Alice Jean May Starr, more familiarly known as A.J. Starr, first became interested in aviation as a young child when Charles Lindbergh soloed across the Atlantic in 1927, as did Amelia Earhart in 1932.
As a young woman in New Jersey, A.J. attended a lecture by Earhart at the local high school sponsored by the Englewood Women’s Club. After the lecture, A.J. waited awhile for Amelia to come out of the building and asked her for her autograph.
In June 1940, while A.J. was in art school, she heard about a rally sponsored by the Women Flyers of America (WFA) held at the Grand Ballroom at The Plaza in New York City and she immediately signed up to be on the list as a charter member.
The WFA started a training program at two airports, landing airplanes at a Hicksville, Long Island airport and seaplanes at Sky Harbor in Carlstadt, New Jersey. The first plane A.J. flew at Sky Harbor was called the ‘Flying Valor’, a beautiful, white, all-metal Luscombe with a red stripe running down its fuselage. She also flew an Aeronca Chief and in July, 1940, A.J. received gold wings from a Lt. Harold Lentz as the first student of the WFA program to solo.
A.J. May first heard about the core group of women flying for the U.S.A.A.F. in Newcastle, Delaware; the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) who were under the direction of Nancy Love. By then A.J. had volunteered in the Civil Air Patrol and had her private pilot’s license, but she did not have enough hours to qualify for the WAFS.
When the WFA called her about a job as a link trainer instructor with the Navy in Atlanta, she left New York in December 1942 to work there for two months. Just as she finished Link training A.J. received a telegram saying that Jackie Cochran’s assistant, Ethel Sheehy, would be coming to the area to interview her (and other licensed women pilots) for the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (later called the WASP). She and about ten other women were signed up for the WFTD class starting in February 1943.
Initially told that the program was at Houston, when the orders arrived to report to Sweetwater, Texas, the recruits did not know what was going on, until they learned that the program had been moved to Sweetwater. And so A.J.’s class, 43-W-4, became the first class to be entirely trained at Avenger Field.
“One day”, said A.J., I let the cat out of the bag that I could play the bugle so I got slapped with the job of playing Reveille at dawn and Taps at the end of the day.” When Jackie Cochran visited Sweetwater one day, she wanted to hear A.J. blow taps and stood off a distance to get the full effect. “Much later, I learned that a woman who had worked in the hangars at night, wept every time she heard me blow taps.as she had lost her husband in the war,” added A.J.
After seven months of training, A.J. graduated in August 1943 and was assigned to the 3rd Ferrying Group at Romulus, Michigan. Her first mission was in an L-5 liaison plane and then the L-2, L-3, PTs, the Canadian version of the AT-6, called The Harvard. Later, she flew the C-47, the B-24, and C-46 in transition and as co-pilot.
At Roscrans Field in Missouri, where A.J. was assigned to temporary duty for instrument training, she passed the course and was later assigned to temporary duty for a month in Brownsville, Texas for pursuit school. There she flew the Curtiss P-40, P-47 Thunderbolt, P-51 Mustang and the P-39 Airacobra. After pursuit school she returned to her home base at Romulus.
‘’When we got to Romulus, we were supposed to be able to fly just about any plane they gave us. We would go to the factory to pick up these planes. We sat down in the ready room and they would give us pointers,” said A.J.
A.J. flew some 38 different types of aircraft as a WASP including, those previously mentioned, the Norduyn UC-64 Norseman, Beechcraft U-45 Navigator, and the B-25 Mitchell. But her favorite was the sleek P-51.
Photo by: A.J. Starr 43-W-4
Photo by: A.J. Starr 43-W-4
Photo by: A.J. Starr 43-W-4
Photo by: National WASP WWII Museum
One of her most interesting days on duty occurred on January 22, 1944 when some bad weather finally cleared up a Newark Airport, where she and her group were delivering airplanes. A.J. recounted, “So, 350 airplanes from all around Pittsburgh, Montreal, points South and West converged at Newark. For four and a half hours, 73 aircraft per hour were landed, frequently at the rate of four airplanes a minute! We were in a flight of three Harvards coming down from Montreal and all we could do, except run out of gas, was to land on the cross runway and jam the brakes on before we crossed the active runway. We were lucky we got there. A girl in a P-38 from California was screaming to be let down – we knew why- she had to go to the restroom urgently, and the women had no relief tube, as the men had!”
In addition to being a bugler, A.J. was a talented cartoonist who often drew comical cartoons about WASP training and flight operations while on active duty. In a September 2011 email I sent to A.J. via her daughter Julie, I asked A.J. about a specific cartoon that she had drawn about a ferry assignment that landed her at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. A.J. replied, “It was a delivery of a Fairchild PT26A- from Fort Erie, ONT. to Syracuse, Stewart (West Point), Fort Dix and delivered to Roosevelt Field. That was the cartoon I drew of all of us… exhausted and waiting for ‘SNAFU Air’ (Situation Normal All Fouled Up) to take us back to Fort Erie for another PT. My cartoons usually were drawn when we RON’ed (Remained Overnight), and they were drawn on the hotel stationery.”
A.J.’s last trip was ferrying a P-63 Kingcobra to Great Falls, Montana. By the time the WASP were disbanded on December 20, 1944, she had accumulated 800 hours. After the war A.J. worked for Mallard Air Service, a sales and service agency in Teterboro, N.J. that did charter flying. After Mallard went bankrupt, A.J. married and later was the Eastern Director of the WASP Organization.
She eventually relocated to California, and in the mid-2000s I had the pleasure of meeting up with A.J. and her daughter, Julie at the Jacuzzi Family Vineyard in Sonoma for, what you can say, was truly a ‘wine flight’, since before the Jacuzzi family manufactured water pumps and spas that today bear their name, they built one of the first enclosed cabin high-wing monoplanes…but that’s a whole other story.
A.J. Starr was one of the last surviving WASP, and I was saddened to learn from her daughter last year that she passed away on June 28, 2023 at the age of 102. Hers was a life well-lived.
Written by: Julia Lauria-Blum
Photos courtesy of: Personal correspondence with A.J. Starr, 43-W-4, and the National WASP WWII Museum
About Julia Lauria-Blum:
Julia Lauria-Blum earned a degree in the Visual Arts at SUNY New Paltz. An early interest in women aviation pioneers led her to research the Women Airforce Service Pilots of WWII. In 2001 she curated the permanent WASP exhibit at the American Airpower Museum (AAM) in Farmingdale, NY, and later curated ‘Women Who Brought the War Home, Women War Correspondents, WWII’ at the AAM. She is the former curatorial assistant & collections registrar at the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island and is currently editor-in-chief for Metropolitan Airport News.
Julia is the proud mother of two daughters and a rescued Boxer. Her many interests include swimming, painting, traveling, aviation history, cooking, and storytelling.
