IDAHO, USA — A mere stone's throw, and a couple of runways away from Gowen Field is the Boise Airport. The transportation hub that's been at that location since 1938.
Before that, Boise's airport was located where Boise State University is now.
Elaine Hunt McCalley still remembers landing at that gravel air strip. She turned 105 on Monday, June 5, and 24 years ago was honored with an induction into Idaho's Aviation Hall of Fame.
Becoming one of the first four women in the gem state to get a pilot's license wasn't the only ground broken by McCalley in her brief career as a pilot. Flying first found its way into her life nearly a century ago. She grew up in Gooding and convinced her parents to take her to see the airport.
"I'd been wanting to fly since I was a child," McCalley said. "I had my first airplane ride when I was a sophomore in high school, and it was in an autogiro...what's that? Well it's like an airplane but with rotor blades on top."
She was hooked and soon started lessons, until she got a job with the Office of Employment Security.
"And then I went to Boise in 1938, and my first paycheck I headed for the airport, ha," McCalley said.
Five dollars of her weekly paycheck went toward weekend lessons at Boise's booth field. Within a year, she had earned her license.
"My mother was my first passenger after I got my private pilot's license," she said, "so I took off after we got up and kind of circled, she said 'can't we just turn round and land?' She was hanging on."
McCalley wasn't the only woman pilot either, she said there were about six or eight of them. They would fly for fun, sightseeing the area from above.
"The feeling of freedom and being up there absolute and it's just such a special feeling," she said. "I didn't plan on making a living of it, ever, I just wanted to fly ha-ha."
Then in April 1940, she made another maiden voyage, by becoming the first woman in Idaho to get a commercial pilot's license. Until one weekend in 1941, Sunday December 7 she joined the Civil Air Patrol.
"I think it was the day the war started, a couple of us had rented some airplanes to fly up over Anderson Reservoir where they were building the dam up there," she said. "So we flew around up there and came back and that's when we walked into the office and said...whoops Japan has bombed Hawaii.
Everything changed from then on."
She then got married and during the war her husband was an instructor for the Army Air Corp, they wound up in Missouri. The last time she flew a plane was after the war, sometime in the 1940's.
Just because she hasn't piloted a plane by herself in more than 70 years, doesn't mean she hasn't flown. Her friend has been taking him up in his Cessna for several years around her birthday.
She had a party this past weekend with nearly 3 dozen family and friends, including her great grandkids, showing up from all over to celebrate her birthday.
Her birthday was such a busy time for her, she had to miss her trip to the gym, which she visits three times a week.
Wow does she get there, you ask? She drives herself, having had her driver's license renewed two years ago, at 103.
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