Visit to Oklahoma City Museum Inspires Gift

Josephine “Jodie” (Wood) Wallingford and her sister Frances (Wood) Adair took flying lessons when they were teens in 1929 at Clover Field, later to become Santa Monica Airport, in California. Jodie finished and earned her Private Pilot License, #9129 when few women learned to fly airplanes.

In October of that same year, 99 of the 117 women pilots at the time gathered at Curtiss Field on Long Island, New York, and founded the Ninety-Nines to work together supporting each other and advancing in aviation while establishing an office to track women in aviation. Jodie received a Limited Commercial rating but then “life happened” as so many of us in aviation have experienced. After marriage, a baby, and a divorce, she made the hard decision to stop flying to support her son after the death of his father.

Her only son, Frederic Messenger (Bill) Wallingford, Jr., made a visit to the Ninety-Nines museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 2005 after Jodie passed on. He was so very proud of his mother’s accomplishments at a time when few women learned to fly and the museum and the Ninety-Nines made a lasting impression on him.

So inspired was he by the museum’s collection of source materials about women in aviation and aerospace such as photographs, archival records, biographical files, personal memorabilia, books, films, and oral histories that he decided to make a generous donation to the museum for the establishment of an endowment fund.

The fund is to be used to further the Ninety-Nines mission to help women gain independence through providing scholarships.

FMI:  www.ninety-nines.org/