A young pilot named Ed Pawelek, who had flown against the Luftwaffe during World War II, was the principal instructor. When the Amelia Earhart wannabes weren’t washing down planes or staffing the information booth at air shows, they were in the air or in the classroom, trying to master the principles of aerodynamics, meteorology, civil aeronautics regulations, navigation, and airport procedures. Each “flight,” or troop, had eight to 10 girls in it. Of 19,000 Girl Scouts in Detroit at the time, only 135 were Wing Scouts. Her next-door neighbor and best friend, a fellow Girl Scout named Hazel, told her about a new auxiliary called the Wing Scouts. Into this world stepped Marilyn Moore, a Detroit teenager with sky-blue eyes and an unfailingly sunny disposition. This was an era of sod and gravel runways and windsocks fluttering atop barn roofs. By mid-century, there were, among others, Krist-Port in Farmington, Big Beaver Airport in Troy, and Joy Airport in Macomb County. Wings Airport opened at 18 Mile and Mound roads in Utica. Fraser’s mayor, a dentist named Otis McKinley, laid out his eponymous airfield on his farm near Utica Road and 15 Mile. Even as that particular dream evaporated, personal aviation continued to flourish, with small private airports sprouting in the cornfields outside the city. It’s generally forgotten that, in the early 20th century, the men turning Detroit into the hub of automobile production nearly made the Motor City the center of aviation, as well. ![]() ![]() “There’s just nothing better than taking off on a beautiful, clear day and flying around in a blue sky,” she says. She recalls flying over downtown Detroit in the 1950s, its skyscrapers no more than stacks of Legos beneath the wings, and looking down on the Ambassador Bridge, as well as the Hudson’s building and Briggs Stadium, now-vanished totems of a city in its prime. “That’s the Blue Water Bridge,” she says. Clair River to Lake Huron some 60 years ago. It was taken by her husband, also a pilot, during a flight up the St. She looks at a slightly faded color snapshot. Meinhard sits inside her daughter’s Sterling Heights home, sifting through curling photographs and fragments of memory. I loved it, and the seed for learning to fly was planted in my mind.” This must be what it was like to be a bird, I thought. Looking down, I saw cars and houses growing smaller and smaller, and the people on the ground were like tiny ants far below. Strangely, there was no real sense of speed - just floating in the air. “Although I was very young,” the now 80-year-old memoirist writes, “I vividly remember sitting in the airplane on my mother’s lap, hearing the roaring noise of the plane’s engine, and seeing the ground rushing by faster and faster until, suddenly, everything was smooth as we left the ground and rose into the air like magic. A couple of generations later, the former aviatrix relives the life-changing moment in the opening lines of the unpublished manuscript she wrote for the benefit of her children and grandkids. Meinhard (born Marilyn Moore), was a saucer-eyed 3-year-old when she first experienced the euphoria of flight aboard a neighbor’s small plane at Detroit City Airport in 1935. In a world where people have grown accustomed to jetting off to all corners of the map and space tourism will soon become a reality, it can be hard to conjure up a time when a simple 10-minute ride aboard a small aircraft was a novelty to be treasured and talked about, over and over again.
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