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Area Woman Air Pioneer Honored in Capital Rites

Washington - (GNS) - Some of aviation's biggest names last night paid tribute to a petite former Rochester woman, one of the first women in the world to solo in an airplane. 

She is Mrs. Blanche Stuart Scott of Hornell, only woman ever taught to fly by air pioneer Glenn H. Curtiss. She took her plane aloft alone for the first time from Curtiss' School at Hammondsport, in S t e u b e n County, 43 years ago, in 1910. 

Gen. James H. Doolittle at a banquet here last night presented Mrs. Scott with a gleaming bronze medal in recognition of her service to aviation. 

She was one of the 10 aviation pioneers from all parts of the world, invited here by the Aeronautics Association of the United States to receive its medal and scroll. Four of the 10 are women.

Speakers at last night's affair were Sinclair Weeks, secretary of commerce; Cornelis Kolff of the Netherlands, president of the Federation of Aeronautique International, and Gordon McGregor of Canada, president of the International Air Transport Association. All praised the vision and courage of Mrs. Scott and the other air pioneers.

The medal, presented by Gen. Doolittle for the U. S. Aeronautics Organization, is about three inches in diameter. One one side os a profile of the Wright Brothers, and on the other a super-jet plane and the Wright flyer, which the Wright Brothers, first took into the air at Kitty Hawk, N. C., 50 years ago. 

The scroll accompanying the medal said it was given to Mrs. Scott in appreciation and recognition of her "real pioneering efforts which have contributed so importantly to the continuing progress of aviation during the first half-century since Kitty Hawk."

[[Image with caption "MRS. BLANCHE S. SCOTT]]