Beverly Weintraub, author of WINGS OF GOLD
On April 21st I had the privilege to interview Beverly Weintraub. Ms. Weintraub is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote for the New York Daily News and Washington Post, and she is currently an Executive Editor at The 74 Media. Her first book, Wings of Gold: The Story of the First Women Naval Aviators, tells the true story of six remarkable women who made history as recruits in a naval aviation experiment in 1972. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joshua Kupietzky: What is your background in aviation, and how did you get involved with writing Wings Of Gold?
Beverly Weintraub: I am a longtime journalist. I won a Pulitzer with some colleagues at the New York Daily News in 2007. I have also been a pilot for the last couple of decades, and I'm involved with a number of aviation organizations. One of my former New York Daily News colleagues works for the opinion section of the Washington Post. So, when something happens involving women and aviation, she will occasionally email me and say, “Would you write something?” For example, when Captain Rosemary Mariner passed away in 2019, the Navy did its first all-woman Missing Man flyover at her funeral. Captain Mariner was one of the six women who went through this experimental program in the 1970s, which was the first time women were officially brought into military flight training.
It was an experiment, and the Navy had no idea what was going to happen, nor did these six women. Captain Mariner became very prominent and was an inspiring leader and a forceful advocate for military women and their rights. She was the first woman to fly a Navy fighter jet and to command an aviation squadron. The flyover made huge headlines, it was national news, so I got an email from this former colleague of mine, who asked if I would write something for the Washington Post, which I did. Then, a couple of months later, an editor from Lyons Press saw it and emailed me and said she thought it would make an interesting book, what do you think? It was hard to say no, and the story sort of fell in my lap. This doesn't really happen, and so really, the story found me.
JK: Wings Of Gold focuses on the first six women Navy pilots as you just mentioned. How did you get all of the information pertaining to these six women pilots? Did you speak with them in person?
BW: Four of them are still alive, and Captain Mariner’s husband had done a fair amount of interviews around the funeral.. So, to get his contact information, I went to a colleague at NBC who had spoken to him and asked if it was okay to share it. I also emailed a number of veterans’ organizations because I really did not know where to find anyone else. One of these veterans’ organizations, specifically for women, put my query out on their listserv, and two of the women responded to that query. Then, I got an email from another woman named Mary Louise Griffin, a retired Navy captain and an airline captain. She was actually one of the driving forces behind the flyover. She is a centerpiece of this female military aviator community, and she had a huge archive. Captain Griffin said, “Come visit me, and I'll show you my archive.” I stayed in her house, and she put me in touch with the other women and their families. She was instrumental in helping to put the book together. I would not have been able to do it without her help. Some of the other women had their own archives. I think they knew they had amazing stories to tell. But, writing the book is pretty daunting, and they realized at some point that they weren’t going to write a book. However, a couple of them kept every last piece of paper, every document, every piece of memorabilia, and they allowed me to come see it. So, I did just that. Before the pandemic hit, I was able to do some traveling.
I was also fortunate in that when these women were brought into flight training in 1973, and with every milestone in their careers, there was huge public interest in them. There was an enormous archive of news stories that were written about them at the time. Most of these articles were about them as individuals because the six women were not actually a class. They were six individual women who were brought into flight training at the same time, but they were split up almost from the start. They never were in the same training squadrons together. Each of their milestones was really made individually and the news stories from the contemporary coverage of the time focuses on each of them as individuals. After having had an initial conversation with these women and their families, I dug into their archives, built timelines, and tried to figure out who was where, when, and how they intersected. After that, I tried to determine what was going on in the country in the military so that I could understand what forces were acting on them in their careers and then what changes they effected in the military and in legislation more broadly. I then went back to the women and got the details to put the meat on the bones of their stories.
JK: You mentioned earlier, you are a pilot. What is your backstory about how you became interested in aviation and what type of pilot’s license do you have?
BW: The first time I flew commercially, when I was eight years old, I was hooked. I wanted to know what all those lights, the numbers on the runway, and the signs, and everything meant.
As a teenager, I told my mother I wanted to learn how to fly, but she put the kibosh on that pretty fast, so I didn't get my private [pilot's license] until I was in my 30s. I have my instrument rating, and I'm involved with the The Ninety-Nines [International Organization of Women Pilots] and was on the board of the Air Race Class for a number of years, which is an annual all women 2500 mile cross country race. I've raced that five times. I have an airplane, and I live in New York. My airplane, however, lives in New Jersey. When my kids were growing up, I was getting my license and they got so jaded. They were like, “Do we have to fly again?” It turns out that my father's whole family was airplane crazy, but when I was a kid, I did not know it. It's kind of an odd family legacy.
JK: Do you have any plans to get the next round of aviation license such as a twin engine?
BW: Probably not. I came really close to getting my commercial [license] a couple of years ago, and then life intervened. I'd have to start from scratch and take the written [test] all over again. At this point in my life, I'm never going to fly commercially. It was more of a goal. I have my tailwheel, and I have my high performance and my complex endorsements. Seaplanes are fun, but they are really slow.
So I think, in terms of training, I may try to get my instrument currency back, but it's a lot more complicated than it was when I did it. There were no GPS approaches at that time. I go to these IMC club meetings and I don't even know how to read the approach plates anymore. So, I'd have to really start over from scratch doing that. Maybe I'll do that someday, but right now I'm just learning how to be a book publicist.
JK: And do you have any plans to write another book about female aviation military aviators?
BW: It's possible. I have some ideas and people have pitched me on various topics. I am not really sure at this point if I'm going to follow any of those routes. There is a story that is sort of hinted at in the current book that I find really interesting, but I don't know if there's enough information out there to make it work. And I just haven't had the time to really dig in and start going through databases and figure that out yet.
JK: Did you find since the 1970s and 1980s, when the book takes place, there have been an increase of women joining the US military and becoming pilots?
BW: There's definitely an increase in the numbers, but the percentages really haven't changed very much in the Navy, in the military, in commercial aviation, and even in general aviation. The numbers are still very small. Unfortunately, some of the same issues that the women in my book confronted, the current crop of female military aviators and commercial pilots continue to confront. It's still some of the same conversations and it’s somewhat disheartening that we are still having the same discussions about, how there are no women's bathrooms in the hangar. Didn’t we solve that in 1973? Apparently not. Just this past summer, the Navy introduced the first ever maternity flight suits. In 1980, Jane Skiles O’Dea had to create a maternity uniform out of civilian clothes because there was nothing, and the Navy had just gotten around to this last year. There is some progress, but a lot of it is just really slow.
JK: How can the US military and aviation as a whole increase that process so more women become pilots?
BW: It is happening. I mean, this is a question that people who know way more about this than I do have been unable to come up with solutions for. To some degree, it's a question of culture change, which usually takes a long time. Things are improving. There are women who have had incredibly productive careers without any resistance at all. And then for some, it's the same old, same old…
JK: What are your takeaways from these extraordinary women you wrote about in Wings Of Gold? And what advice do you have for young aviators, especially for women who want to become pilots and who want to have a career in the aviation industry?
BW: I think you're absolutely right that they are extraordinary women. The most amazing thing about these women are the stories of their perseverance, their courage, and their determination. The way they modeled professionalism and were able to know what their rights were, know what everybody's rights were, and know how it was supposed to work is extraordinary.
Be persistent, be polite, be professional, but don't take no for an answer. If you can't get it one way, well maybe there's another way. Find a mentor once you start moving up a little bit, mentor other people behind you because you never know from where help is going to come. In everything you do people are watching and you're modeling behavior.
