WASP Books Date from Challenge
Issued Ten Years Ago

By Sarah Byrn Rickman

Ten years ago, Nancy Batson Crews challenged me to write the story of Nancy Love and the original WAFS (Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron) -- the first 28 women to fly for the Army in World War II.

To help get me started, she invited the living WAFS (there were nine of them) to a reunion in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. There, I met the remaining "Originals."

That week in Birmingham, June 1999, changed my life dramatically because it set me on a writing path from which I have not deviated. In those ten years, I have seen The Originals (2001) and Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II (2008) published -- thus fulfilling Nancy Crews' wish.

In addition, my WASP novel Flight from Fear was published in 2002.

Now, Nancy Batson Crews: Alabama's First Lady of Flight, the biography of my friend, my mentor, my inspiration is a reality. Please see the information on the new book here.

We lost Nancy to lung cancer in January 2001, but her legacy will live on in the two books she inspired as well as her own now published biography.