Alta Thomas, a flier at 25, pulled targets across the sky so gunners on the ground could shoot at them.
And by seizing an opportunity nearly seven decades ago, the Sequim woman joined a select group of pilots who blazed a trail for their sisters — while receiving little recognition for their service.
Thomas, now a spry 91, was a WASP, a Women’s Airforce Service Pilot, who helped train troops on U.S. military bases during World War II.
As the first women in history trained to fly U.S. military aircraft, WASPs flew noncombat missions, including towing targets for air-to-air gunnery and ground-to-air anti-aircraft practice, and served as trainers.
Now, 67 years after Thomas flew her first missions over Georgia, she and some 200 other surviving WASPs are to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.
In a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol on March 10, Thomas will join the ranks of Congressional medal honorees, including George Washington, Rosa Parks, Jonas Salk, Robert Frost and Harry S. Truman.
Thomas is one of 11 living Washington state WASPs expected at the ceremony; 16 others will be honored posthumously.
The honors spring from legislation co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Rep. Susan Davis, D-Calif., and signed into law by President Barack Obama last summer.
Sen. Patty Murray, the Democrat from Freeland, was among those supporting the bill.
“These brave pilots have empowered and inspired decades of women service members,” Murray said last week. “This is a recognition that is long overdue and richly deserved.”
In receiving the gold medal, the WASPs have traveled a long way from the days when, despite flying dangerous missions to help prepare male service members for overseas battle, they received no military benefits nor honors, and had to pay for their own training and their own way back home.
The pilots were granted veteran status in 1977, more than three decades after they served.
But try asking Thomas if she has any “it’s about time” feelings, and you hear something else entirely.
‘A privilege to fly’
“It was such an absolute privilege to fly,” she said Friday, sitting in her sunlit family room.
“This was just before aviation took hold . . . it was an adventure.”
As a girl growing up in Portland, Ore., Thomas chose her own set of bibles: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s tales of aviation adventure, Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars.
Ask her what it feels like up there, and she recites a poem that begins, “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth / And danced the skies on laughter-slivered wings . . . Up, up the long delirious burning blue / I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace . . . The high untrespassed sanctity of space / Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
John Gillespie Magee’s poem, “High Flight,” still elicits a lump in Thomas’ throat — and tears in the eyes of her two grown daughters, Deborah McGoff and Kelly Thomas.
They visited their mother on Friday, eager to hear her share her story with a reporter.
Thomas comes from a family of five girls whose father, she said, “wanted us to be skilled in something before we got married.”
So Thomas earned a degree in history from Smith College, plus private and commercial pilot’s licenses.
She had a War Department job at the Pentagon when she heard about the WASP program, and as Kelly said, “knew what she wanted and went after it.”
Boss threatened her
Thomas’ boss told her she was frozen in her office job, and that if she tried to go elsewhere, she’d be blackballed.
Another higher-up, however, went to bat for her.
This colonel “wangled a transfer,” Thomas recalled, and she went to Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, for WASP training in February 1943.
She joined the ranks of women who flew fighter, bomber, transport, and training aircraft, serving for two years.
Other WASPs’ planes took hits, and 38 WASPs died in the line of duty, but Thomas was never hit.
“The men were so eager to go overseas,” Thomas remembered, “they wanted us to replace them” at U.S. military bases.
The WASPs were unceremoniously disbanded in late 1944, when the end of the war in Europe was imminent.
Thomas, then 26, went looking for work in aviation, but with returning male pilots seeking those jobs, she instead landed a post as a radio teletype operator in Gustavus, Alaska.
A new adventure
Her flying days were over, but living in Alaska was another adventure Thomas reveled in.
There, she met Ralph Thomas, who was married at the time.
“It never occurred to us to have a romance, But we were very good friends,” she said.
Thomas later moved back to her home state and into a cabin in the Willamette National Forest, and “sort of lived off the land.”
Then, one day, she crossed paths with Ralph, who was divorced and working nearby on the McKenzie River’s Cougar Dam.
They were married June 8, 1961, and Thomas, a 43-year-old woman who’d faced some big challenges in her young life, called herself “scared stiff.”
Of what? “Three. Meals. A day . . . I just didn’t think I could,” she replied. Settling down was a foreign thing.
Fortunately, Ralph told her he loved to cook, and was a good cook.
“When he’d go off to work,” on extended trips, “the neighbors would tell me about easy recipes.”
Ralph died at age 99 in 2003. These days Thomas gardens and enjoys time with her daughters and their families — who are planning their trip to Washington, D.C., to see their mother and grandmother receive the Congressional gold medal.
“We’re all going,” said Deborah, referring to her husband, Tom, their children Noah, 11, and Jenna, 6, along with Kelly and her partner Sherri Lewis.
Of the medal, Thomas will only say, “I am humbled by it.”
She doesn’t dwell on how the WASPs were treated during and after the war, and she’s quiet when her daughters talk about how the WASPs were unsung pathfinders.
She’s been an inspiration to her girls, too.
“She taught me,” said Deborah, “that you can do or be anybody you want to. Don’t let anybody tell you ‘You can’t . . .’
“The greatest compliment anybody could give me would be to say I am like my mom.”
Kelly added that her mother led by example, never by lecture.
“It’s never been about ‘You should do this,'” Kelly said.
“And I can honestly say, I have never heard her speak ill about anyone,” including those who, back in the mid-20th century, didn’t believe women could fly.
“I never thought a thing about it,” Thomas said. “I live too much in the present.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
