Spartan Profiles: Fay Gillis Wells

AMERICAN AVIATOR

            She was the first woman pilot to parachute from a disabled airplane to save her life, which made her the first woman member of the Caterpillar Club. That was on Sept. 1, 1929. She and Amelia Earhart co-founded the Ninety-Nines, the world’s largest organization for women pilots, with 6,500 members in 30 countries. In the 1930s, she covered aviation activities for the New York Herald Tribune from Moscow, then a beacon for aviators trying to break around-the-world flight records. In fact, few question that Fay Gillis Wells, w’29, age 92, is America’s most prominent female aviator today.

             After her aviation career, she became White House correspondent for Storer Broadcasting and covered the Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. She was one of three female reporters who accompanied President Nixon on his groundbreaking trip to China in 1972. In 1976, she founded the International Forest of Friendship in Atchison, KS, Amelia Earhart’s birth place. “It’s a living memorial to aviation and aerospace history,” says Fay from her home in Alexandria, VA. “This year we celebrate our 25th anniversary.”

            Fay has fond memories of MSU. She and her sister Beth, both New Yorkers, chose MSU because “We had this dream after reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild,” she recalls. “We had to know something about agriculture, and I didn’t know wheat from barley. We found out that Michigan State was the country’s oldest ag school. So we said, let’s go to the best.” They drove to East Lansing in a Ford Model-T. “I remember I took a class in ornithology,” she recalls. “I was the only girl in a class of 23 students. That was fun.” 

            But midway in her junior year, Fay ran away to New York for adventure. She enrolled in a flying class, soloed in three weeks. In her second solo flight in the experimental Curtiss Fledgling airplane, she learned aerobatics. The rest was history.