Nancy Batson Crews: Alabama's First Lady of Flight

Nancy Batson Crews

Nancy Batson Crews

Alabama's First Lady of Flight

SARAH BYRN RICKMAN

FOREWORD BY JANE KIRKPATRICK

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2009 Sarah Byrn Rickman

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Goudy

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rickman, Sarah Byrn.

    Nancy Batson Crews : Alabama's first lady of flight / Sarah Byrn Rickman; foreword by Jane Kirkpatrick.

        p. cm.

        Fire Ant books.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8173-5553-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Crews, Nancy Batson, 1920–2001. 2. Women air pilots—United States—Biography. 3. Air pilots—United States—Biography. 4. United States. Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron—Biography. 5. Women Airforce Service Pilots (U.S.)—Biography. 6. World War, 1939–1945—Participation, Female. 7. Birmingham (Ala.)—Biography. I. Title.

    TL540.C825R53 2009

    629.13092—dc22

    [B]

2009007965

Cover photo: Nancy Batson climbing into the cockpit of a North American AT-6 Army advanced trainer, ca. June 1943. This was the cover photo of Air Force, the Official Service Journal of the U.S. Army Air Forces, September 1943. Photo courtesy of the WASP Collection, the Woman's Collection at Texas Woman's University, Denton.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8293-3 (electronic)

This book is dedicated to the most important people in my life—my family: my husband, Richard; my sons and their wives, Jim and Amy and Chuck and Susan; and my grandchildren, Katie, Alex, and James Daniel.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Jane Kirkpatrick

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Boys, I've Brought You a Real Lemon

2. Daughter of Alabama

3. Flight!

4. The WAFS

5. The Best of All Jobs

6. Women in Pursuit

7. The Question of Militarization

8. The Best and Worst of Times

9. Beyond the War: Life Goes On

10. The Pain of Change

11. Gliding: Better Than Sex!

12. Paul and the WASP

13. Passing the Torch: Radford Learns to Fly

14. California City

15. Lake Country Estates

16. Enhancing the Legacy

17. Nancy and the Planes She Ferried

18. The Reunion

19. From Cub to King Air

20. Pneumonia, or Something Worse?

21. Terminal

22. Alabama Women's Hall of Fame

23. Redemption

24. Paul Jr.

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Index of Airplanes that Nancy Flew

Illustrations

Nancy and the King Air corporate turbo jet

1.   A stuck nosewheel on this P-38 challenged Nancy

2.   The Batson family, early 1920s

3.   Young Nancy in her signature jodhpurs

4.   Four University of Alabama CPT coed pilots

5.   Graduation, June 1941

6.   With Paul and her J-4 Cub

7.   Six Wilmington WAFS study navigation

8.   Great Falls six with their PT-17s

9.   Seven Wilmington WAFS

10. Nancy's official WAFS portrait

11. The first women pilots to attend Officer Training School

12. Farmingdale P-47 pilots ready to ferry

13. Nancy climbing into a P-47

14. Nancy climbing into a P-38

15. Wedding day, February 1, 1946

16. Family portrait, 1956

17. Nancy and Super Cub N4425Z

18. C. G. Taylor with Nancy and Paul

19. Eight original WAFS in Reno, 1975

20. Nancy and Super Cub N7464L

21. The WAFS reunion in Birmingham 1999

22. Nancy and Dr. James A. Pittman

23. The Flying Grannies: Nancy and Chris Beal-Kaplan

Foreword by Jane Kirkpatrick

It's said that place and space both border and define us. Historically this was true for women who typically found their place in the workings of the kitchen, the family, the near community. Within their life span, women often migrated only miles from the landscape of their birth. Though things changed rapidly for those coming of age during what we call the Greatest Generation, the stories we hear are more about men migrating from place and space than about women. Women's history is often relegated to stories of their leaving home only to fill the spaces of men gone off to war. When men returned, most women moved back into their traditional places and spaces.

But there was a cadre of women who defied those traditions and Nancy Batson Crews was one of them. What makes Nancy's story the more remarkable is that she never led a squadron the way her mentor Nancy Love did as founder of the WAFS; nor did she die the heroine's death in duty, as did her friend Evelyn Sharp. Nancy Batson Crews's place in the American experience peaks in the passion that filled her life and heart, soaring above the earth, maintaining aviation friendships across miles and years while earning her way for over six decades in an eclectic aviation career. How rare is it to be a woman doing what you love to do at eighteen and still being paid to do it at the age of eighty? That what Nancy loved to do was to pilot planes makes her story all the more amazing.

Yet Nancy Batson Crews: Alabama's First Lady of Flight is more than a story of one woman. Hers is the story of many women who fell in love with flight at a time when their country needed their willingness to risk winter snows, summer thunderstorms, western mountains, and active airport traffic to ferry planes men would fly in combat—freeing men from transport, so they could. These women performed with minimal fanfare and later fought for military recognition that they were even present, serving in that place.

What defines Nancy's story, however, is less that she helped lead that recognition but that when World War II was over, she continued to define her life in aviation whether it was towing gliders, teaching students, or increasing her own skills in whatever aircraft she could find to master. After the death of her husband, she went on to build a successful business in real estate, but always, the business of flight kept Nancy whole. The relationships she developed in those early years were the ones that sustained her through later troubling times. Those friendships defined a sisterhood of women among whom flight almost more than family marked their place.

I'd never heard of Nancy Batson Crews until I read Sarah Byrn Rickman's fine biography, which would have been my loss. But I've spent my life either counseling women to help them trust their dreams or writing about ordinary women who made places in their worlds worthy of remembering. As a pilot myself, Nancy's story resonated as we are shared adventurers. But flight for Nancy wasn't an achievement nor was it ancillary to some other occupation; it was not merely a way to move from place to place. Flight was Nancy. Her husband and children understood that without that time to soar, to wrap herself in flight plans, logbooks, weather reports, tending to the WAFS she never lost touch with, without that passion in her life, the wife and mother they came to love would have been bereft. She became untethered to this earth and needed flight as a balance to it in order to feel alive.

It's easy to see why Nancy trusted Sarah to tell this remarkable story. The compassion of this writer for her subject grows out of mutual respect and a desire to understand the complexity of this woman who never stopped taking risks and paid the personal price necessary to truly seek one's bliss. The author's care for truth, her ability to listen with her heart as well as her ears as children, friends, colleagues spoke of Nancy, gives those of us who never knew Nancy a deeper understanding of her life. Some of how that relationship grew between subject and biographer is shared within this narrative; some we speculate about because of the complexity of Nancy's life so tenderly unveiled.

Nancy's choices weren't always wise. The strength that drove her to succeed also pushed others away. Nancy was a product of the Old South. She harbored prejudices and later resentments from the war that pierced the bonds of her own flesh. Yet the author's compassion and admiration take us through these human frailties to meet a woman worthy of emulating, a woman who never stopped learning, never stopped discovering.

One cannot come away from reading of Nancy's life without profound respect and a deep sense of awe that during an era when married women were still not allowed to even teach in many places in the country, Nancy Batson Crews soared above such injustices. She made a remarkable life doing what she loved and met her obligations to family and community in extraordinary ways. Her story is a reminder to us all that we can dream and risk at any age. Looking back, Nancy surely could have agreed with the poet Mary Oliver that hers was a life married to amazement and that she took the world into [her] arms. This fine biography shows us how to make those words our own epitaph.

Acknowledgments

Nancy Batson Crews's three children have worked with me, in full cooperation, throughout my research and the writing of this book. My heartfelt thanks to Paul Crews Jr., Radford Crews, and Jane Crews Tonarely. My thanks also to other members of Nancy's family for their help: her late sister Amy Batson Strange; her niece Elizabeth Strange Simpson; her nephew Luther Strange; and her cousin, Ken Coupland. Katherine Price Kap Garmon provided me with the written history of Camp Winnataska as well as personal memories of, and observations about, the camp Nancy loved so very much. In addition, several of Nancy's aviation friends in Birmingham have been enthusiastically supportive throughout the entire process: Chris Beal-Kaplan, Dr. James A. Pittman, Lt. Col. Joseph L. Shannon (USAF ret.), and Dr. Edward W. Stevenson.

I would also like to acknowledge assistance from the Southern Museum of Flight and the Alabama Aviation Hall of Fame in Birmingham; the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame located at Judson College in Marion; the International Women's Air and Space Museum in Cleveland, Ohio; and the WASP Collection, the Woman's Collection, Texas Woman's University in Denton.

Lastly, to the eight WAFS (Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron) who survived Nancy—all of whom I met through her—my admiration, my respect, and my thanks: Bernice Batten (deceased 2004), Phyllis Burchfield Fulton, Teresa James (deceased 2008), Gertrude Meserve Tubbs LeValley, Barbara Jane B.J. Erickson London, Barbara Donahue Ross, Barbara Poole Shoemaker (deceased 2008), and Florene Miller Watson.

Sarah Byrn Rickman

Abbreviations

Introduction

Nancy Elizabeth Batson was number twenty to qualify for the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), which was made up of the first twenty-eight women to fly for the U.S. Army in World War II.

In September 1942, noted aviatrix Nancy Love was recruiting experienced women pilots to ferry badly needed single-engine trainer airplanes from the factories to the Army's flight training schools.¹ Love was working with Col. William H. Tunner, commander of the Ferrying Division, Air Transport Command, U.S. Army Air Forces. Tunner's need for ferry pilots was so critical to the war effort, he was willing to give competent women pilots a try. The women went on to fly far more than trainers.

In January 1944, Nancy Batson and eleven others became the first women pilots to graduate from pursuit school.² They were qualified to fly high-performance pursuit (fighter) aircraft. One hundred thirty-two women eventually qualified as pursuit ferry pilots for the Ferrying Division. They routinely ferried aircraft cross-country at speeds up to three hundred miles per hour, at altitudes up to four miles high, from one coast to the other—alone—in an era when most women hardly dared dream of driving the family automobile across the state line, let alone across the whole of the United States. Nancy spent much of 1944 ferrying P-47s from the factory to stateside embarkation points for transfer to the war zones.

Twenty-two when she joined the WAFS, Nancy Batson earned the nickname the Golden Girl of the Ferry Command.³ Her prowess at the controls of an airplane, her absolute dedication to the job, her winning personality, and her engaging Southern accent all contributed to her acceptance by both the men and the women of the Ferrying Division.

Five feet seven inches tall and of slender but athletic build, Nancy was blessed with honey-blonde hair, gray eyes, finely sculpted features, and flawless skin. She was, unquestionably, a beautiful young woman. Her looks brought her yet another nickname—the Veronica Lake of the Ferry Command. Veronica Lake was a popular 1940s movie star whose long blonde hair fell seductively over one eye.

Nancy excelled early at horseback riding and school sports and later at golf. Her athlete's sense of timing and superb physical coordination carried over into her flying.

She tried out for cheerleader in high school—not for the popularity the role assured, but to prove she could do it. She campaigned for the highest elected office a coed could hold on the University of Alabama campus—not to impress others, but to prove her leadership skills to herself and to her father. Not surprisingly, she won both those competitions.

People liked Nancy. Batson could charm the pants off a snake, said her good friend and fellow WAFS Teresa James.

Beneath the personable exterior was a woman with finely tempered hometown Birmingham steel in her backbone. She epitomized the Puritan work ethic and sense of right versus wrong—the latter to a fault. There were no shades of gray in Nancy's life. Typical of a young woman brought up in the pre–World War II South, she never questioned how she had been raised to think nor what she had been taught to believe. Who she was and how she was shaped by the socioeconomic, political, and racial realities of the South are an integral part of her story.

Nancy Batson's accomplishments and contributions as a WAFS are notable. So are her achievements in aviation before the war, and so too is what she did in her later years. She was born into a well-to-do upper-middle-class family, which gave her economic and social advantages, but she also was a girl-child born into the patriarchal South. Her personal mission—her passion—was to make her mark in a decidedly male profession: aviation.

She had the good fortune to have a mother who did not try to mold her into the traditional role of a Southern belle. Ruth Batson gave her daughter all the manners, social graces, and refinements one needs to get along in genteel society. But Ruth did far more than that. She didn't use those things to harness Nancy's energy and ambition. Nancy was allowed to grow up to be the person she wanted to be. Her mother gave her—to use our more modern-day expression—her space.

Nancy's father went along with this, willingly, paid the bills, and was proud of his daughter. When Nancy's brother died in the war, Nancy became his surrogate son. It was Nancy who worked with her father after the war, golfed with her father, planned real estate development strategy with her father, discussed politics with her father.

In her flying career, Nancy was a flight instructor, she flew commercially, and she ferried aircraft. The only thing she didn't do was fly for the airlines, but she did fly passengers. In 1944, she checked out in an Army twin-engine C-60 transport and flew her fellow ferry pilots from the docks at Newark back to the aircraft factory on Long Island so that they could pick up more P-47s and ferry them to the docks.⁴

In the 1960s, while in her forties, she built a flying business from scratch—just Nancy and her Super Cub. In a smart business move, she learned to tow gliders with her Cub. From there, she went on to learn to fly gliders. In her fifties, she became a glider instructor pilot.

Her parents taught her to give back, so in order to serve her community, she took a stab at local politics at age sixty. She got burned. She switched her energies to land development and home building and was a success—this in her late sixties and seventies.

When Nancy Batson Crews was seventy-nine years old, she flew nearly eighty hours as copilot in a corporate turbo jet.

Nancy was a natural leader. The only time she tried to avoid that calling was in the war. She wanted so badly to fly the Army airplanes that she resisted Nancy Love's attempts to put her in charge of a small squadron, which would rob her of precious flying time. She did, however, serve frequently as a flight leader for the less experienced young women pilots as they qualified and came into the Ferrying Division.

She had her own private battles with racism—a legacy from her Southern upbringing—but far more telling was the impact World War II had on her gut-level personal beliefs and prejudices. It was not the black–white issue but the anti-Japanese, propaganda-fed sentiment that permeated this country during WWII that was Nancy's undoing.

She had few battles with sexism because Nancy was a woman at ease with men and men were at ease with her. Neither a flirt nor one to use her physical charms, she simply liked men, liked being with them, and they liked being around her. She learned early how to work with men and had more male than female friends.

By her own declaration, Nancy was not a feminist. Nevertheless, she was her own best advertisement of what a woman could do. She worked within the system and never took no for an answer. She believed in her abilities and made them work for her. When she needed help or advice, she sought the best she could get—usually from men. She paved her own way and simply did whatever she wanted.

She had a husband who loved her and supported her flying, though he had no personal interest in aviation. She was the mother of three children she adored. Nancy Batson Crews was a free woman, a rarity in the mid-twentieth century. This made her a fitting role model of what a woman can do if she has skills, determination, and drive. Nancy, however, never liked the label role model, because she felt that she was given too much to begin with to be a realistic role model for young women who were not so fortunate.

Some would say she had it all, yet Nancy faced her share of personal tragedy, disappointment, and strife and was not always adept at handling the consequences. All told, Nancy and her personality redefine the meaning of complexity. Her life defies pigeonholing.

Nancy and I met in 1992. That meeting changed both our lives—mine to the greater extreme.

In January 1990, I had gone to work as a communications consultant for the International Women's Air and Space Museum (IWASM) located at that time near my home in Centerville, Ohio. The fledgling museum was (and is) a repository for papers, photos, and memorabilia of the early women pilots of Amelia Earhart's era and those who came after.

In November 1990, I helped IWASM launch a series of programs featuring pioneer women flyers to be aired for the cable television viewers in south-suburban Dayton, Ohio. We videotaped the women—sometimes panels, sometimes single speakers—before a live audience. We recorded their voices, images, and their stories for posterity, as a form of oral history.

IWASM Administrator Joan Hrubec and I worked with the Miami Valley Cable Council (now Miami Valley Communications Council) to produce the programs on MVCC's community-access channel. Between November 1990 and March 1994, we taped a dozen programs that still air on South Dayton's Channel 723.

The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) are the other half of the equation when it comes to the women who flew for the Army Air Forces in World War II. In November 1942, famed aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, with the backing of Army Air Forces Commanding General H. H. Hap Arnold, launched an Army flight training school for young women in Texas. The original purpose was to supply more women ferry pilots for the WAFS of Colonel Tunner's Ferrying Division—Nancy Love's group. As it turned out, not all the graduates could meet the Ferrying Division's exacting standards and Tunner refused to hire some of them. So Cochran turned to finding other wartime flight jobs the women might fill. The total number of women who flew in various capacities for the Army in WWII was 1,102.

Knowing that in 1992 the WASP—the name by which all the women who flew for the U.S. Army in World War II eventually became known—were coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of their founding, Joan and I decided to put together a WASP panel. We asked our Dayton-area resident WASP and a museum trustee, Nadine Nagle, to moderate the program and we asked nearby Springfield, Ohio, resident WASP Caro Bayley Bosca to be one of the panelists. Five more WASP, women who were trained to fly the Army way between November 1942 and December 1944, agreed to come to Centerville and be on the panel.

I suggested Nancy Batson Crews as the panel's representative original WAFS. I had just read about her in Sally Van Wagenen Keil's book about the WASP, Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines. What Keil wrote about her assured me that Nancy would be a delight to have on our program. Nancy's desire to tell the WAFS' story led her to say yes, she would come.

Nadine and I picked Nancy up at the Dayton airport Sunday night, January 12, 1992. The taping was scheduled for Monday evening, January 13. As I got to know Nancy over the next two days, I was entranced. What I learned from her was that the existing WASP books told only part of the story. The surviving WAFS, and Nancy in particular, felt that their very different beginnings and service needed to be told in a separate account. The 1,074 women who earned their wings in Army training in Texas is one story. The other story is about Nancy Love and her twenty-seven professional women pilots who went straight into the Ferrying Division to ferry trainer airplanes as civil service employees beginning in the fall of 1942.

As Nancy and I became better acquainted, she decided that I was the person to write the story of Nancy Love and the WAFS. She convinced me and then she made it happen. My history of the WAFS, The Originals: The Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron of World War II, was published in 2001 by Disc-Us Books, Inc. Nancy was the reason the book was written and published.

In this biography of Nancy Batson Crews, I tell the story of