She eagerly accepted, along with ninety other women pilots across the country who included WAFS and civilian pilots. They included the wife of a Virginia aristocrat, a Chicago stripper, a Hollywood stuntwoman, and a nurse. An heiress of the Florsheim shoe family arrived with seventeen trunks full of high fashion clothes and a brace of afghans.
Barbara joined Jackie's squadron of flying instructors at Houston Municipal Airport. At the edge of one runway stood a shed and hangar that became the new home of the Army Air Force Women's Flying Training Detachment to train more women pilots for the WAFS. They had neither toilet facilities nor a place to eat, but it was a start. They didn't complain as they hiked a half mile to the Houston terminal for those luxuries.
After more weeks of more air and ground training, Barbara was among the first graduates of the WFTD at Howard Hughes Field, Houston. All during the ceremony she kept looking for the famous man to appear, but he never did.
Later, Barbara learned Hughes was in Hollywood supervising the controversial release of a scandalous new movie that had its own censorship problems. It was the sexy western Jackie Cochran had told her about. Loosely based on the life of Billy the Kid called The Outlaw, it starred his most sensational discovery since Jean Harlow. She was a buxom brunette by the name of Jane Russell whose image soon would grace American fighter planes and bombers on both sides of the ocean. If they didn't already have the face and figure of Betty Grable painted on them.
With orders to provide 750 women ferry pilots in 1943 and 1,000 in 1944, WFTD facilities at Houston were soon outgrown. Jackie Cochran moved her training school to Sweetwater, Texas.
Barbara had always felt she was "one of the girls," but never more so than when she and two dozen of her fellow "Woofteddy" flight instructors landed their planes to have lunch at an air base enroute to Sweetwater. Sitting in booths and tables at one end of the air base cafeteria, she and her friends gave out with wolf whistles at every good-looking GI who walked in the door.
She wondered too, why they all looked to her like gorgeous Stephen Collier, with his pectorals prominent under a thin silk undershirt. The rat.
No, she amended. He is not a rat. He is a dear, yet he is not mine and never can be. I will not take a man away from his wife. Nor will I play the other woman in a marriage.She had seen too many tearjerker movies about that with Bette Davis and Irene Dunne. That was not the role she wanted in a romance, and this was not a movie she was living, but her life. She wanted to be the wife of the man she loved, not a married man's mistress in a lonely and hopeless "Back Street" love affair.