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Female flyer, WASP pilot lived full life

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — Inspired by a story she read as a young girl about Amelia Earhart’s trans-Atlantic flight, Virginia Sweet became a pioneering female aviator in her own right.

She was a pilot with the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, ferrying every type of military aircraft from factories to air bases during World War II to free male pilots for combat.

Sometimes Sweet was assigned to fly shot-up, barely functional aircraft in for repair. Thirty-eight of her fellow women fliers were killed during duty.

Sweet flew 52 different types of military aircraft, including the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-29 Superfortress bombers, but she left her heart in the cockpit of the P-51 Mustang.

“She was a honey to fly,” she said of the long-range, single-seat fighter that helped beat Hitler’s Germany.

After the war, when these Rosie the Riveters of the skies no longer were needed, the nation essentially turned its back on Sweet and hundreds of WASP pilots like her.

The longtime Schenectady resident died July 12 at 88, less than two weeks after President Barack Obama signed a law that offered the WASP fliers recognition and Congressional Gold Medals, the highest award Congress can give to a civilian.

At the July 1 signing ceremony, Obama acknowledged that the honor was long overdue and thanked WASP members, who were granted only civilian status during wartime and not considered members of the military.

Obama was joined by three WASP pilots representing more than 1,000 women who joined the unit in 1942 and 1943. They were the first women to fly American military aircraft and logged more than 60 million miles during the war.

After World War II, the women were released from duty and returned home largely forgotten. They were even required to turn in their WASP leather bomber jackets.

Sweet had been in failing health after a stroke earlier this year and was only semiconscious in recent weeks. Her niece, Betsey McBride of Niskayuna, said her “Aunt Ginger” may not have understood what relatives told her about the honor she received July 1.

McBride will accept Sweet’s Congressional Gold Medal posthumously at a ceremony planned for Washington, D.C., later this year.

“She liked to say she would have been a general if she was a man,” said a nephew, Edward Grinter of Schenectady.

Sweet wasn’t shy about articulating the bitterness she felt for being treated as a second-class citizen during the war. She felt she could fly as well as any male, even if she was issued men’s flight jumpsuits that never fit quite right across her sinewy 5-foot-6-inch, 100-pound body.

She could curse like a guy, too.

After the war, Sweet spent five years on active duty during and after the Korean War and 30 years with the Air Force Reserve, retiring in 1979 as a lieutenant colonel. As an instructor, she taught generations of local men and women to fly.

“She was a spitfire,” said McBride, recalling how Sweet chased new adventures throughout her life, including traipsing around Egypt alone while in her 80s and driving solo across Mexico as a senior citizen.

Sweet grew up in Quaker Springs, Saratoga County, attended a one-room schoolhouse, skipped two grades, graduated early from Mechanicville High School and entered Duke University at 17. Her father died when she was 9 and her mother struggled to raise three children as a single parent. In 1940, at 19, she learned to fly.

She majored in languages at Duke, and taught high school French, Spanish and Latin. She married a Pan Am pilot when she was in her 20s, but they split up in less than a year.

“She was flamboyant and a women’s libber way ahead of her time,” Edward Grinter said. “She said she wouldn’t pick up her husband’s dirty socks.”

“She was very strong-willed and very opinionated,” as well as generous, McBride said.

Before they entered first grade, Aunt Ginger had taught her young nieces how to play chess, how to sing “Silent Night” in German and how to acquire a taste for steak tartare, guava paste, smoked octopus and other exotic meals she cooked.

Sweet liked fast cars. She drove a 1952 Chevy convertible, a ’70s-era Thunderbird and a 1960 Cadillac, but not always well, or within the speed limit.

“I always felt safer with her in an airplane than in a car,” Grinter said. She prided herself on a five-decade flying record without an accident.

In her later years, Sweet battled depression and became something of a recluse before a stroke caused her to move in January to a rehabilitation center.

She perked up when the center’s newsletter carried a front-page story on Sweet and her WASP service.

“I did have to make several landings with no power,” she told an interviewer. “But it was no big deal.”

Sweet received military honors at her funeral Saturday.