Wally Funk's Race for Space

by Sue Nelson

  The sign – almost as long as she was tall – used to hang outside her father’s store in Taos, New Mexico. At either end of ‘Funk’s 5 and 10’ were the words ‘Curios’ and ‘Jewelery’ at a forty-five-degree angle. It was under this sign that Wally shined shoes, sold rabbits or carved bows and arrows so that she could begin saving money for the future. The saving habit had never left her.

  We went through each box methodically. One was filled with aviation awards and trophies and a ‘Most Elegant in Show’ award for her 1951 Rolls-Royce; another housed skiing boots, salopettes and multiple pairs of thermal underwear and thick socks. She picked up some Indian pot shards. ‘This must have meant something to me at some time.’

  There were Life magazines, photograph albums and scrapbooks. She found three sheepskins bought in New Zealand, a model of a Stearman biplane, homemade candlesticks and a brass Moroccan water carrier from her travels through Africa. There were giant wall stickers that said, ‘A woman’s place is in the cockpit’ and ‘The Powder Puff Derby’. A metallic rattling revealed a collection of personalised vehicle license plates from different states, with different variations on her Mary Wallace Funk initials. They included a yellow ‘WF’, a yellow ‘MWFII’ for New Mexico and some blue Californian plates with ‘F II’, ‘I MWF’, and ‘MWFII’.

  She pulled out a huge, long board. It had three maps of the United States, Europe and Africa, and was edged by hand-painted emblems of the flags and names of the countries she had visited from 1965 through to 1967, before her return to the US. It was the same board I’d seen in the 10 December 1967 edition of Santa Fe’s New Mexican newspaper. There was the emblem for South Africa. During the drive back to Albuquerque, Wally had regaled us with stories of being in Kruger National Park with the poodle, Toot. In one of them, she had left her van to photograph elephants on foot.

  ‘You’re lucky the dog wasn’t eaten by a lion,’ I said.

  ‘Little Toot? No. Never had to chastise her because she was so easy-going. Maybe she got that from me or my mother, I don’t know.’

  For once, I had swallowed my tongue and instead asked how she had got the dog through customs. ‘When we got to England, I knew I couldn’t bring the poodle with me so I put her in my purse, went to the bathroom for a long while and got through.’

  The racks of artwork contained prints, a tiled scene of adobe houses and a huge black-and-white photograph of a parachutist about to land on the ground. It was Wally on her first parachute jump. One framed photo showed seventy-eight graduates from Oklahoma State University’s sorority Alpha Chi Omega, 1959. Each woman wore an identical black off-the-shoulder dress.

  Numerous certificates revealed Wally’s competitive life of ambition and achievement. She was sixteen years old in 1955, when she received her National Rifle Association (NRA) junior diploma qualification as a ‘Distinguished Rifleman’ for ‘demonstrating unusual skill while firing in the prone, sitting, kneeling and standing positions’. An image of Wally as Doris Day’s Calamity Jane resurfaced in my mind. There was even a photograph of her dressed as a cowgirl by her palomino horse, Victor, as ‘The Taos Kid’. When she was older, she even rode in a rodeo.

  ‘I wanted to be a cowboy. A cowgirl. My mother got chaps for me, boots, my gun, a belt. When I started shooting, I did cowgirl action shooting in Taos every Wednesday or Thursday night with my heavy red bag, with all my ammunition in it,’ she said. ‘I carried my gun and walked to the armoury down about half a mile, and I shot for two or three years.’

  The NRA diploma required pinpoint accuracy. ‘When I was fourteen, I shot perfect bullseyes. Five bullseyes in each target. A ten point. You had to do it when you were prone, which meant when you were lying down; sitting, kneeling and off-hand – that’s standing. So in those four positions, I made ten targets in each position in a perfect bullseye.’

  The NRA club she belonged to forwarded the results to Washington. President Eisenhower sent her a letter of congratulations. ‘That was a big part of my life. I did everything active and did it well. That’s what led me to be a shooter on targets in California. I’ve shot in competitions in Australia and New Zealand, too. I took my gun,’ she said. ‘I would ride on a horse with a pistol and shoot balloons containing a powder.’

  Naturally, Wally had kept a record of gaining her commercial pilot’s licence, aged twenty, in 1959. This was the qualification that opened up the start of her long professional career as a pilot within aviation. Even today, Wally flies weekly. She unearthed the application form. There was not much that Wally threw away, but this meant I knew that, in April 1959, she stood at 5 feet 8 ¼ inches, weighed 136lbs and had brown hair above those bright blue eyes.

  The Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration certificates included an eighty-hour flight standards inspector workshop in Los Angeles from October 1971; a seventy-two-hour course for a 22,100 Air Taxi Operation Certification and Inspection Indoctrination in 1973; and a flight instructor’s revalidation course in 1977, sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the Ninety-Nines – the organisation for women pilots set up by Amelia Earhart and other female aviators in 1929.

  Wally believed that Earhart had not died at sea, but had been spying on the Japanese in 1937 when she had run out of fuel, had to land on a beach, and was captured. A Japanese prince, who she had taught to fly, released her. She had apparently returned to the States in secret and lived the rest of her life in Florida under the name Irene Bolam, and died in the 1980s. The whole story sounded crazy, but it had been a popular theory since 1965. One thing I had learned since knowing Wally was never to throw any of her outlandish claims out the window. It turned out that she had simply lived an outlandish life. Who knew whether this claim was also true?

  There was a ‘Supervision and Group Performance’ certificate from the Office of Personnel Management in 1979, and later certificates from the National Transportation Safety Board showing that Wally had completed her Aircraft Accident/Incident Report course at Washington, DC, in 1982, and a helicopter orientation course in 1983. Then there was one for Technical Writing from the United States of America Office of Personnel Management, and a South Bay Adult School certificate for an Orientation Computer Programming course in California, both from 1984.

  All these certificates and trophies were a record of a life that had been spent continually learning and striving for a combination of adventure and self-improvement. In a framed colour photograph of an NTSB Basic Aircraft Accident Investigation Course from 1975, Wally was the only woman among seventeen men. It was the longest I’d ever seen her hair. It just about rested on her shoulders.

  The photographs from Wally’s younger years – either framed, in albums or accompanying newspaper articles – were revelatory. I had only ever known her in the later part of life, from her fifties onwards, when she had white hair. There was a relaxed, carefree nature to these photos. This last year or so, I had often witnessed Wally anxious because she wanted so badly to be able to take her spaceflight.

  Would I have been as doggedly persistent as Wally if I were her age and had a ticket into space? Would I have sent regular emails and made telephone calls to Virgin Galactic to check on their progress? So many that they would instantly know my voice and I would know all their names? Would I have appeared as single-minded and even possibly difficult in the process of checking up on my dream? Yes, yes, yes, and absolutely, yes. We were more alike than I’d realised.

  The newspaper cuttings revealed a woman who had persisted with her dream right from the start. I found a clipping from the Taos News, dated 1 June 1961. I recognised the photograph. It was taken at the Fort Sill military base, and showed Wally in a flight suit holding her helmet in front of a US Airforce T-33 jet. Its headline was ‘Mary Wallace Funk Passes Space Tests’. It began: ‘The first woman in space may be a Taos girl who already has put wings on her future.’

  Wally had been making headlines for most of her life. The year 1961, however, was a crucial one for both Wally and humank
ind’s endeavours to explore what lay beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. For it was the year Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space. It was also an important year for me, as I was born thousands of miles away from Wally in the UK a few days after that wonderfully evocative photograph was published. As it was a forceps delivery, I was literally dragged kicking and screaming into the space age.

  These cuttings, however, also gave an insight into the social life of her parents. Her mother was often on committees, volunteering, speaking about bonsai in one instance, and – a particular favourite of mine – at a garden party where she displayed ‘a daffodil with a twenty-four-inch stem which had been picked from the Taos plaza’. These activities were religiously recorded by the Taos News. ‘She was the matriarch of Taos,’ said Wally. ‘Dressed beautifully. Always entertaining.’

  One article from Wally’s collection, brown with age and labelled ‘1958’ in one of her scrapbooks, said: ‘The Lozier Funk home was the setting for an open house the evening of Dec. 26th when Mr. and Mrs. Funk ... charmingly welcomed 125 guests. Dancing was enjoyed during the evening.’ It gave me an idea of how large their family home must have been.

  ‘There were all kinds of parties,’ Wally recalled, sorting through another box. ‘Here’s my nana and grandaddy. Nana was always beautifully poised. That was in 1955. See?’

  A group of well-dressed men and well-coiffed women posed for the camera. ‘My parents had a lot of parties.’ Her father even kept up the sartorial standards when relaxing. ‘When he went fishing, Father dressed as he was for the store. Vest and bow tie.’

  Wally came upon a letter from her mother, sent March 1973, and read it aloud. The handwriting was difficult to decipher in several places. From the way it began, Wally must have included a newspaper cutting of her exploits in a prior correspondence.

  ‘Dear Wally,’ her mother wrote. ‘Your marvellous letter and that great write-up was something every parent prays for, but few are so blessed … How few young people have enjoyed so much praise … you are the true blue, family-loving American, unselfish, willing to learn and not afraid to grow with self-criticism where needed … with unending pride in our daughter …’

  The letter diverted into their social life, meeting friends and going to lunch and an antique show. It ended: ‘Call us collect Wednesday. Love, Mother.’

  Wally chuckled. ‘I always called collect as I didn’t have the money.’

  She picked up an old black-and-white photograph of a young girl in a white dress, black stockings and laced-up boots with white ribbons in her hair. She was stood on the steps of a house in front of a porch, with a rocking chair on the veranda. Wally turned over the photograph and discovered it was her mother, Virginia Shy, aged seven, taken in Olney, Illinois, in 1907.

  The Oklahoma City Times, from 19 May 1960, revealed Wally with short hair, smiling beside two men and in front of several trophies. They were all pilots from Oklahoma State University’s (OSU) Flying Aggie club. Wally ‘moved Aggie girls ahead by winning the top co-ed pilot award at the recent meet in Columbus, Ohio’.

  By the end of the year, the Daily Oklahoman was reporting that Wally was ‘the only girl ever enrolled in OSU’s flight instructor training program’. In another scrapbook press cutting from 1960, four cowboys surrounded Wally, who was riding something that was, at first glance, a bucking bronco. Her back was arched and one of her arms was held aloft holding a cowboy hat. The ‘bronco’ turned out to be a saddle on a fifty-five-gallon gasoline drum’ pulled by ropes and operated by the four men.

  Another newspaper article reported that Wally was about to compete in the National Intercollegiate Flying Association Air Meet at the University of Illinois. ‘Attending the meet will be Mary Wallace’s mother, Mrs. Lozier Funk, who has been in Mattoon, Ill., with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. W.C. Shy, the last few weeks, and who will attend the National Garden Club Convention at St. Louis, next week.’

  Wally didn’t just take her mother to races. She once took her to an air-crash investigation. ‘She helped me dig and look for a compass.’

  To my delight, there was an original copy of the April 1961 edition of Parade magazine. This was the Sunday newspaper magazine, distributed across the United States, that featured Mercury 13 members Jan and Marion Dietrich on the cover in matching orange flight suits as the ‘first astronaut twins’. All the successful women who had passed the astronaut tests had been warned by Lovelace, several times, to keep it a secret. Their phase-two tests were still ahead.

  Somehow, that advice seemed to have eluded the Dietrichs and Jackie Cochran, who wrote the article. After that, all the women – including Wally – felt free to speak to the press and tell their stories. ‘Because the twins spilled the beans to Parade magazine,’ reasoned Wally. ‘Although Lovelace was very upset, and so were we.’

  The Parade article showed a white-haired Jackie Cochran, who had part-funded the tests, observing Jan Dietrich on a treadmill, breathing into a mask for a lung-function test. It was an interesting read considering Cochran’s later role in the committee hearings – a role that helped prevent the women from going into space. She opened the article with: ‘Women will fly into space just as certainly as men will – only not so soon.’

  Cochran’s words appeared to be partly waving the flag for women and yet also partly holding them back. She predicted that a woman would go into space by 17 December 1963 – a peculiarly specific date, because it was the one hundredth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight. She then gave a more realistic time frame of within six or seven years. As it turned out, her first prediction was correct, as a woman did fly into space in 1963. She just wasn’t American.

  Cochran also wrote: ‘Women can be just as good “astronauts” as men’, but in the next paragraph she argued. ‘Economically, this country can’t afford right now to have women pilots flying as a part of the Armed Service. It’s considered too expensive when there is no emergency or shortage of this kind of talent. It costs the government several hundred thousand dollars to qualify a jet pilot. Such a government-trained pilot cannot be a sporadic flyer; he must fly regularly. And with women, marriage and children are likely to interrupt their flying careers.’

  Wally had underlined ‘Mary Funk’ in the article, as well as highlighting two sections: the paragraph which said that the women who passed ‘may later receive specialized training to participate in space flight as astronauts or as engineers or skilled technicians’; and the description of the programme as being the ‘first “launching pad” for women in space.’

  Four-and-a-half months after that Parade article was published, the programme was cancelled.

  Cochran, the first woman to break the sound barrier, had been a divisive person for the Mercury 13. She had been born poor in Florida, but was now – primarily through marriage – an extremely wealthy woman living in California. Through her financial backing, she gave these women the opportunity to achieve their dreams of becoming astronauts, yet simultaneously contributed to putting them on hold through her testimony in Congress. Jerri Truhill had been outspokenly negative about Cochran when we’d met in 1997. What was Wally’s view of Cochran?

  ‘She was always nice to me because I came from Taos,’ said Wally. Cochran liked the town and often visited. ‘We talked about the people we knew there and the artists. She was always okay with me and the fact that I was doing so well and how physically fit I was. You know what, you take women that are married with two or three kids, they couldn’t do what I did. I don’t think the twins were married.’

  After the Parade magazine revelations, Dr W Randolph Lovelace himself was quoted in a 28 May 1961 edition of the Daily Oklahoman. The article announced: ‘Oklahoma’s second lady astronaut has completed the medical and physical competence tests of possible future space flights, one of the nation’s top medicine experts disclosed here Saturday.’

  The first Oklahoman was Jerrie Cobb. As Wally was an OSU graduate and working in Oklahoma, she was the second. Cobb had just b
een announced as a NASA consultant by the space agency’s head, James Webb. Interestingly, the writer noted that ‘Dr Lovelace, expressing a view contrary to that expressed privately by some scientists here, said women will make space flights eventually.’

  ‘Sometime in the future,’ said Lovelace, ‘we don’t know when, women will go into space – just as they have gone into everything else.’ He had also heard rumours that the Russians were possibly preparing to send women on space flights.

  A month later, in the 27 June 1961 issue of the Daily Oklahoman, it was announced that Wally Funk ‘Dreams of Becoming First Woman in Space’. It noted her flying achievements and included the fact that, the year before, the Ninety-Nines had named Wally ‘the top woman aviator in the nation’.

  The article also quoted her OSU Flying Aggies coach and flight instructor, Tiner Lapsley. Wally was the only female member of the club, and had also stayed with Lapsley and his wife. The piece provided a professional and personal insight into what this energetic, determined seventy-eight-year-old was like as a twenty-one-year-old.

  ‘She always wanted to compete with the boys,’ Lapsley said. ‘She was an extremely active girl. There’s not a lazy bone in that girl’s body … She tried to help the mechanics, mowed the grass around the airport and gassed up the airplanes – most boys don’t like to do it because it’s too hard.’

  In other words, over fifty years later, Wally hadn’t changed. The article noted that Wally ‘dressed like a boy, always wearing blue jeans, baggy flight shirts and hair cut short.’ While growing up, Wally ‘played tackle football with the best of them’.