Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

It’s March, which means it’s Women’s History Month. This one is an easy one for me to participate in, because I’ve written about Clinton County’s historic women at least a million times. My first real writing job was for a local women’s magazine, and I’d choose one historic woman to feature every month. I think I started with Maria Molson, and moved on to Molly Fox, Victoria Woodhull, and Gertrude Kistler. (You can look them up.) I did this for a couple of years, and whenever I’m stuck for a column, I still find myself gravitating to women. Writing about them, I mean.

To celebrate this month, I thought I’d write about Alma Heflin. Did you know that Lock Haven was home to America’s first female test pilot? Well, now you do, and there is no part of that sentence that isn’t cool.

Alma Heflin was born in Missouri in 1910, and the family moved to Washington when she was a baby. It was there, a few years later, when she saw a small plane make an emergency landing on the lawn. At age six, I had a similar experience; a small plane crashed in the forest near our house. I wrote an article about it, which may have been the first hard news I ever reported. Alma went a different direction—She decided to become a pilot.

In those days—the 1920s—career choices for women were not exactly wide-open yet. If you were female and wanted to work, you basically had the choice of teacher or nurse. Alma became a teacher, did some writing on the side, and learned to fly as a hobby. She became both dedicated and talented at it, and in 1937, she heard of a new airplane factory opening up in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. She came to look at the new planes with the intent of buying one, and became one of Piper’s earliest customers.

William Piper, head of the company, was impressed with Alma. So impressed that he hired her. As a secretary. (Women could also be secretaries.) Alma moved to 608 East Main Street and attended a local church on West Main.

She became popular in the community. The Clinton County Times featured her in their “Folks You Should Know” column on March 10, 1938, saying, ”Last December, Miss Heflin passed her test for a private pilot’s license….Miss Heflin says she likes Lock Haven better than any other town she knows of, and in view of the fact that she has traveled in every state but the New England states and Florida besides living in several different states that statement has definite significance.”

When America entered World War II, it made some severe changes to our society. Goods and materials were being shipped overseas, and so were a lot of our men. This caused a shift in employment; jobs that had previously been done by men were now done by women. Piper Aviation was in the forefront of that, hiring local women to build the Piper Grasshoppers. And Alma, one of the few pilots left in town, became America’s first female test pilot.

She was featured in a national newspaper sketch column called “Strange As It Seems” and made the cover of several magazines. She made a name for herself testing the Piper Grasshopper, basically a military version of the Piper Cub. The Grasshopper was designed to take off and land in small spaces, had windows for visibility, and was drab green because the military has never discovered any other colors.

Alma Heflin died in 2000 and was buried in Arlington. And when it comes to women’s history, she’s a big name—Both local and nationwide.