In 1922 the ‘Caterpillar Club’ was founded by Leslie Irvin as an exclusive club for those who had their lives saved by a parachute when forced to bail out of a disabled aircraft The name of the club refers to the silk threads that made the original parachutes produced by the silkworm caterpillar. Irvin, the founder of the Irvin Airchute Company, is credited with making the first free-fall descent using a ripcord in 1919.
Between the dawn of aviation and World War I, wearing a parachute in flight was discouraged due to the idea that if pilots had them on, they would too easily elect to abandon their aircraft when conditions started to become difficult. Since the chutes were generally snubbed by early aviators, Irvin began the ‘elite’ Caterpillar Club to incite the use of parachutes, and they quickly became accepted after the swelling death stats of pilots during the First World War.
“‘Life depends on a silken thread’ is the club’s motto.”
In 1922 Irvin agreed to give an exclusively designed Caterpillar pin to every person whose life was saved by an Irvin Airchute. Three years later, in July 1925, Irene McFarland, a stunt jumper, became the first female member of the Caterpillar Club. McFarland was scheduled to test a parachute of her own design for a 3,500 ft. jump, but government regulations required that she wear a backup chute manufactured by Irvin. During the jump after her own parachute failed, she used the Irvin backup which ultimately saved her life.
In 1929, pioneering aviator and co-founder of the Ninety-Nines, Fay Gillis Wells became the first female pilot, and second woman after McFarland, to become a member of the Caterpillar Club after bailing out of a crippled airplane. Following that unnerving event, she was hired by the Curtiss Flying Service in Valley Stream, Long Island, demonstrating and selling aircraft across the country.
During and after their service with the WASP, several more women were ‘inducted’ into the Caterpillar Club. Marie Mountain Clark, 44-W-1, was thrown out of the open cockpit PT-19 she was training in when, unknowingly, her safety belt became unfastened prior to her popping the stick for a spin recovery! Nancy Nordhoff Dunnam, 44-W-& made an emergency parachute jump on May 14, 1944 and she was issued a membership card by the Caterpillar Club in April 1969. Both her membership card and pin may be viewed on the Museum of Flight in Seattle’s digital website.
In 2013, the Hartwick Gazette (Volume 124, Number 6) wrote in Mary Louise Bowden’s obituary that Bowden (Class 43-W-4) ‘became a member of the Caterpillar Club after bailing out of a P-51 fighter plane over North Carolina, which she was flying from a factory field in Texas to a field of embarkation in New Jersey. The plane’s engine caught on fire giving her no choice but to jump. She was unhurt in the accident.’ WAFS ‘Original’, Bernice Batten became a member of the Caterpillar Club making an emergency bail-out while ferrying an A-24.
After the war Elizabeth ‘Libby’ Gardner, 43-W-6, worked as a test pilot for General Textile Mills, a company that was working on developing an aircraft parachute device that was intended to safely land aircraft that became disabled in flight. Libby became a two-time member of the Caterpillar Club.
In 2010, I met with Libby to record her oral history and she shared with me during the interview how she participated in two tests flights with the device in 1945. During the first test flight, Libby was forced to bail out of the airplane when the parachute became tangled in the aircraft. During the second test flight, the airplane entered a dive when its elevators were jammed by the parachute. Luckily, Libby escaped from the cockpit safely, but she was only a mere 500 ft. from the ground when her own chute opened! After recounting her harrowing experience, she shared with me a LIFE Magazine article, dated January 7, 1946, entitled ‘Parachute Test, Girl pilot barely escapes death in trial drop of plane by chute.’
By the end of World War II, virtually no pilots flew without a chute and the number of Caterpillar Club members with the Irvin pins grew to over 34,000, but the total amount of people actually saved by Irving parachutes is now estimated to be 100,000.
Today, several branches of the Caterpillar Club exist and some of its more famous members include Lindbergh, Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, John Glenn, and President George H.W. Bush. But, of course, one would imagine that becoming an elite member of the Club is not necessarily something a pilot or aircrew would aspire to!
Written by: Julia Lauria-Blum
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.