GIVING BACK

Bucking
Tradition,
Iowan One Of CAP’s
First Female Pilots
By Kristi Carr
One-hundred years old — is it the new 80?
For Sgt. Ruth Beard Fuller, who turned 100 in April,
redefining roles and standards has been a constant
theme throughout her long life.
So, it is not surprising she was among the first Iowa
Wing recruits, within months of its establishment in
1943. In her memoirs (Ruth Beard Fuller Papers,
Iowa Women’s Archives, University of Iowa
Libraries), Fuller wrote: “About the time
I began flying, I joined the Civil Air
Patrol. Wartime, remember? There
were weekly drills and instruction on various
civil defense matters.”
A compelling reason to join the Civil Air
Patrol, she acknowledged, was the opportunity to
do what she loved — fly. Flying mail or airplane
parts to Midwest cities were some of her assignments.
A young girl dreams of flying
Her dream to fly was born, Fuller said, at the age of
12 when she attended the 1919 Iowa State Fair, where
Ruth Laws appeared as a “barnstormer, taking passengers
on brief rides. Because her name was Ruth, I took it
as an omen.”
Fuller postponed her flying aspirations, however, for
more than two decades. In the interim, she finished her
secondary education while avidly playing basketball and
writing for the Mount Ayr, Iowa, school newspaper. In
the 1920s, she was in the minority as a female student at
the State University of Iowa (now the University of
Iowa).
“For my life after school,” she noted, “I had three
choices. One was to be a physical education teacher or
go on to law school like my father. The other was
not something I made public. It was to get
married and have six children.”
When she met Bernard “Barney”
Fuller in a college physics make-up
class, the decision became clear. But even
in marriage, she tested tradition as she was
Protestant and he was Catholic.
The dream becomes a reality
Lest anyone think Fuller was turning status quo, after
marriage and the birth of her two daughters, Peg and
Joan, she brought her dreams of flying back into focus
at age 36, spurred by the arrival in Centerville, Iowa,
where she was now living, of S.A. Hopkins, the town’s
first flight instructor.
“The airport-owned plane was a Cub Coupe side-byside
with an air speed of 65 miles per hour for cruising,”
she recalled. “It had dual controls and could be flown
from either side.”
Fuller’s memoirs chronicle her first lessons of “climbs
U. S. Civil Air Patrol Volunteer 46 July-August 2007