A Foxcroft WASP Made Middleburg Proud
by Leonard Shapiro
There was a time, nearly 75 years ago, when the Foxcroft School was on military footing, just like the rest of the country. Back in the 1940s, with World War II raging in the European and Pacific theaters, the girls of Foxcroft were regularly drilling and marching in formation on campus under the direction of school founder, Miss Charlotte Noland.
One of those students clearly was infused with the same sort of patriotic fervor that gripped the entire nation. Not long after she graduated from Foxcroft, where she captained the basketball and riding teams, Elizabeth Coit Hubbard, not even 18 yet and a native of Lake Forest, Ill., decided that she wanted to join the fledgling Women’s Airforce Service Pilots program. They were known as the WASPs, using a Disney cartoon character named “Fifinella” as their feisty insignia. And they were truly pioneers in every sense of the word.
Elizabeth, also known to family and friends simply as “Sis,” eventually made her way back to Middleburg. Her mother, Elizabeth Merrill Furness, had moved to this area in 1938 and purchased an old dairy farm that she converted into the Piedmont Vineyard on The Plains Road in 1973. She was 75 at the time and Piedmont was the first commercial vinifera vineyard in Virginia.
Her daughter, Sis, married Bill Worrall, an Army intelligence officer, in 1946 and they lived in Alaska and Germany for many years before settling in northern California. The Worralls came back to Middleburg in 1976 to help Sis’s mother run the vineyard, and took it over when Mrs. Furness died in 1986.
Two of the Worrall children, Virginia Jenkins and her brother Bill Worrall, both have lived in the Middleburg area ever since, and their sister, Merrill Grasso, also spent many years here before moving away several years ago.
Sis Worrall passed away in 1996, and by then had become an active and beloved member of the community. She was an eager fox hunter, a fine fly fisherman and helped raise money for numerous good causes, particularly the Loudoun Hospital Centerin Leesburg, frequently opening her home and vineyard for fundraising events and benefits.
Her children are all properly proud of their groundbreaking mother, even if she rarely spoke about her wartime experiences. Nevertheless, Bill Worrall has taken it upon himself to become a one-man research center on the WASPs, and particularly Sis Worrall’s contribution. Over the years, he’s collected all manner of materials, including the yearbook from her 1944 WASP graduating class, filled with often poignant personal messages on each of the individual photographs.
Most of those fearless women are gone, but the memory of what they accomplished during the war has never been forgotten. Even now, there is serious talk in Hollywood about making their story into a film or television mini-series.
The WASPs were formed in September, 1942, nine months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, in large part because of the efforts of Army Air Forces Commander General Henry “Hap” Arnold. They never engaged in combat overseas, but their role in the war effort back in the U.S. was vitally important.
According to the Air Force Historical Support Division, the WASP women even paid their own way to travel to basic training at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. More than 25,000 applied, even some from Canada, England and Brazil, but only 1,830 U.S. women were accepted into the program. Of those, 1,074 earned their wings, including Sis Worrall.
To qualify, applicants had to be between the ages of 18 and 35, have a high school diploma, stand at least 5 feet 4 inches tall, pass Army physicals and have a pilot’s license. Sis Worrall had the Foxcroft diploma, but Bill and Virginia have never been entirely certain their mother had a pilot’s license when she headed to Texas. Nevertheless, what she did have, even back then, was plenty of moxie, and she may well have literally learned how to fly on the fly.
Avenger Field definitely was no picnic.
“My mother did complain about the sand, the wind, the bugs, the food,” Virginia Jenkins said. “I never heard anyone ever talk about chicken fried steak with such disdain.”
WASP assignments were diverse—as flight training instructors, glider tow pilots, towing targets for air-to-air and anti-aircraft gunnery practice, engineering test flying, ferrying newly built bombers and fighter planes to major bases around the country so they could then be transported overseas, and other duties. Although WASPs had the privileges of officers, they never were formally adopted into the U.S. Army Air Corps.
In all, 38 WASPs lost their lives over their two-year existence. And yet, despite their absolutely essential role, they were not considered official military at the time. That meant they were not eligible for benefits under the postwar G.I. Bill that provided veterans educational, medical and housing benefits.
That shameful wrong was finally righted on Thanksgiving in 1977—33 years after the WASPs program was disbanded. On that memorable day, President Jimmy Carter signed a bill granting World War II veterans’ status to former WASPs. Just last month, the WASPs also were granted the right to have their remains interred at Arlington National Cemetery.
They definitely earned it, because most of their missions were not without peril. They flew somewhat flimsy AT-10s and AT-6s, training planes essentially made out of plywood. The only metal was in the engines.
“Several women were killed in routine training,” Bill Worrall said. “One got shot down while she was towing a target for artillery practice. Someone on the ground missed the target and got her aircraft.”
Virginia Jenkins said Sis definitely did talk about her and her fellow “flygirls,” as they also were called, being slighted for so many years.
“I don’t think any of them were happy about it until they were finally recognized,” Jenkins said. “Even though my mother downplayed the whole experience for most of her life, I know she was very proud of what they had done.”
Ironically, Sis Worrall never flew again after the war, though her friend, former Middleburg artist Lloyd Kelly, an amateur pilot himself, once took her up in his plane and let her take the controls. “When they came down, he said ‘she hasn’t lost her stick,’” Bill Worrall said. “She definitely could still fly well into her 50s.”
These days there is another pilot in the family. That would be Bill’s son, Ben, an Air Force Academy graduate who now flies F-15s and is based in Okinawa, Japan. He was still a young child when his pioneering aviator grandmother passed away 20 years ago.
“But he knew what she’d done,” Bill Worrall said. “We all did.”