Women in the Civilian Pilot Training Program and Civil Air Patrol: civilian pilots at College Park during WWII
- fieldoffirsts
- Nov 11, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 22
By: Eloise Sinclair, Collections Assistant
Women civilian pilots
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, women broke barriers and broadened their horizons by learning to fly.
Building tensions in Europe and a desire for military preparedness, led the Civil Aeronautics Authority to create the Civilian Pilot Training Program in 1938, and the US Air Force to found the Civil Air Patrol in 1941. Both programs aimed to increase the number of civilian pilots and bolster national security. They offered new and unique opportunities for women to study aeronautics and earn their wings. However, being one of the first women to tread this path was not always easy.
Maryland and, in particular, Prince George’s County was a hub of aviation during the late 1930s and early 1940s with eleven active general aviation airports. College Park Airport played a considerable and significant role in women’s entry into flight.
Katheryn “Kit” Munson, Marian Bond, and Marie Schwarz Essex, whose stories were recently uncovered in our collections, are some of the women who took advantage of these programs to gain new skills and freedoms and meet like-minded women.
Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP)
Kit Munson
In the summer of 1940, Katheryn “Kit” Munson, a student at the University of Maryland, embarked on an exciting new chapter of her life when she won a scholarship for the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP) at College Park Airport. She had been encouraged to apply by Dr. John E. Younger, the director of the CPTP program at the University of Maryland and by Ralph Williams, one of the Assistant Deans.
Kit was one of the six female students to study at College Park Airport that summer. Places were competitive, with many colleges only offering one place for women for every ten offered to men. Kit’s personal account, written in 1991, provides us with a clearer understanding of her daily life as a student pilot. Her days were hectic as she had to juggle early morning and late afternoon flight instruction and evening ground school with an administrative job in a campus office. Alongside learning how to independently fly a plane, students in the CPTP were also expected to understand meteorology, the theory of flight and how airplane engines worked.
After earning her private pilot license on August 22nd, 1940, Kit secured a job in the office of College Park Airport. This was the perfect next step for Kit as she was able to use her administrative experience to earn a wage, while still having plenty of opportunity to fly. She continued to use the J-2 Cub she had become so fond of during her training.
Marian Bond
The account of another University of Maryland student who learned to fly in the summer of 1940 differs from Kit’s, revealing the range of experiences women had while learning to fly in the CPTP.
Marian was a physics major with an impressive number of extracurricular activities and an interest in the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, when she became the first woman to be accepted into the CPTP at College Park Airport.
Despite her many accomplishments, Marian was teased and belittled by one of the male students in her class. When he saw her solo, he said, “if a dumb girl can do it, so can I.” She did not let such comments deter her and earned her private pilot license in just a few months. In a personal account from 2002, Marian said she was not sure that this man ever passed the training course.
An article in the Chicago Daily Tribune titled ‘Learning to Fly’ which features both Kit and Marian exemplifies the diversity of women’s experiences in the CPTP. Kit is pictured in overalls with oil smudges on her face, fixing an airplane engine. The caption and text underneath her photograph clearly show that she is one of the few women who earned spaces to learn to fly in the program.
In stark contrast, Marian is shown wearing a skirt and heels and the caption below her photograph is far more ambiguous about her status as a student pilot. It makes no mention of her enrollment in the program and describes her simply as “spinning [the] propeller of [a] training plane at University of Maryland." Her personal account provides insight into the dynamics behind this photograph. The photographer only asked to take her picture because he viewed her as a "cheesecake." This is an outdated term used to describe attractive and often flirtatious women. At the time, Marian was not secure enough to protest.
Unfortunately, Marian did not include what she did after earning her wings and degree in her account. According to an article in the University of Maryland newspaper she hoped to go into biochemical research, another field which was male-dominated and would have taken perseverance and a thick skin to succeed in.
Civil Air Patrol (CAP)
Marie Essex
Following high school, Marie Schwarz Essex moved to Washington DC and into the Young Women’s Christian Home on Capitol Hill. It was here that she met her life-long friend, Erna Blatt. Erna had similarly moved to the city after finishing high school with aspirations of becoming a ‘government girl.’ Both Marie and Erna became active members of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) Hyde Squadron from c1942.
At this point, there was not yet an airfield in Hyde, Maryland, so Marie and the other early squadron members set to the exhausting and time-consuming task of turning a barley patch into a functioning airfield. They tore down barbed wire fences, dug trenches for underground telephone cables, installed searchlights, and converted a dilapidated house into a field office.
Marie found a community in the Hyde where she could socialize, relax, and share her passion for flying with like-minded women and men. They also played an important role in the war effort, patrolling the East Coast for German U-Boats.
Marie flourished in the CAP and rose through the ranks, becoming a 2nd Lieutenant and then a Captain and Intelligence Officer for the College Park Flight, following its establishment in early 1945. One of her responsibilities was to produce monthly reports of their activities. Her report from February 1945, reveals the role College Park Airport played during the Second World War.
The College Park Flight, led by Captain J.C. Bergling, had 34 members and a training program for cadets. Meeting and "flight hops" in Army L-2 aircraft were held at the airport each Sunday, in a building set aside for CAP use. Marie’s account also highlights another woman active in the flight: Corporal Alice Copeland who was responsible for handling all flight detail work.
Marie was not only involved in the flying aspect of aviation; she also worked for the Engineering and Research Corporation (ERCO) at their plant in Riverdale, MD, located just one mile away from College Park Airport. During the war, ERCO produced gun turrets for bombers, for which all personnel were awarded an "E" for Excellence by the Army and Navy. Marie continued to work at the ERCO factory into the 1950s, suggesting that flying, like for Kit and Marian, may not have become a career.
Kit, Marian, and Marie’s stories provide valuable insight into the lives and experiences of women civilian pilots in the early 1940s and how they were simultaneously praised and promoted and ridiculed and stereotyped. However, they also show how women took advantage of new opportunities and through perseverance and grit, overcame obstacles, whether they were financial or social, to gain new skills and responsibilities and forge their own path. College Park Airport played an important part in the lives of trailblazing and inspiring women at a time when many doors remained closed to them and the world was still coming to terms with women in the skies.
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