“START OF TAPE 1. SIDE 1” Interviewer: Okay. I’m at the home of Mrs. Mary Engle,
with her husband in Lexington, Kentucky. She served with the… WAC Corps, the Women’s Air Force Service pilots during World War II.Engle: That was the WASP.
Interviewer: WASPs, I’m sorry.
Engle: [Chuckling] that’s all right.
Interviewer: It’s my understanding, or I’ve been told that you are the
only…member of the WASP Corps who still, or now lives in Kentucky, is that true?Engle: As far as I know I think I’m the only one.
Interviewer: And do you know of any others from Kentucky that might have served
at that time?Engle: Oh there was, there was one girl who was from here, but she didn’t last,
and I can’t think of her name… Interviewer: Yeah.Engle: …which is [Chuckling] a blessing.
Interviewer: Yeah, well that’s, and so you were the, the only member of the
corps. How did you get interested in, 1:00in…the WA…WASP program?Engle: Well we had a little two-seated plane that we had been flying in, and
when I read that the, when the war started and we heard that people were going to be needed I took of for, Oh… Interviewer: Dayton, isn’t it?Engle: Dayton, and I got a physical there and they sent me to Sweetwater.
Mr. Engle: No, they sent you to Houston.
Engle: Well, it was Houston. Why don’t you come and do this?
Mr. Engle: Don’t laugh about?
Engle: No, it’s good, it’s good that you do (clears throat). You left me little,
we were in Sweetwater.Mr. Engle: We went to Houston. You were there for a while. And they transferred
the whole training program 2:00to, to… Engle: Sweetwater.Mr. Engle: …Sweetwater, Texas, and you flew a fly, a plane from Houston to…Sweetwater.
Engle: The planes that needed the, if, if they had broken down and been…fixed,
well then they’d send us to take it to where it was supposed to go.Interviewer: Was it, so, during flight training in…in Houston and in Sweetwater,
what kind of program did y…did you go through? What was flight training like at that time?Engle: Well they had, all the ground information and they had some country boys
who had flown and they started teaching us, and…it just went on from there. We all thought 3:00we died and gone to heaven. [Chuckles – Interviewer] Everywhere with these airplanes and feeling like you’re just doing something for your country (clears throat), and…it really was just great, and we would…take them in the fields where they had been made and take them where they needed them and, and if something…one of them had broken down somewhere and they got it fixed, they’d fly one of us up to bring it down, and just anything that they could…they could do, they gave it to us to do. Of course we ( ).Interviewer: What…what were some of the later ladies like that you served with.
Were these all people out of…small communities, or were they from big cities, or… Engle: Well they from, were from all over, from California to Maine, and some of them had had a lot of training, and some of them had not, and wound up having to go home, and…we just, whatever they’d, they needed us to do, if it was bringing them down from the factory 4:00or take one that had been… Interviewer: They, your planes are being manufactured in Houston?Engle: Huh… Mr. Engle: All over the country.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Engle: Yeah.
Mr. Engle: That was, that was their class there, they, let me see that thing.
Engle: Yeah.
Interviewer: You’re, you’re, you’re in the, the fourth class?
Engle: Mm-mm.
Interviewer: And I’ve have seen some of the photographs of…some of the ladies
with their head sticking out of the…the windows with, with lipstick… Engle: [Laughing] It’s, I’m in there.Interviewer: It’s in there?
Engle: I don’t know but… Interviewer: Well the…I was just thinking,
the…u…uniform regulations of… Engle: Well when we first went in, we’d just do with whatever we had, and then they got some…things 5:00that we could wear flying and we felt real, just real important that we had uniforms [Chuckling] ( ). Well it’s true that… Mr. Engle: You can see they, they’ve changed quite a bit--now this pi…picture was taken at, at the reunion in San An…San Antonio, recently, when we were there, this year, I guess, yeah.Interviewer: Now the, the uniform that’s here today, is this the same one that
you wore during the war?Engle: Mm-mm.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Engle: And then I think I had a shirt left of the one that they had before this outfit.
Interviewer: The flight suits here, there are photographs here of two, of two
women in the full leather flight suits, so what was it like trying to fly a plane with all that gear and equipment?Engle: Well and when you’re as short as I am, and I was always at the tail end
of line to pick mine up, 6:00and they were [Chuckling] rolled up, up to here, and up my sleeves and [Chuckling] I swear how I ever got in and out of there, much less flew the thing.Interviewer: Mm. What were the largest, what was the largest plane that you flew
during the war?Engle: Well, the, the largest that I had, that I went flying by myself was a
twin-engine beach craft, but I flew a lot of real big ones. They’d be taking them from one place to another and the pilot would say, you’re on the fly list, so of course anything that flew [Chuckling] I wanted to try it.Interviewer: So basically, I mean, a lot of the men that--if I’m not
correct--were really…trained on one or two types of aircraft, when in reality you gals might have actually, you had better cross-training on a wide variety of aircraft than the men had.Engle: Yeah.
Mr. Engle: I don’t think there is any question about that, that she flew…a
little bit of everything, B-17s, B, B-39s, times, at times some of them, B-25s, big airplanes. Of course you needed, had to have a 7:00co-pilot, but there usually was two gals would take them.Interviewer: The idea of…ferrying the planes there in the Houston Sweetwater
areas, is that where you stayed predominantly through the entire, of your, your full enlistment there in that area?Engle: Mm-mm.
Interviewer: Then you…were in service until what time period? When did you
actually go out of service?Engle: Well, when the war was over.
Mr. Engle: Well, let’s see, it seems like you went out, I think, in forty…five.
We were both stationed in Dallas, Texas. She was stationed in Dallas and when I, I went through…instructor flight school in New Orleans (clears throat) and then she got sent to Dallas, so I pulled some strings and got transferred to…Dallas, 8:00Hensley Field, to instruct. And so, we’d get to see, occasionally got to see each other.Engle: Full and fast.
Mr. Engle: And it was, she was, you know, going all over the country out of, out
of Dallas, out of Love field.Engle: I think we were…the only place we ever left the United States was to take
some in Canada. They wouldn’t let us go overseas. We begged them to, and they…no, no, they wouldn’t do it.Interviewer: Mm-mm. How they… Engle: ( ) Interviewer: …though the…the ladies…had
a lot of difficulty with I guess official recognition. What kind of fields were involved there? I mean you weren’t actually considered part of the air corps, or the army, or whatever, what… Engle: They resented us, because they were being shipped overseas and you know we, they believed we were taking planes that they thought they could have been staying home too. And for course they wouldn’t 9:00let us go with…some of them were a little unpleasant.Interviewer: So was there any like…were there any altercations between the
ladies and the men, you know, when they were bringing the planes in?Engle: No, I don’t think so, I think it was just kind of looking down their nose
at us and we just tried to grind on out, because we didn’t care, and they could be mad if they wanted to [Chuckling] but we were having fun.Interviewer: So you were in the 319th?
Engle: Mm-mm.
Interviewer: How many people were in the 319th?
Engle: I don’t know. Isn’t there a picture in there of all of us?
Interviewer: Yeah, the, the class… Engle: That’s it.
Interviewer: yeah.
Engle: But there were--that was about four classes.
Interviewer: Oh, okay.
Engle: If we were all in this ( ).
Interviewer: How many… Engle: …but I was in the third, the third class to go.
Interviewer: Okay. Were they, how many people would be in one of the classes?
10:00Were they just a small group of three or four? Were they larger… Engle: No, they were, they were a pretty large group. I guess ours was the smallest one because we started out late, but…( ).Interviewer: As, as, Mr. Engle, as far as…the military was concerned you were…a
naval…aviator in the European or Pacific theater?Mr. Engle: I was a flight instructor in the United States.
Interviewer: Mm-mm, okay.
Engle: And in the Navy though, weren’t you about a, half a year older than you…
Mr. Engle: No, no, it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that, because…I was, when the war ended, I was, I already been signed up to go to NATs, Naval Air Transport, 11:00I wanted to fly big planes all over the country, which is, is which is what I was going to do. Then the war started winding down and, and I eventually got out. But I spent most of my time in instructing, in…Naval Air Station in Dallas.Interviewer: And what type of planes were you instructing in, was it..
Mr. Engle: Primary.
Interviewer: Okay.
Engle: The dangerous kind. [Laughter] Interviewer: Yeah.
Mr. Engle: Well that, that’s the truth too, I mean, boy they got killed every
day, ( ), if you stayed there longer than eighteen-month tour of duty, you, you were dead [Chuckles – Third Party] Interviewer: Yeah.Mr. Engle: Forget it.
Interviewer: You went--you…went
12:00in…on what date, or what, what time period was it that you went in the service?Mr. Engle: Well I went in the service… Engle: We went in at about the same time,
didn’t we?Mr. Engle: No, I went in, I was in before you were, because I was in… Engle: All
that… Mr. Engle: …I was in, down in Sweetwater--uh, no I was in Georgia going through pre-flight when you came down here and told me about the, about the WASP Program opening up. But…and I, when I first went in the navy, I tried to get in to flight training and the, I was, I was in the wrong…I wa…I went up to the…naval training base at…at…Chicago. 13:00Interviewer: Great Lakes?Mr. Engle: Great Lakes, and not knowing where to go, or to see or anything like
that, I went--I just lucked in on, I went out to Great Lakes and they said, well they’re, they’re, they’ve got a…recruiting deal down at, I think the Sheraton Hotel in chi…down in, in town. So, I turned around and came back, and they said, well, “oh, yes,” say, “we’re, we’ve got a group here coming through,” they were going through taking physicals and all that thing, and they said, is what he said, “they’ve been signed for, some of them, for a year.” And everybody signed up and got a number. Somebody came along about that time and said, “Number 31,” something happened, and they’re not going to make it, they’re not going to be here. So the guy said, “if you want to go through in his place, why, welcome.” [Laughter – Mr. Engle] I did, and, and I told him, I said, “I want to get into flight training.” He said, “well, we can’t help you there.” But he said, “you 14:00can sign up and go in, and then, and then request flight training, later on.” Which I did and my orders came through later, and then I went into flight training. But I signed up…I signed up I think along about January, right after, right after Pearl Harbor, and got orders, I think in June of…the following June after that. I was an aerial ( ) gunnery instructor there for a while, before, before I went into, before I got into flight training.Interviewer: Mm-mm.
15:00And the…the uniform material that we’re going to borrow…from you, consists of a…a one-piece flight suit, or summer-weight flight suit, and the…leather flight jacket and the leather helmet and goggles. Those are just standard equipment that you wore?Mr. Engle: Yeah, that’s what I wore.
Interviewer: Mm-mm. What--the…the numbers of people that you trained in…through
the process, how many people would have gone through the…training courses that you were involved in?Mr. Engle: Uh…I d…I don’t remember, it was so many. I do remember they had a
little small field there, two landing pads, and we would take off and land…usually about three hundred planes in about fifteen minutes, like a bunch of bees coming in. That’s when they had a whole of accidents, you know. People would land on the top of each other 16:00and students flying and, it, it was pretty bad. I, in fact of the matter, I…do you remember Robert Taylor, the movie, movie star?Interviewer: Mm-mm.
Mr. Engle: I checked him. He went through Naval Air Station in Dallas; several
movie stars went through.Interviewer: Yeah.
Mr. Engle: I went out one night with him, to the…hotel, I was trying to think of
the name of the hotel, where Dean Martin and…and what’s his name? Who was? Jerry Lewis, Martin and Lewis, they started out together, you know, when they first started out, that they put on a, they were, they were at the hotel putting a show on, and I’m sitting there with…Robert Taylor, all these women came up, 17:00boy [Laughter – Mr. & Mrs. Engle] Interviewer: Yeah.Mr. Engle: Terrible. [Laughter – Mr. and Mrs. Engle] Interviewer: [Chuckles –
Interviewer] that’s not too good for a married man now, is it, huh? [Laughter – interviewer] Mr. Engle: It was terrible.Interviewer: Oh! The…the uniforms here, the WASP uniform, the insignia and
everything that’s on here, basically gives us the idea of, of what the uniform is but this, this basically would be a…a dress uniform, or something that you would, you wouldn’t wear this in a cockpit or something that…when would, when would the, you’d wear this uniform?Engle: I’d wear that one in the cockpit, because the, the one that…the one we
wore for dress uniform was a, a longer shirt than that, and I don’t know where it is.Mr. Engle: (Why don’t you?) get it.
Interviewer: Yeah, I think that the one it’s… Interviewer: Yeah.
Engle: If you want something go and get that over here too.
Mr. Engle: I, I’ve…I was looking for the tie, you…found the tie yesterday,
18:00but I couldn’t… Engle: You couldn’t find it today?Mr. Engle: …I didn’t look too well, but I didn’t find it today.
Interviewer: Well, and the one-piece, the one-piece jumpsuit, what was that used for.
Engle: To fly in.
Interviewer: Okay, it was also use as a, primarily the flight suit?
Engle: Mm-mm.
Interviewer: And when you were wearing this, what other kind of accessories
would go with it that… Engle: Well you could, it, it would depend on where you were going. If you were going some place overnight, why you would either wear something underneath it, or, it depended on the weather and, and if you wanted to have something fairly decent to fit into your ( ), if the plane was big enough you’d put it in a suitcase, but the smaller ones, you just climbed in.Interviewer: And you talk about…going places and staying overnight, if you took
a plane from Houston to…I don’t know, to…to someplace, to some other base, 19:00how would you get back? Where there planes going back to? Or… Engle: We could…only the president could put people off a flight, and we were next.Interviewer: Oh, so you’re the number two on the… Engle: Mm-mm, and when we go
into an airport, they’d look at us and just groan because they knew they weren’t going anywhere. But we were, and once in a while we’d sneak and, if it was somebody that really was distressed and needed to get home and somebody dying, why we just pretend we were, we’d go another way and let them go… Interviewer: What… Engle: …and so we got there.Interviewer: What were some of the, the more interesting places that you took
planes to? Were there… Engle: Kind of all over.Mr. Engle: You were up in Canada.
Engle: Yeah, that was the only other country we, we were allowed to go
20:00in, and New York. One of the girls’ father lived in New York, and you would have thought we had saved the nation. He took us [Chuckling] out in a real fine restaurant and he would--I think everybody in New York, by the time we got out of there, was…they just, you’d thought we saved the whole thing, but he…a lot of them in Dayton.Interviewer: Did any of the ladies have any problems in…ferrying the planes, I
know you; did you encounter any difficulties such as… Engle: In-laws?Interviewer: …crashes or…yeah.
Engle: No, I don’t think anybody crashed, did they?
Mr. Engle: Several of them got killed, sure.
Engle: I guess just cause they weren’t in my class.
Interviewer: What kind of difficulties would you experience with the, with the
aircraft, that you might pick up?Engle: Well some of them may…hadn’t been…the
21:00mechanics hadn’t done their work properly and then, now and then, it was the, it was our fault, when somebody forgot to put their landing gear down and that happened a time or two, and they just, you know, not paying any attention.Interviewer: Mm-mm, And I was… Engle: But the women didn’t have too many…of that.
Mr. Engle: When you started, didn’t you go to factories to pick up the plane,
and they, they told you that it wasn’t ready; the wing had dropped off of it?Engle: [Laughter] Yeah…so I got to sit up there and wait for it.
Interviewer: Well that’s kind of disconcerting that you go to pick a plane up,
the wing fell off of it, you…I would think that you flew that one home rather gingerly.Engle: Well I thought they were joking when I stopped in
22:00and had my papers and all that thing, and they said, well it’s not ready [Chuckling] and I, I said, “don’t hand me that stuff,” because they were always teasing us. And…they took me out and showed it, the wing it had fallen off.Interviewer: So you waited basically for them to rivet the wing back on and then
you got in and flew away. I know people that won’t get in a commercial airliner today, if they think there is there is something wrong with the, with anything. I couldn’t imagine flying one away that the wing had just fallen off of it. That’s amazing. Hey, you were…an eastern Kentucky native, you were born where?Engle: Jackson, Kentucky.
Interviewer: In Jackson, Kentucky?
Engle: Uh-huh.
Interviewer: When did you…move out of Jackson?
Engle: huh, I guess when I was going to college, when my dad died, and…
Interviewer: And you went to college where? 23:00Engle: Huh… Mr. Engle: You went to high school for a while, didn’t you?Engle: Yeah.
Mr. Engle: Henry Clay?
Engle: Mm-mm.
Mr. Engle: Didn’t you go to Henry Clay…before you went to college. I, that’s
where I met her was in college.Interviewer: So the, ah…so basically that means that, that I, you were a college
graduate when you entered the WASP program. Were all the ladies college graduates?Engle: No, I don’t think so.
Interviewer: So that wasn’t a requirement to enter the program.
Engle: I don’t think so, I…I think they… Mr. Engle: They all had to.
Engle: …you had to have… Mr. Engle: They had to fly… Engle: …high school.
Mr. Engle: …they all had to have… Engle: Oh yeah, you had to… Mr. Engle: …you
had to have a commercial license or, or just private license?Engle: Well it started out with commercial licenses, and they did, they had many
of those so, so they, yeah.Interviewer: And you had your private license well before the war?
Engle: Mm-mm.
Mr. Engle: She had a commercial license.
Interviewer: Oh, okay.
Mr. Engle: Pretty close to it.
Interviewer: That’s great, oh at…and you’re originally from… Mr. Engle: I, I was
born… Interviewer: Born and raised… 24:00Mr. Engle: A native of Lexington, one of the very few [Laughter – Interviewer and Mr. Engle] Engle: There are not many of those.Interviewer: Oh. And…let’s see, at this point, I really, what I needed to know
for the exhibit label, basically was…your, your name, the time that you went into the service, where you were stationed and when you went out of the service, and that pretty, I think we’ve pretty much covered that, and I guess the same, with you being that you’re primarily you’re, you were stationed in…primarily there in Texas, with…the Naval Air Station in Dallas. Was there a, a, a specific…training program that you were assigned to? Was it given a, a number or...Mr. Engle: That was the name of the air station, Naval Air Station in Dallas,
and we flew out of Hensley Field, 25:00and…that’s between Dallas and Fort Worth, a field that, that…and made us, made us--flew out of the, out of Love Field, right in Dallas, right there in Dallas. We were flying at two different fields.Interviewer: Did you guys get much of chance to see one another? I mean you were
relatively close together. How difficult was it to actually, to see one another during this time period?Mr. Engle: Well, in between, in between… Engle: We couldn’t ( ) Mr. Engle: The
trips she was taking, we had an apartment. So we, I guess we saw quite a bit of each other at that, considering.Interviewer: Yeah when… Mr. Engle: At least twice a week, something like that.
Interviewer: When you, when you went across country delivering one of these
planes, if you, you picked one up somewhere, you took a co-pilot with you? 26:00Engle: No, not if we could get out of it. Now and then [Chuckling] I c…I had one girl who had landed with her gear up, and so I think they, I don’t know why they thought that was going to punish her, because I was the one who got punished. They made her ride with me for a while.Interviewer: Oh no.
Engle: [Chuckling] I don’t know whether she ever washed completely out or not,
but she should have been, anybody that would land an airplane with the gear up [Chuckling]. But anyway… Mr. Engle: Well no that is, this, this airline pilot here the other day… Engle: Yeah, they did, didn’t they.Mr. Engle: …did that very same thing, then they, the…plane coming in behind him,
you might, you might have read the paper, I don’t know.Interviewer: No, I missed this one.
Mr. Engle: There was an airline coming in behind this one and noticed that his
gear wasn’t down, so he radioed the tower and told them the plane ahead of him was, didn’t have his gear down, so the tower radioed 27:00and told him to…abort the flight and take, take off immediately and he still rubbed the runway, boy but he got back up in the air and then dropped his gear and came back down. This is a commercial airline.Engle: Do you supposed he is still a commercial air… Mr. Engle: I imagine he…
Interviewer: There was one of them that…landed…I don’t know, what was it, a 747 or maybe something even larger at the little Frankfort Airport. He thought he was landing in Lexington.Engle: Oh yeah!
Mr. Engle: Yeah, I read, I..
Interviewer: Yeah.
Mr. Engle: …I remember that.
Interviewer: They had to get one of the National Guard guys that flies those
C-47 or c…or, or one, the transport the National Guard flies now. They had to get one of those guys to come and fly it out of there, they couldn’t, the runway was so short, they couldn’t find [Chuckles – Interviewer] anybody to fly it out of there. I…that was…amazing proposition, I’m sure. Well, I guess at this point really, that’s, that’s pretty much what I need, I, what I don’t have is your f…your comp…your full name?Mr. Engle: Mine?
28:00Mine I, my full name is William Robert Engle, e-n-g-l-e. Thank you for finding your tie.Engle: It’s right here…somewhere.
Mr. Engle: I couldn’t find it.
Engle: Well, I found it.
Mr. Engle: You found it yesterday.
Engle: Yeah.
Interviewer: That’s really, all we need, I didn’t want to do any… “END OF INTERVIEW”
29:00