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THE TIMES-UNION 
Family  Section C
Want Ads ... 3C
Comics ... 7C
Rochester, N.Y., Friday Evening, January 31, 1969

[[image]]
[[caption]] The subject was flying at Zonta Club's annual Amelia Earhart dinner.  Speakers Blanche Stuart Scott (left) and Mrs. David M. Gitelman (center) and Mrs. Norma R. Fox, dinner chairman, spiel off some aeronautical lingo. [[/caption]]

[[?Gadc]]

She Was a Pioneer in Skies
By MILDRED MIKKANEN
Editor of the Family Section

[[image]]
—Times-Union Photo—Gordon Massecar
[[caption]] New officers of the Susan B. Anthony Republican Club include Mrs. Edward C. Ehrlich (left), first vice-president, and Mrs. Robert L. Criddle of Chili, president. [[/caption]]

Don't ever ask Blanche Stuart Scott of Alexander Street her age "because that's a fighting word with me."

Like Jack Benny she is forever 39, even though, while still in her teens in 1910, she was the first American woman to pilot a plane.

"I would have been the first woman in the world if Baroness de la Roche of France hadn't beaten me by two weeks," she told the 125-member Zonta Club at its annual Amelia Earhart Dinner in the Statement, formerly Pilgrim's Landing.

The late Miss Earhart in 1928 was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.  She was lost in 1937 on a Pacific flight.  She was a Zontian and in her honor the clubs given women fellowships for graduate study in aeronautics.  Mrs. Edward Perkins, president of the local club, said Zonta has financed 80 Earhart scholars to date.

Mrs. Scott, who knew Miss Earhart slightly — "we all called her A.E., but compared to us oldtimers she was a Johnny-come-lately in aviation" — claims her own solo flight in Hammondsport was "an accident.  In those days planes were kites with a motor in them.  I was practicing grass cutting — taxiing around a pasture — when a gust of wind caught the plane and I hopped up and down 12 to 14 feet.  It really wasn't a flight.  A month later I piloted a real flight."

Earlier that year, as a publicity stunt, she was the first woman to drive a car across the country.  "If I were young today, I'd probably be a delinquent.  Would I go to the moon?  Oh yes, but then I'm not terrible sane," she said, laughing and shaking her blonde curls that she confessed were "mostly a wig." 

She's had a lively life as a screen writer, been in radio, newspaper and television work, acted as a consultant to the Air Force.  She still writes and lectures and plans a book she'll call "Not on a Broom."

THE SMALL gold pair of wings pinned on her white blouse proclaimed her an "Early Bird," one of the men and women who flew before World War I.  The medallion hanging from her neck was imprinted with the head of Glenn L. Curtiss, pioneer aviator and her instructor, and "means I'm a member of the Antique Airplane Society."

Mrs. David Gitelman, the other speaker, had a different pin.  "I'm a member of the 99s, an international group of women pilots.  Amelia Earhart 

Transcription Notes:
Do the three dots between "Not on a Broom" and "THE SMALL..." need to be transcribed? Also, do the credits for the two images need to be transcribed?