Flying Into Yesterday: My Search for the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical Engineering Cadettes

In WWII, 918 brave and bright young women known as the Curtiss-Wright Cadettes were trained at seven topnotch universities to design airplanes. Their work helped salvage the Curtiss-Wright Airplane Company from its own engineering deficiencies in a time of national crisis. But the records of their participation in the wartime aviation industry were mysteriously lost. Their story has never been told -- until now. At the heart of the book is the author's mother, a smart 19-year-old beauty who, in 1943, managed to bust out of small-town, East Texas by stepping onto the Curtiss-Wright Starlight Express. In 2008, five years after her mother's death, Jean-Vi began crisscrossing the country in search of documentation on the Cadette program, seeking to discover whether these women (including her mother) had been real engineers. Her account is a compelling narrative that will keep you turning pages, eagerly anticipating the results of her digging, right up to the dramatic -- and inspiring -- end. Flying Into Yesterday tracks an amazing story that was deliberately cut from American history because women weren't supposed to be aeronautical engineers -- but they were, in World War II! This remarkable book is like a treasure hunt, and we get to join in the chase. (Mollie Gregory, author of Guts and Grace: The Untold Story of Stuntwomen in the Movies. ) Jean-Vi Lenthe is a poet, performer, and educator turned investigative journalist. She has an M.A. in Poetics and lives in Taos, New Mexico. ??? For book excerpts, photos, and author tour schedule, see the website: WILDHAREPRESS.COM???