Pilots

In 1933, Joe Tolley soloed an Aeronca C-3 and fell in love with aviation. He bought a piece of land in 1934 in Pence Springs, West Virginia — a grass strip mowed out of a cozy river valley and shaded with trees and the ridgelines of the Appalachians. The name, Hinson-Alderson Airport, indicates the two larger towns nearest to the strip. Just one short year later, he taught his eldest daughter, Ruth, to fly, and she soloed another Aeronca C-3. In fact, Ruth was among her father's first 12 students, their names inscribed on a plaque that still graces a wall of history in the manager's office at that strip — a strip that she still runs today, nearly 70 years later.

The east-west turf runway lines up next to the river, with trees at both ends and ridgelines to the south, east, and west. The prevailing wind is out of the west. "There wasn't a regular flight school, just students who came in and wanted to learn to fly." As Ruth notes, "We didn't have any insurance — you couldn't get any." By 1942, Ruth Tolley had enough experience to acquire her commercial and instructor certificates — just in time to teach young Army pilots in an Army Air Cadet training program. A short piece away from the grass strip at Pence Springs, in nearby Princeton at another airport managed by her father, Ruth taught one full class of five cadets in Piper J-3 Cubs, and started a second class before she left the training program. "It was the first time I ever was in a program with an agenda," remembers Ruth. During her own training, the plan was haphazard at best. "What you'd learn to do was spins and loops." And when she soloed, "The fact that I got off the ground and back down was enough." Her gender was a conversation piece, but not much more. "There was a lot of emphasis on women pilots because of Amelia Earhart and the cross-country air racers [in the Women's Air Derby]." She recalls cadets gee-whizzing, "Oh gosh, I got the woman!"

In 1938, Ruth married John Gwinn, who flew a B-25 as an active-duty Air Force officer. The pair, with their subsequent young family, moved around the South during the first 25 years of their marriage, and Ruth's flying adventures often took a temporary backseat once they started having children — save for one. In 1951, while her husband was in Korea, Ruth and her sister, Betty Tolley Cox, a Fort Lauderdale-based private pilot, flew to Cuba in a Cessna 140 as part of a three-ship flight. The trip was mostly a lark, made in conjunction with an airshow in Miami.

When John retired from the Air Force in 1965, the family moved back to Lewisburg, where John developed the Lewisburg airport to replace an airstrip at the local Greenbriar resort in nearby White Sulphur Springs. Ruth took over managing the grass strip, located 18 nm to the southwest of Lewisburg, after her father passed away in 1961.

The Tolleys hosted a picnic and fly-in every September "until it got too big," according to Ruth. When 73 airplanes showed up in 1996, including a DC-3, the crowd overwhelmed the small field, and Ruth decided, "This has got to stop." She has co-owned the strip with Betty, now deceased, and Suzanne Tolley Humphrey, her half-sister. And there she taught her son, Mike, to fly.

Mike, now 47, got his radio operator's license at age 14 for $5 so he could work the field's unicom. He soloed a Cessna 152, but finished his private certificate in a 1968 Cessna 172, N35388, which the Gwinns bought new. And 388 has stayed in the family: Ruth owned and flew the airplane until two years ago, when Mike took it over. Now Mike flies the airplane regularly from his new home base in Newport News, Virginia, down to West Virginia to visit his parents. Mike is a test pilot stationed at Fort Eustis flying both helicopters (primarily UH-60 Blackhawks) and Beechcraft King Air C-12s for the Army as a warrant officer. He has accumulated more than 8,000 flight hours, and he instructs in his spare time for the Langley Air Force Base Aero Club. His son, Michael, 12, looks forward to learning to fly — and being a fourth-generation Tolley-Gwinn pilot.

While accumulating most of her 10,000 hours giving flight instruction, Ruth also flew contracts for a federal women's prison and hauled her share of corpses for local undertakers. She once picked up a body at Newport News, then Patrick Henry Field, and "they couldn't get him in there" and left his feet hanging out of the body bag. "I guess somebody had to do it," Ruth says, "and they could do it by air cheaper and quicker than hiring a hearse with two drivers."

John retired from managing the Lewisburg airport a couple of years ago, but he is still active in the community.

At 83, Ruth no longer flies, having lost her medical in 1977 because of an irregular heartbeat. She still goes to the 2,800-foot-long strip at Hinson-Alderman several times a week to hang out with the pilots who continue to flock there.