Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Okay, the first thing I’m gonna do is apologize for the title.

That’s awful, but I was so eager to get to the actual column that I just went with the first thing I thought up. Alma Heflin was neat, a really cool bit of Lock Haven’s history.

Piper Aviation came to Lock Haven in 1937, and set up on the east end of the city. The builders of the Piper Cub, and many other planes, they put a lot of people to work. William Piper was the innovative and community-minded head of the company.

Meanwhile, Alma Heflin. Alma was born on September 2, 1910 in Missouri, the daughter of Irvin and Nora Heflin. The family moved around a lot, and was living in Washington when a pilot had to make an emergency landing on her lawn. This event inspired young Alma, eight years old at the time, and she decided she was going to be a pilot one day.

Alma put herself through college as a freelance writer, and did some teaching and some secretarial work. But flying was always her first love, and she attended the Dallas Aviation School.

If you’re going to fly, obviously you need a plane. So in August of 1937, Alma visited Lock Haven with the intent of purchasing a new yellow Piper Cub. She would have been one of the earliest customers Piper had when moving to Lock Haven. The employees at Piper were so impressed with her that they offered her a job in sales.

She moved to Lock Haven, bought a house at 608 East Main Street, and became part of the community. A 1938 article with the Clinton County Times said,”Miss Heflin says she likes Lock Haven better than any 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 had definite significance. She has had her church membership transferred to Trinity Methodist Church and intends to make this city her home.”

A couple of years after Alma settled in Lock Haven, World War II began, and America got involved in the fight. Fuels, metals, and various materials were rationed because of the war effort, and there was also a shortage of men, who were overseas fighting the war. This left Alma as the best pilot that Piper had, and she began testing the planes, beginning with the L-4 Grasshopper.

The Grasshopper was the plane Piper was making for the Army, essentially a military version of the Piper Cub. An unarmed spotter plane, it had a few extra windows and was painted that drab green, because the military only understands one color. But the rest of the structure was basically the same ass a Cub. And testing these things made Alma into America’s first female test pilot.

This brought Alma Heflin a certain sudden fame. A newspaper article in 1942 said,”As far as is known, charming Alma Heflin is the only woman test pilot in the country.”

Another article said of Alma,”110 pounds, light brown hair, cut in a pageboy style, with a soft roll of the forehead, steel gray eyes, 5 feet 3 inches tall, soft-spoken, and just past her mid-twenties.”

Hey. It was 1942, allright? Considerably different time.

But whichever way you cut it, Alma Heflin was cool. Popular and outgoing, she was once featured in the Clinton County Times column “Folks You Should Know,” a privilege reserved for the most interesting people in Clinton County’s society. She was well known in the community, and even once featured in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as the country’s first female test pilot. And that’s the story of Alma in the air….Dammit! “Alma In The Air” would have been a way better title.