I knew the air was not the place for my little baby airplane, and I set about landing as quickly as ever I could. A few seconds later, a shadow passed over and simultaneously bullets spattered all around me.”

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war. Cornelia longed to serve and was given the opportunity in 1942, with the formation of the Woman’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), which transported planes between factories and military bases. Fort accepted the invitation without hesitation. “Fly girls,” as they were called, flew fighter planes at a time when many women did not yet have a license to drive a car.

This pioneering group of twenty-eight women expanded over the next three years and eventually became the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots). These female aviators were the vanguard of a new generation of young women who sought to serve their country while also working as professionals. They were met with some resistance and a healthy dose of skepticism. One person who never doubted their heroism or skills was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote in September 1942: “This is not a time when women should be patient. We are in a war and we need to fight it with all our ability and every weapon SPRING 2019

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Fort’s commanding officer, Nancy Love, sent a letter to Fort’s mother: “My feeling about the loss of Cornelia, is hard to put into words. . . . If there can be any comforting thought, it is that she died as she wanted to—in an Army airplane, and in the service of her country.” At the young age of twenty-four, Cornelia Fort became the first American woman to die on active military duty.

possible. Women pilots, in this particular case, are a weapon waiting to be used.”

During World War II, government posters and the media often portrayed flying as an exciting and glamorous job for women. In truth, Fort and other female pilots worked 16-hour days in difficult conditions. In July 1943, Fort wrote: “They chatter about the glamour of flying. Let me tell you how glamorous flying is. We wear heavy cumbersome clothes and a thirty-pound parachute. . . . You are either hot or cold. You look forward all afternoon to the bath you will have and the steak. Well, we get the bath but seldom the steak. Sometimes we are too tired to eat and fall wearily into bed.”

Though not trained for combat, the WASP flew a total of 60 million miles performing operational flights, towing aerial targets, transporting cargo, smoke laying and a variety of other missions. During World War II, the WASP flew every type of military aircraft manufactured for the U.S. armed forces.

On March 21, 1943, a group of pilots, both male and female, were assigned to transport BT-13s to Texas. During the transport, another plane’s landing gear clipped the wing of Fort’s plane, which sent her plane into a deadly descent.

Though she wore a parachute, Fort was unable to eject from the cockpit. We are left to wonder whether the collision knocked her unconscious or the impact caused a mechanical malfunction that prevented the door from opening. The plane burst into flames as it crashed into the ground.

Cornelia Fort was only 24 years-old.

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HALLWAYS

Fort and the thirty-seven additional WASPs who gave their lives in service to their country were not given military funerals.

Those who served and survived were not granted veteran status nor were they eligible for veteran services or benefits. In 1975, former WASP Bernice Haydu introduced a bill to the Senate to provide retroactive veteran status to this group of female pilots. After two years of lobbying, the legislation passed both Congressional houses, and President Jimmy Carter signed the bill into law.Cornelia Fort did not live to see the end of the war and never received the recognition she deserved as a trailblazing aviator, WWII veteran, and role model. And so, we honor her life and legacy today, 100 years after her birth on February 5, 1919.

A determined young woman with a passion to find and use her talents, Fort exemplified the “Dream big, go far,” campaign of today’s Harpeth Hall School. When asked how she knew she was meant to fly, Fort wrote, “I know it in dignity and selfsufficiency and in the pride of skill.” She concluded, “All of us have the wanderlust. . . that’s the magic of it for me. . . .

[And] that which is so terrifying at first, becomes eventually something useful and free and warmly good.”