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For Elizabeth Wall Strohfus, her second life began at age 71.
An interviewer delving into Strohfus' past in 1991 discovered that the Faribault native had flown airplanes during World War II for the
Army Air Force. "I say that's when I came out of the closet, because I had all my Air Force stuff put away in a closet," Strohfus said. "I found out that people were interested in it."
For Strohfus,
the digging up of her past meant a new career of traveling the state and the nation giving programs on her service during the war. She gives 40 to 50 programs a year to school kids, veterans groups and
military reunions.
And at age 85, she's still going strong, still a bundle of happy energy, still enjoying every minute of her life and her military fame. Wall/Strohfus was one of about 1,000 women
pilots during the war, and she likes nothing better than to tell her story.
Elizabeth Wall grew up in Faribault during the Depression, graduating from Faribault High School in 1937. "I had such a
happy childhood, I didn't even know we were poor."
Wall graduated with Bruce Smith, a good student and football player who went on to be the University of Minnesota's only Heisman Trophy winner. "I
was so scared of boys at that time that I didn't know him well. I was too shy. But he was very nice and very humble."
Her father had retired as a farmer, selling his land, during the early 1930s. He
moved to Faribault and put his nest egg in a bank. The bank folded, and the money was gone. "Obviously, he never trusted banks after that."
Elizabeth was the second youngest of six kids. "I was a
tomboy. I loved to play ball, and I loved to climb things. I was always trying to get up in the air, by shinnying up a telephone pole or sitting on a rooftop.
"I didn't like girly things, and my
sister would make me sit still on the couch while she fixed my hair. I could hardly wait to get out of there and let my hair loose."
After high school, one of her sisters found out there was a job
opening at the county courthouse in the registrar of deeds office. "In those days, it didn't matter if you liked a job, you were just happy to have one. You didn't get a bonus for good work, you got to
keep your job."
Wall worked as a clerk, and then advanced to deputy registrar while still in her teens. "I made $50 month, but I didn't need it. I'd come home and give all my money to my mother except
for a few dollars. I had those three older sisters, so I had plenty of clothes."
Along the way, she found out about a Sky Club at the little Faribault Airport. It had a membership of 15 men who each
contributed $100 to join. The money was used to maintain a 65-horsepower Piper Cub aircraft. There was also a minimal fee for each hour flown.
For Wall, the Sky Club seemed like a dream. She would go
over and clean their office, or just hang around hoping to get a free ride in the airplane. On her first flight, one of the club members decided to give her a little thrill and did a stall and spin.
"He asked if I wanted to do it again. I'm sure he thought I was going to get sick, but I said, 'Sure.' We did it about 10 more times, and when we landed, he was sick."
Wall desperately wanted to join
the club, but she didn't have the membership fee. "So I went down to the local bank and asked for a loan. When I told the banker why, he thought I was crazy. But he knew my family, and he knew we were
poor but honest. He used my bike as collateral, and he even co-signed the loan."
For Wall, it was like heaven. She quickly mastered the intricacies of the Cub, and had many happy hours of flying. "I
had always been shy, but being up in the air was where I belonged. And I was treated so well, with 14 guys and only one gal."
In 1942, after World War II had started, Wall learned of a program for
Women's Airforce
Service Pilots, or WASPs. She was eager to join, but there was one little problem: Her boyfriend, who was already in the service, didn't want her to join. "He said that anybody who goes into the Air Force couldn't be his gal. I told him that whatever I do, I'll still be me." Wall was faced with choosing him or flying. It was no contest.
"You had to have 35 hours of flight time to join the WASPs or a private license." A friend let her get extra hours in on his plane, and Wall qualified for an interview at Ft. Snelling. She was one of
over 25,000 women who volunteered for the new, experimental program and only 1,800 were accepted. In the end, just over a thousand earned their wings.
Wall was sent to Avenger Field in Sweetwater,
Texas, for ground school. As she entered the program, she realized that she was beginning a whole new life for herself. Always known as Liz at home and around Faribault, she chose to be called Betty in
her new surroundings.
Betty Wall loved the flight training, but found much of the academic work very challenging. "What did I know about meteorology? In Faribault, if the sky was clear, we flew. If it
wasn't, we didn't." She also had classes on such things as engines and Morse code.
"I thought physics were things you took for a stomach ache."
While she struggled with the ground classes, her
flying went well. The students would fly in the morning and do classes in the afternoon, or vice versa. They flew PT-19 trainers that had 250 horsepower engines, a big difference from the Cub she was
used to.
Later as training advanced, she flew BT-13s and later AT-6s, the plane she loved the most. The women did all their training at Avenger Field, unlike the male pilots who usually changed fields
for every stage of their training.
For a while, the field became a popular stopping point for male pilots who had – officially — run out of gas, or were having engine trouble. The lure of hundreds of
female pilots in training was too great. The Army Air Force, though, finally put the field off limits and the friendly visits ended.
As her training came to a close, she again was faced with a
life choice between her fiancée at the time, and her Army Air Force career. She considered resigning for a time in order to get married. In the end, flying won out again.
"It was between him and the
AT-6, and I chose the AT-6. And you know what, we both lived happily ever after."
Wall graduated with the first class of 1944, the ninth class overall to graduate from the program.
Many of the
graduates went on to work ferrying aircraft around the country and overseas, freeing up other pilots to do their work in the war zone. Wall and eight others from her class, though, volunteered to fly
pursuit aircraft and they were sent to the airfield at Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Las Vegas base was a school for gunnery, and the women got a chance to fly a variety of aircraft including twin-engined
bombers.
On her orientation flight at the new base, a pilot took her in an AT-6 on an adventurous flight that included a dive bombing maneuver – all with the cockpit open. The pilot then turned the
craft over to Wall who tried to emulate the training flight, including the dive with the canopy open.
"I lost my hat, I lost everything. If I hadn't been strapped in, they would have lost me."
One
of her classmates, was, in fact, nearly lost. She was with another pilot when they did a roll and the woman pilot's seatbelt broke. Fortunately she was wearing her parachute. Later, back in the ready
room, the other pilots were excitedly waiting to hear the woman's story. She simply said, "When I realized I'd left the aircraft, I counted to ten and pulled the cord."
The women and men assigned to
the base performed a variety of tasks for the pilots learning gunnery, including towing targets to shoot at, and diving into formations to test the gunner's skills. Sometimes live ammunition was used (at
the towed targets), and sometimes the guns were cameras that recorded the action.
The live ammo that was used to shoot at the towed targets was color coded. "At least the colored bullets let us know
who was putting the holes in our planes and not in our targets."
It was like living a dream for Wall. "We were only supposed to fly four hours a day, but sometimes the guys would come back from Las
Vegas a little under the weather, and they'd ask me to take their shift. Lord, I loved to fly those airplanes. If I could get eight hours a day in, I'd always do it."
At 5-3, Wall was on the bottom
end of what the Army Air Force would accept for a pilot's size. The cockpits were designed for larger people. "I'd have to sit on two cushions and have my parachute behind me so I could reach everything."
Eventually she did come down with some flying fatigue, and was sent home to Faribault for a week and then shipped off to Orlando for two weeks to attend Officer Tactical School where she learned,
among other things, how to eat a snake.
Later, she went back to Sweetwater for more training on instruments, was qualified as an instructor, and began teaching instruments to the male pilots going to
school at Las Vegas.
On one mission, she was asked to dive into a group of gunners in an emplacement. She thought the orders said 50 feet, and she was happy to oblige. Wall took great delight in
watching the gunners hit the deck, flat out. Later she found out she had misread the orders and the dive was only supposed to go within 500 feet of the ground.
At one point, she was asked to fly a
P-39, one of the "hottest" of American war planes. She was confident she could fly it, but she was worried about the landing. The officer in charge told her not to worry because he would talk her down on
the radio.
She had a ball in the P-39, finding out what it could do, but when it came time for landing, the radio went dead. Wondering if it was some kind of test, she analyzed her situation. She took
the aircraft through a series of stalls to find out the best landing speed, and then made her approach.
Below she could see that they had called out every piece of fire fighting and ambulance
equipment on the base, and it was standing by awaiting her first landing in a P-39.
Wall touched down right at the tip of the runway, made a very nice landing, but was unable to bring the airplane to a halt until there were only a few feet left at the rear of the runway.
Happy to
have made it, she saw a jeep scream up to her plane and the officer jumped out. "Hell of a landing Wall," he said. "But why didn't you use your flaps?"
Wall said it wasn't her only miscue in her Air
Force career, but she doesn't talk much about the other ones.
It was a glorious year for Wall, but it came to a sad end when the Army decided to disband its WASP program in December of 1944. The main
reason given for canceling the women's program was that there were plenty of pilots coming home from Europe and the Pacific, who had served their tours, and could do the work the women were doing. Some
historians also saw political reasons for the end of the program.
"They just said, 'Thank you girls,' and that was it. It broke our hearts."
Despite the amazing work the WASPs did in a critical
phase of the war, they were never considered an official part of the military. They never were granted commissions, and they never had insurance.
When a woman pilot was killed, and 38 died during the
war, their families had to pay for the cost of shipping the body home. If the family couldn't afford it, the other women pilots chipped in for the burial costs.
Wall found herself back at home in
Faribault without a job. "And I'll tell you that after flying a B-17, that 65-horse Cub wasn't much of a challenge anymore."
Wall was now qualified with a commercial license, and she was checked out
on many planes including sea planes and four-engined planes. She could also do instrument flying.
She tried for a job at Northwest Airlines. "I had all the credentials, but it was too early for female
pilots. They offered me a job in the front office, but I told them what they could do with it."
Back home, Wall estimates she had 15 jobs in two years as she tried unsuccessfully to fit back into
civilian life. In the end, though, she married a hometown boy and they had five children together.
Later, she ran for registrar of deeds in Rice County, but lost the election. Looking back, she says
it was a blessing. She eventually moved to New York where she worked as a researcher for the American Cancer Society.
She traveled to 26 states and did studies for over nine years. She eventually came
back to Faribault where she's lived since 1979.
Elizabeth Wall Strohfus married three times, and was widowed three times. She has five children and many grandchildren.
Looking back, she says she
doesn't harbor any hard feelings over the way the Army Air Force ended the program, or treated the WASPs while the program was going.
"I have no regrets. I just feel lucky that I got to fly."
In
1979, with the help of Sen. Barry Goldwater, and after years of work by Gen. Hap Arnold, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Jacqueline Cochran, the founder of the WASPs, the women were finally recognized by Congress
as veterans.
They were issued DD214s and given all veterans benefits. Strohfus, who had been active in the Auxiliary, including Third District president, then became active in the Faribault American
Legion.
Since her "discovery" in 1991, Wall-Strohfus has been in continuous motion, speaking at schools, air shows, and dozens of other places. She's a member of the 8th Air Force Association, and an
honorary member of that group's historical society. She's also a member of the Commemorative Air Force.
She loves talking to the Air Force veterans. "They're all such darlings, such great people. I
like to give them all a hug. I figure there's safety in numbers."
Strohfus has traveled to 22 states with her slide show, and she loves talking to school kids. "I tell them that unless it's illegal or
immoral, they should do everything they can to pursue their dream."
For several years she wore her authentic service uniform to give talks, but it eventually wore out. Now she wears a replica to the
sessions.
She said she has had little trouble in relating to the high school kids who are often considered a tough audience. "I've never found a group that I can't interact with."
She has shared a
dais with Tom Brokaw, flown an F-16, and had Barry Goldwater do a blurb for her autobiography, a book her son helped put together. She has no plans of letting up. "I might have to slow down at some point
just to see how old I really am."
Wall/Strohfus flew eight different aircraft during the war, and she had the time of her life.
"It's was a very, very interesting time. They let me fly all those
airplanes, and I will be forever grateful to them."
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