This week I’m hosting Lorraine Beatty with Bachelor to the Rescue (Bachelor to the Rescue plus His Small-Town Family US only) and Anne Greene with Angel with Steel Wings (US only). If you want to enter the drawings for the books, please leave a comment on your post with your email address. I will not enter you without an email address (my way to contact you if you win). If you don’t want to leave an email address, another way you can enter is to email me at margaretdaley@gmail.com. The drawings end Sunday (May 17th) evening.
Interview with the heroine from Angel with Steel Wings by Anne Greene:
1. Mandy McCabe, tell me the most interesting thing about you.
I learned to fly a two-seat Cessna airplane in 1939 when most women didn’t even drive automobiles. I traded dates with a barnstormer pilot, and he taught me to fly. Three years later when I joined the WASPs, Women Air Service Pilots, the Army Air Corps taught me to fly every type of plane made. I also flew planes towing targets so the new Army trainees could learn to shoot live bullets in defense of our country during World War II. My service freed draftees to go into combat. My stint as a WASP changed my life.
2. What do you do for fun?
I saved every penny I earned to buy into my own flight school, so avoided getting serious with the numerous men I met at USO dances and other military functions. But we lady pilots made up patriotic songs together, sun bathed together, and did our patriotic duty entertaining the lads who would soon leave the base and fly in combat.
3. What do you put off doing because you dread it?
The other WASPs chose me to save our program from being riffed due to a chauvinistic base commander. My mission was to date our Major to influence him to influence the base commander not to scrap our program as he had done at other bases. I thought dating the captain was like fatting a pig to eat his bacon and dreaded every moment we spent together.
4. What are you afraid of most in life?
I fear ending up back where I started—in a dead-end life in Hangman’s Hollow, Tennessee, married to a minor and mother to a passel of children like my three older sisters. My pappy already tried a shot-gun wedding to keep me home.
5. What do you want out of life?
I want to put the things I learned in the Army to use when the war ends. I want to be my own woman. I want to fly. Flying is breath to my lungs. I want to own my own flight school.
6. What is the most important thing to you?
After my Christian walk, and owning my own flight school, I want to make the man I love happy. It took me a long time to fall in love and I want our love to last a lifetime.
7. Do you read? If so, what is your favorite type of book to read?
Up to this point in my life I’ve had precious little time to read. I do plan to read other books than those pertaining to flight training and manuals as soon as I gain the opportunity. I’m sure I will love books about history and books containing suspense.
8. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
People always pick me out as a leader. Someday I’d like to be lost in the crowd.
9. Do you have a pet? If so, what is it and why that pet?
No pet yet. I’ve been on the move too much to care for a pet. But if I did have a pet, I’d probably choose a big dog. I like to run and would find it lovely to run with a dog.
10. If you could travel back in time, where would you go and why?
I’m far more interested in the future. I know the war radically changed opportunities for women. I’d like to go forward into the 21st century and see what women have accomplished.
