Out of the mountain of pulpy paperbacks she consumed, one would plant another seed in her mind-a novel by Robert Heinlein titled Space Cadet, about a new recruit in the space academy. In times of stress or whenever she craved solace, she would sink into science fiction and simply vanish from society. Her imagination grew fat on science fiction and weekly doses of Star Trek. She would dangle from the top of a door in ski boots, urging her body to grow, but it stopped at five feet one and a half inches, two and a half inches short of the airlines’ minimum. She might have dreamed of becoming a commercial pilot if she had been a man, but instead she decided to become a stewardess. “It was not a sight to inspire confidence in my passengers,” Mary admits. Mary’s standard equipment in the cockpit was a pair of pillows, one behind her back so she could reach the pedals and one on the seat so she could see over the instrument panel. “I would take her to the airport in the car, and then she would take me for a ride in the airplane.” “She learned to fly before she learned to drive,” her mother remembers. When the manned space age began in 1961 with Yuri Gagarin streaking over the atmosphere singing, “I am eagle! I am eagle!” Mary was fourteen and already in the air. But somewhere in Mary’s mind, as she looked at the jet, a seed was planted, and part of her would never sleep until she saw it flower. Women didn’t fly jet airplanes: it was a simple truth. “Boy, I’d like to fly one of these babies!” she exclaimed, and an airman stationed there assured her, “You’ll never fly one of these, young lady.” He was doing her a favor. We can picture Mary then as an undergrown tomboy with a crooked smile and gray-green eyes that are still twice as sharp as normal-great pilot’s eyes. She remembers an Armed Forces Day when her parents took her to an Air Force base, where she could clamber through the actual jets on display. By the age of ten she had assembled nearly every model airplane in the Revell line. It was there-confronted with the approaching death of that once limpid and thriving body of water, now strangled in sewage and the volatile wastes of industrial society-that Mary committed herself to regenerating the beauty of the natural world.
Mary, the second of three daughters, was the counselor in charge of the waterfront. For extra income the Cleaves operated a summer camp on Lake Champlain, in the cool Adirondacks. Her mother was a high school biology teacher in Long Island, the third generation of a line of naturalists her father was a trumpet player and conductor. From that time on, Mary always associated toilet training with higher education, eventually earning a doctorate in the field of sanitary engineering.
GULLIVER ANIMAL CROSSING NEW LEAF GUIDE MOTORCYCLES ARCHIVE
Read more here about our archive digitization project.Īpsychohistory of Mary Cleave would begin at the age of two, on the potty, where her mother taught her to read. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives.
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