In the late 1950s, Pat Bryson dared to do what no other female in her small southern Missouri town of West Plains had ever done. She dreamed of learning to fly. When she was 15, she begged her father to allow her to take a ride in an airplane, a Cessna 170 that a man kept on a grass strip. Despite the protests of her mother, she paid the man a penny per pound and climbed aboard. That short flight, low and slow over the countryside, sealed the deal. Somehow, she resolved, she would learn to fly.
After graduating from high school – valedictorian no less – Pat secured a job at a local bank as a loan clerk and secretly began saving her money for flying lessons. She told no one at work of her plans, as they would have thought she was crazy. Only one person was in on the scheme: her father who had his own secret love affair with airplanes. Finally, the 19-year-old girl gathered her nerve and drove to the airport to ask for a flying lesson.
