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WOMEN'S INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF AERONAUTICS, NEW YORK 

[[image - stamp of spread wings]]

January 1966

Dear Member:

Happy New Year and thank you for all the beautiful Christmas cards.

This started out to be a long delayed news letter about our members, but on compiling the news we find that too little has been sent in about all our members.

It has been said that an organization's history is the backbone of its existence. Our WIAA has certainly had a useful and colorful history. It was organized in 1931  and Viola Gentry, pioneer pilot and charter member of this New York Branch, has struggled along with a very small group here to keep alive our interest and useful activities. Many clubs have had to go out of existence, but we are going to appeal to all who would like to help us continue our deep interest in aviation and the pioneers who did so much in the early days of flying.

Some of our club history was made around world events and is of interest to recall. The New York Branch of the WIAA was organized with activities at both Floyd Bennett Field and at Roosevelt Field where our member, Annette Gipson, held the Annette Gipson All Women's Air Races of 1933-1934. Many will remember those brilliant events when girls came from all over the U.S. in all sorts of begged or borrowed planes to participate. Amelia Earhart, always a most colorful figure, was the starter in both races. A brilliant dinner dance always followed.

When I was elected president of this group in 1935, and as green as grass, my only connection with aviation was the fact that I was sent by the newspaper I worked for to write up what women were doing in aviation. I was startled soon after being elected by Viola Gentry, who said Wiley Post was lost and that our club would place a bronze plaque at Floyd Bennett Field on the very spot where he had taken off and landed on his return from his first "around the world solo flight". In two weeks the plaque was place on the apron with proper civic ceremony!

We remember how thrilling it was to go to NAS, Lakehurst, N.J. to meet our international president, Lady Grace Hay Drummond-Hay and Clara Adams when they came on the first flight of the Airship Hindenburg. How many times we went to see Clara Adams off on most of her "first world commercial airline flights". She is well known as "first flighter", and has a long history in travel by regular airlines.

Our club was very active in the early days when we always met pilots who flew into Floyd Bennett Field, Roosevelt, Newark and LaGuardia, and we held breakfasts, luncheons and dinners for them. A few of the women pilots included Elvy Kalep from Estonia who created her "Parachute" and "Scribbles" dolls and wrote her "Air Babies" book; also Ya Ching Lee, then China's foremost woman pilot who came here to raise funds for China. Then the foreign girl pilots also