Chicago, Summer, 1942
One warm night in late August, the phone rang at Barbara's desk while she was alone in the airport office. Hoping it wasn't bad news about one of her delivery planes having crashed in a storm, she answered the phone. She had a feeling of dread, but not know why.
"Barbs? It's Chet. I figure you got my notes, but maybe need a push to answer them. Can I see you again?"
She hung up in his ear.
He wrote her again at the airport: "I really would like to see you again. I'd like to take you to dinner and we could talk. My wife and I still don't get along. What does she think a wife's duties are, to be frigid?
"Would you believe she wants her own bedroom? Our house is plenty big enough, but I mean, come on! She doesn't work or anything. All she does is sit around listening to soap operas on the radio or go shopping on Michigan avenue with her snooty girlfriends.
"Barbs, why didn't you ever marry me? I'm stinking rich, still got that 'pretty face,' and know how to make a girl happy. "Now more than ever, I need you and want you. Give a guy who's in love with you a break? Call me?"
He signed it "Love, Chet," and wrote his home and office telephone numbers.
Barbara filed it as before.
The following month, during the daytime when Barbara was more comfortable about answering her office phone, she got a call from Jackie Cochran.
"I'm back from London again. There is a women's ferrying unit in this country now, finally. I'm part of it, though not in charge of it. You can be in it, too, if you still want to."
Barbara assured her she still did. "But you're not in charge of it?"
"Ruth Love is. Did I ever tell you about her? We've both been trying to do the same thing, but she has more pull in high places. Her husband Robert has become deputy chief of staff for the new American Ferry Command. Colonel William Tanner has become head of the ferrying division's domestic wing. When Tanner learned Ruth Love flies a plane and is as eager as I am to recruit women ferry pilots, they got their heads together.
"Long story short, she's got an okay from the Army Air Force Chief of Staff to get a women's ferrying outfit into the air soon as possible. It'll be called the Women's Auxiliary Ferry Squadron and we'll be called WAFS."