Margaret Phelan Taylor grew up on a farm in Iowa. She was 19, had just completed two years of college and was ready for adventure in 1943 when a Life magazine cover story on the female pilots caught her eye. Her brother was training to be a pilot with the Army. Why not her? She asked her father to lend her money for a pilot's license — $500, a huge amount then.
"I told him I had to do it," Taylor says. "And so he let me have the money. I don't think I ever did pay it back to him either."
But there was a problem. She was half an inch shorter than the 5-foot-2-inch requirement.
"I just stood on my tiptoes," she says. When she arrived at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, where most of the WASP were trained, "Well, there were a lot of other short ones just like me, and we laughed about how we got in."
Learn more from the amazing site. http://www.npr.org/2010/03/09/123773525/female-wwii-pilots-the-original-fly-girls
Women can and do make a difference in the world.
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