Mary Goodrich Jenson
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| Hartford native, long-time Wethersfield resident, the first woman in Connecticut to earn a pilot's license.
As a student pilot at Brainard Field, Mary Goodrich Jenson wrote a series of articles for the Hartford Courant on her experiences. The so-called "girl pilot" (she earned her license at the age of 20) continued to write on aviation for the Courant, the first woman to have a bylined column for that newspaper. As aviation editor, she covered the arrival of dirigibles (she was the only Hartford woman to fly on the Hindenburg, in 1936), visits from Amelia Earhart, and other notable air stories. She was a charter member of Earhart's Ninety-Nines, Inc., an international organization of women aviators founded in 1929. Jenson piloted her own Fairchild KR-21 bi-plane around Connecticut, and made history as the first woman to fly solo in Cuba. She was a director of the Betsy Ross Corps, a group of female pilots organized to assist in national defense during emergencies. In 1940 she promoted the Women Flyers of America, a unit of female pilots trained to relieve male pilots for wartime service by ferrying planes from the factories to airfields and transporting supplies. The WFA motto was "Airmindedness - for Sport, Profession and Emergency!" Educated at the Collegio Gazzola in Verona, Italy, and at the Katherine Gibbs School and Columbia University in New York, Jenson entered a career in advertising and promotion. She moved to Hollywood, California, and worked for Walt Disney Productions, where she met her husband, with whom she had two children. Returning to Wethersfield in 1941, she served on the Board of Education, the Republican Town Committee, the Council of Social Agencies of Greater Hartford, and as President of the Women's Association, an organization founded by her mother in 1921. | |||||||||||
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