Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. Ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8, we’re honoring a few Baylor women who have made history with this Classic article from spring 2000. Click here to watch interviews from Wings Across America and see its progress over the last 25 years.
Their slogan could have been, “We’re looking for a few good women,” but there were no slogans for the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in the 1940s. In fact, there continues to be very little recognition for the first women in history to fly American military aircraft. Two Baylor alumnae are helping to change that—Ruth Dailey Helm 37 (pictured in dress uniform) was a WASP, and Nancy Parrish ’71, MA ’80, is documenting her story along with those of every other WASP she can find.
Parrish and her mother, Deanie, herself a former WASP, founded Wings Across America in conjunction with Baylor. The organization is dedicated to the history and memory of the WASP program.
“We want to inspire the next generation with the story of these women,” said Parrish, an independent producer. Because male pilots were needed exclusively for combat duty during World War II, Parrish said, the Army Air Force reluctantly recruited hundreds of women pilots. From 1942 through 1944, more than a thousand women aided the U.S. military by ferrying and flight testing aircraft, transporting cargo and personnel, and serving as instrument and flight instructors. Although the women didn’t fly combat missions, thirty-eight lost their lives while serving as military pilots. But because the women had never been granted veteran status, the program was never officially recognized. At the end of 1944, it was abruptly disbanded, and government documents pertaining to the project were either destroyed or archived.
“Every one of these women has a fascinating story,” Parrish declared, and it is her goal to see that each woman finally gets to tell it. “I thought about doing a documentary, but when you can tell a story in an exciting, entertaining way then you’ve got something really special. And that’s what the Internet gives us.”
With start-up funds from initial contri-butions, Parrish secured an official website (http://wasp-wwii.org) in 1998 when Baylor became part of the program, granting access to television equipment, fundraising assistance, and student interns. In 1999 the program became an official Baylor telecommunications division project, but it still needs funding.
The program officially kicked off its fundraising campaign during Baylor’s 1999 Homecoming parade. It was there that Ruth Dailey Helm was honored with a flyover of World War II aircraft. “That was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Helm said. Helm—who, as a WASP, flew fighter planes and B-25 Bombers out of Dallas’s Love Field—later went on to be inducted into the Arizona Aviation Hall of Fame. Helm calls the WASP program “a wonderful chapter in my life. We were put through the most rigid training: we certainly weren’t given any privileges. In fact, we had to be a little bit better than the men.”
Helm is very supportive of Wings Across America: “Nancy Parrish is doing something wonderful because it’s oral history.” With the help of independent PBS stations across the country, Parrish plans to videotape each of the six hundred WASP survivors who live in forty-seven states. Each WASP will have her own Web page, linked to the existing Internet site. Once the video archive is completed, a digital library and a virtual museum will be created, providing visitors with research material and film clips.
To date, Wings Across America has videotaped five WASP members, including a Carmelite Nun who received a special dispensation from the Vatican to travel from her French Antilles monastery to Waco to tell her story. Parrish said that more than 250 pilots have agreed to be interviewed, but in a little over a year thirty of those women have since dies. As Parrish says, time, as well as money, is of the essence.
After being in what she calls “the best kept secret of the war,” Helm says that it’s past time for the WASP program to get the recognition that has been so long in coming. “I think we should tell our story before someone rewrites history for us.”
