A Cool Woman Died
I don't usually read the obits, but Margaret Ray Ringenberg's caught my eye. The picture above it (in the LA Times print edition only), of the grandma-looking lady in the flight suit with a scarf trailing behind her, says "Lifelong Aviator." The headline reads "Pilot ferried military planes during WWII."

Now, I get carsick from my own driving, and I'm even worse on planes, but I've always loved airplanes and admired the women who did what it took to become aviatrices when the rest of the ladies were home baking bundt cakes. Via the AP:

Margaret Ray Ringenberg, an Indiana pilot who ferried military planes across the country during World War II, died in her sleep Monday in Oshkosh, Wis., where she was attending an Experimental Aircraft Assn. event. She was 87.

...After World War II, Ringenberg served as a flight instructor and competed in numerous air races, including an around-the-world race at age 72.

She continued to fly into her 80s and had logged more than 40,000 miles in the cockpit.

...Ringenberg got the bug to fly when she was a child and a barnstorming pilot landed in a field near her family's farm in northeastern Indiana. After she graduated from high school, she was resigned to becoming a flight attendant -- thinking that was the only job on airplanes available for women.

During World War II, however, flight schools suffered a shortage of students as men were drafted.

She was 19 when she flew solo for the first time in 1941. Then she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

When the war wound down, she returned to the Fort Wayne area. In 1945, during a newspaper strike in Fort Wayne, she flew over the area dropping thousands of leaflets announcing Japan's surrender.

She married banker Morris Ringenberg in 1946 and took a job answering phones at the airport. In the 1950s, she began racing and giving flying lessons. Her husband died in 2003.

Here's her website. Unfortunately, the groovy pic in the L.A. Times isn't on there.