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Bu ck died 1924, age 29
Sam died 1926, age 29

[[newspaper clipping]]

HOME - JUNKIN - 2-COL ART
[[unreadable]] 1929
By ERNEST MOOREFIELD.

SOME persons call them tragedies, or hard knocks, or bad breaks.

But Mrs. Hattie Myers Junkin, 4123 Packard avenue, calls them "jokes". Or, falling into the vernacular of the flying field with which she is so intimately associated, she refers to them as "cadet landings" to signify a crackup or a nasty spill. 

In a way, that typifies the woman, who is a pattern of paradoxes.

She is an aviatrix who has flown thousands of miles, yet has never manipulated a plane. 

****

SHE is talkative, but she can keep a secret. 

She is tomboyish, but she harangues against the usurpation of masculine traits and thoughts by women. 

She is an author, but her life's ambition is to be a pianist. 

She is a dreamer of dreams in a life that she has regulated in a practical, orderly fashion. 

****

PERHAPS it is the last characteristic that more adequately reveals the young mother of two children. In the face of what seemed a maddening futility, a cruel frustration, Mrs. Junkin has kept her idealism. Twice widowed by the death of aviators, each the dearest friend of the other, none of the courage has gone out of her life.

By a queer twist of fate, death did not claim her husbands, each a pioneer in American aeronautics, in the wild glory of flight, but came on stealthy feet to a sickroom whose anxious quietude mocked the whirling blast of a plane motor.

****

Mrs. Junkin's first husband, George E. Weaver - everyone called him "Buck" - was one of the men who had a leading part in America air-minded. He was one of [[right margin annotation]] 75 [[/left margin annotation]] 35 civilian instructors who gave the A.E.F. its wings, and after the war he put his dreams of the air onto paper and formed the company at Troy, O., that now manufactures Waco planes. Weaver was among the first to develop area-dynamics.

"Sam" Junkin, at 21 an inspector of aircraft during the world war, married his friend's widow a year after Weaver's death, in 1924. Junkin died Nov. 1, 1926. The baby from the second marriage is Janet, 3.

****

"But those are just the little jokes of life," Mrs. Junkin says. I've lost so much, but then I've kept so much too. Courage, and hope and idealism and dreams and a discretionary sense of balance."

Now she is going to write about her life. The "starvation" days, when aviators buttered their bread with hope more than with butter in the early times before men flew across oceans and went up 40,000 feet. Then success was dulled by death and more hardships, and the care of her baby, and marriage and death again - but always the dreaming of dreams. That is the life Mrs. Junkin plans to write about. She already has broken into fiction magazines.

****

Life, but life as it touches aviation. That is to be her theme. Aviation has been her life for so many years now. Her husbands were aviators. Her brother, Charles Myers of Cleveland, who saw war shrive in the Royal Flying corps, won the New York-Spokane air derby in 1927. Her 10-year-old son, George Weaver Jr., already pilots a plane. She is a member of the "Early Birds," composed of persons associated with American aviation prior to 1912.

"I'm trying to capitalize woman's natural gift of gab," Mrs Junkin says. "I've been writing for my own 'amazement' for years."

[[right margin annotation]]Bunk
Last week Mrs. Junkin moved into an office at the municipal airport, where she will do her writing. [[/right margin annotation]] [[right margin annotation]] OK
"Writing means pennies,"she says, "But most of all, I want to play the piano. I have just begun taking lessons. Maybe I'll learn to fly, too. It's a great old life, isn't it?"[[/right margin annotation]