By Donna Sundblad
(based on an interview with Mary Barnard)
Eighty-five-year-old Mary Barnard's long hair flies in the Florida breeze as she tools around her apartment complex in her golf cart. She's the first to admit she never took the time to learn how to drive a car. Her blue eyes sparkle with mischief as she reminisces about her younger years in Tennessee when she learned to drive a motorcycle and fly a plane. This is her story.
In the early 1940’s I worked on the wings of the planes at the airport. I doped them when they’d come in with a slit in the wing or a hole over here or over there. They were small planes, Piper Cubs. Another girl and myself worked together on them. We’d have to keep dopin’ the fabric wings until they went booonggg and made a noise like a drum, and then the inspectors would come in to inspect them before the test pilots took them up to test them.
One day a Colonel in the Air Force watched us work on the wings and he said, “Mary would like to learn how to fly?”
I said, “Oh, I’d love it!”
“I could tell that by the way you worked on the airplane.” He glanced at me and smiled. “You’ve never flown?”
I shook my head. “I’ve never had a lesson.”
“How ‘bout me giving you lessons?”
My heart did a flip-flop. “Oh that would be wonderful.”
So he did; he took me up in a little plane called a Piper Cub and taught me. The worst thing I ever did was almost ‘ground looped.’ We were takin’ off, and the Colonel was teaching me how to take off and land safely. Everyone that knows me knows that I like to do everything quick. I turned the plane around too fast and it almost turned over.
The Colonel let out a breath. “Mary, you scared me to death. We almost ground looped.”
After the lesson of the ground loop, he went on to teach me the good things and bad things that could happen. He said, “Mary, we’re goin’ up now and today we’re going to do the stalls.” That’s cuttin’ your motor off completely while you’re up in the air, and you’re in bad trouble if your motor don’t come back on. You have to do it to get your license. The stalls are very important. You just take your little plane straight up until the motor stalls, and you’re up there without a motor or anything. You know what you do then?
Pray.
I was young. I nosed the plane straight down to catch the motor up. It coughed, hiccoughed and died. We raced straight away toward the ground, and it started. My heart was in my mouth. The Colonel watched my landing and congratulated me. He was a nice man, never charged me one penny for taking lessons. He was older, ready to retire, and he knew all about flying. I wish I could remember his name.
When I worked on the planes I’d pretend I was Amelia Earhart. That’s back when she was in the news. I got my hair cut like hers. She wore her hair real short, and she had freckles. I copied her haircut and already had the freckles. Bless her heart, she’d already crossed the Atlantic but she tried to go around the world. She had to go across all that water and she disappeared. Nobody ever heard from her again. I just loved her and it hurt me when she disappeared and they couldn’t find her. I couldn’t believe it. And they still don’t know what happened to her, and she was in a Piper Cub too.
I didn’t keep up with my flying. I lost all confidence after Amelia Earhart had her trouble.
You know I use to scare my mother. I’d say, “Mother, I’m comin’ across here today. Get out and wave. I’m gonna dip my wings to ya,” that was my way of tellin’ her and my daughter Margie ‘hi’.
My mother would say, “Mary, you’re goin’ crazy. I’m not going to go out there and let you dip those wings. You’re gonna kill yourself.”
I said, “Here I am flyin’ and you don’t trust me.”
Mother shook her head. “Mary is there anything you haven’t done.”
“Yeah a few things, Mother, I’ve never worked at a defense plant.” Not soon after that, I started working at a defense plant. My daughter, Margie, remembers when I worked at the defense plant because I had to sleep all day because I worked at night. I was on the midnight shift.
We lived with my mother then, because Margie’s daddy was in the army. I was very, very cautious when workin’ in the defense plant. I felt like I was helpin’ out some. I ran a lathe. It sanded big torpedo casings. My mother said, “What are you going to do next?”
I went over to Oak Ridge and worked in the hospital. People came through me to register. I’ve forgotten what my title was.
Oak Ridge was a rural farm area encircled by mountains and water. The army surrounded us. The government secured the area to build plants and to manufacture the atomic bomb. You had to have a pass and go through an armed guard gate to get in and out of town. None of the employees or their families knew what was being made, and they didn’t talk about their work. We knew it was a secret, but we didn’t know what the secret was until they dropped the bomb. Truman was president then.
Published U.S. Legacies April 2005
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