By Joey Smith
The year is 1961. A clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico is running a secret program. Twenty-five women have been invited to take the same battery of physical and psychological tests that NASA used to select the Mercury 7 astronauts. The women have been told not to talk about it. They have signed a pledge.
One of them is from Selma.
Myrtle Kay Thompson grew up in Selma with three mechanically gifted brothers and a father who worked on cars and planes. When she was 12, a brother taught her to fly using the family plane. She soloed at 14, tying phone books to the soles of her shoes and cushioning the seat so she could reach the pedals. She was the youngest licensed pilot in North Carolina. She may have been the youngest in the country.
When the school offered an aircraft mechanics class, it was for boys only. Her mother put on her Sunday best, went to the principal’s office and, in that particular Southern way, got her daughter into the class.
By 1951, at age 26, Myrtle Thompson held a commercial pilot’s license with single and multi-engine ratings, instrument ratings and certifications as a flight instructor, flight instrument instructor and ground instructor.
She wrote a weekly aviation column called Air Currents for the Johnstonian Sun in Selma, later moving it to the Raleigh News and Observer where it ran for seven years. She ran a charter service called Myrtle Airport out of Selma with her brothers, charging a penny a pound to fly. She transported passengers, furniture and, on one occasion, a corpse. In 1955 she was named Miss North Carolina Air Power.
By the time she arrived in Albuquerque in 1961, she had logged 4,300 hours of flight time. More than some of the Mercury 7 men.
She passed every test. All thirteen women who completed the program did. They became known as the Mercury 13. They were ready.
NASA cancelled the program before it started. The agency’s position was that astronauts needed to be military jet test pilots. Women were not permitted to be military jet test pilots. The circular logic was airtight and entirely intentional.
In July 1962, two of the Mercury 13 testified before a congressional subcommittee. The committee did not act. John Glenn told the subcommittee he was not opposed to women in space but that the order of things was what it was. The program ended.
Two years later the Soviet Union sent Valentina Tereshkova into orbit. She was the first woman in space. The United States did not send a woman to space until Sally Ride in 1983, twenty-two years after Myrtle Thompson sat in that clinic in Albuquerque and passed every test they gave her.
She kept flying. She married one of her flight students in 1960 and moved to Georgia, where she became a flight instructor, a Civil Air Patrol pilot, an aircraft mechanic certified by Georgia Tech and a pilot for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1998, at age 73, she was still flying her single-engine Cessna. In 2003 she was inducted into the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame and in 2007, items from a collection donated by her family went on display at the International Women’s Air & Space Museum in Cleveland, OH.
She died on Dec. 22, 2019, at age 94.
Go back to that clinic in Albuquerque. A woman from Selma, North Carolina, who learned to fly at age 12 with phone books on her feet, who talked her way into a boys-only mechanics class and ran a charter service out of Johnston County and wrote about aviation for the Raleigh News and Observer, sitting in a room passing the same tests as the astronauts.
She was ready. They just were not ready for her.
JTHEN is a recurring column in Johnston Now about the history of Johnston County, the parts that got left out, passed over or just never got their due.
