ONE OF THE THREE MUSKETEERS
Born Gene Nora Stumbough in Springfield, Illinois, she grew up in Chicago. Her father, Harold, was a bank teller and her mother, Victoria, was a writer. She had two brothers, John and Craig.
Although she had two names, the family ran them together. Consequently, she was always known as ‘Genora’.
Gene started flying in the junior year of high school (year 11), when her older brother recommended she join the Civil Air Patrol, flying with a more experienced student pilot.
Against all the rules, she was occasionally to fly the plane as she was told that she was ‘a natural’. This was called her ‘Stick Time’.
“As soon as I discovered flying, I thought, ‘That’s for me. I want to do that.”
Gene went to Oklahoma University. There, she joined the Flying Club, known as the ‘Air Knockers’. It cost her $285.
Still a student, she was appointed as a flying instructor for the university. Gene won seven different flying trophies whilst there. A local paper labelled her the ‘Sky Queen’.
Gene also played cello in the university orchestra.
She graduated in 1961 and Gene continued to work as an instructor.
That same year, she met Wally Funk (Mary Wallace Funk), a civilian flight instructor and the first female Federal Aviation Administrator.
Funk had been selected for a programme called ‘Mercury 13’. This was a plan to train thirteen women as astronauts, following on from the USA’s successful ‘Mercury 7’ scheme, which selected the first male astronauts.
In 2021, Wally Funk was to break John Glenn’s 23-year-old record as the oldest person in space. She was 82. However, her record only lasted three months when it was broken by former Star Trek actor, William Shatner, who was ninety.
Funk suggested to Gene that she apply for Mercury 13 as there were still vacancies. “There’s a secret programme going on, testing women physically, taking the astronaut physical test.”
Gene was chosen for the first round of selection and had to undergo a gruelling five-day series of physical, cognitive and aptitude tests, held in Albequerque, New Mexico.
The programme was not run by NASA (who had initiated Mercury 7), but privately, by Dr William Lovelace. The official name was the ‘Women in Space Programme’ (the name Mercury 13 was only coined by a Hollywood producer in the 1990s – and there were only twelve women selected).
The testing was extreme. It included six vials of blood taken from her, many injections, hundreds of x-rays, electrocardiograms, vectorcardiograms, frozen water blasted into her ear, being made to swallow three feet of rubber tubing to test her gut and being denied solid food – amongst others. She undertook 75 separate tests.
Gene she said, “It was fun and it was a challenge. And perhaps, I thought, ‘I’ll take these tests and I’ll get into space someday.”
She passed, and was invited to the second round, to be held in Pensacola, Florida.
However, her boss at the University Flying Club refused to let her have more time off work – so she promptly quit her job.
The day before flying to Florida, Gene was informed that the Mercury 13 programme had been cancelled. NASA had heard of it and because the project was not state sponsored, they shut it down. Gene was without work. “There I was, now an unemployed flight instructor and ‘Astro-not.”
This was the height of the Cold War and the Space Race. The Soviet Union sent the first woman into space in 1963 – Valentina Tereshkova. It took the USA another twenty-two years before they put a woman into space.
In an interview, Gene was asked, “Why do you think there is a need for women in space?”
Her response was, “Well, it’s the same thing as is there a need for men in space. If we’re going to send a human being into space, we should send the one most qualified.”
Gene was known for a dry sense of humour and her rapier wit.
She got a job working for Beech Aircraft Corporation, a company making both civil and military planes based in Wichita, Kansas. There she became a test pilot and an aircraft demonstrator.
Along with fellow pilots, Joyce Case (an aerobatic flyer) and Mike Gordon (a former USAF pilot), she embarked on a ninety-day cross country flight in a new plane, a Beechcraft Musketeer, to promote the company. They became known as ‘The Three Musketeers’. Each plane was of a different colour. Gene flew red.
They toured all 48 contiguous states. At each destination, they arrived at lunchtime, performed stunning air displays in front of large crowds in the afternoon, and socialised with franchise owners in the evening. The following morning, they were off to their next destination.
“What could generate more attention than two of the three pilots being female? The whole idea of having two females flying on this tour was to show the customer that this is such a great airplane that EVEN GIRLS could fly it.”
Gene was not offended by this sales pitch. “Joyce and I didn’t have that attitude. How many pilots get to fly the Beech Line? We were grateful; nah, thrilled.”
However, she did find it a bit jarring that at each stop Joyce and herself were expected to leave their planes in tight dresses, wearing stilettos and jewellery – and without a hair out of place.
Eight days into the trip, the three pilots were ordered to fly wing-tip to wing-tip, through the Grand Canyon. Only Mike had any experience of formation flying.
They also circled the brand-new Space Needle in Seattle.
On the trip, Gene got to meet one of her flying heroes, the flamboyant 1920s barnstormer, ‘Colonel’ Roscoe Turner, who wore diamond-studded wings and always flew with his pet lion called Gilmore. Gene thought to herself, ‘They’re paying me to do this.”
Shortly afterwards, Gene became the first person qualified to fly all of Beechcraft’s planes. “It was the dream job of all dream jobs.”
Despite extensive prejudice, Gene never had anybody that refused to fly with her because she was a woman pilot.
It was whilst working at Beechcraft that Gene met her future husband, Leland Robert Jesson – always known as ‘Bob’. He had been a B-29 pilot during World War Two.
He had two children from a previous marriage: Kristianna and Robert.
They married in 1967 and moved to Boise, Idaho, where they set up their own Beech dealership, Idaho Beechcraft. It was based at Boise Airport.
They had two children, a son and a daughter – Brianna and Taylor.
Gene was appointed to the FAA’s (Federal Aviation Agency) Women’s Advisory Committee by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
It was at this time that Gene started writing about women’s aviation history. Her most well-known book was ‘Sky Girls’, which was about the 1929 Powder Puff Derby.
Its proper name was the ‘Women’s Air Derby’, the first organised race for female pilots anywhere in the world. To qualify, a pilot had to have at least 25 hours in the air.
It was raced from Santa Monica, California to Cleveland, Ohio.
Nineteen pilots set off. Along the way, one pilot caught typhoid, another crashed into a car driving on a runway, a third had the wires on her plane sabotaged with acid, and a fourth, Marvel Crosson, was killed when she crashed into the Gila River Valley in Arizona.
The remaining fifteen all made it to the finishing line (although Blanche Noyes was very lucky, having to put out a fire in mid-air caused by a cigarette butt – ironically, she was a non-smoker).
The winner of the race was Louise Thaden.
Gene personally interviewed all the surviving for her book.
Angelina Jolie acquired the movie rights.
Gene wrote another book called ‘The Fabulous Flight of the Three Musketeers’, about her earlier adventure.
She was also the President of the ‘Ninety-Nines’ between 1988 and 1990. This is the International Organisation of Women Pilots, created in 1929 by Amelia Earhart (and 98 other female flyers).
Gene was very proud of having set up a new branch based in the Kingdom of Jordan.
In her later years, Gene flew in women’s air races, before stopping competing when she was seventy.
Bob and Gene sold their company. They bought a camper van and ‘hit the road’. They owned two holiday homes, one in Sunriver, Oregon and the other in McCall, Idaho.
There was a Netflix documentary made about the Mercury 13. In it, astronaut John Glenn said, “Men fly the aeroplanes and test the airplanes, and women stay home and take care of the children.” There was an outcry at his outdated comment. Gene merely said, “That’s not very nice.”
All the surviving members of the Mercury 13 programme (ten of them) were awarded honorary degrees by the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh.
However, Gene did not like being referred to as an astronaut. She said that she was merely part of a research project.
Nevertheless, more recent female astronauts always said Gene inspired them. Eileen Collins invited Gene to be her guest when the former became the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle.
In 2017, Gene developed macular degeneration in her left eye and had to give up flying.
Along with her family, Gene was a member of the St. Michael’s Episcopal Cathedral in Boise.
She was inaugurated into the Idaho Aviation Hall of Fame.
Gene died in Meridian, Idaho. Her husband Bob, pre-deceased her.
Astronaut Barbara Morgan said in tribute, “Gene Nora, you’re sitting on my shoulder every day.”
Gene’s original Musketeer plane has been restored and is exhibited in the Beechcraft Heritage Museum in Tullahoma, Tennessee.
RIP – Repeatedly In Planes
