PIONEERING AVIATRIX: While raising money for a monument to the
Taylor/Piper factory the folks at Pitt-Bradford came across this
interesting story from Tom Spencer of South Bend, Ind., who will
also be the speaker at Saturday’s unveiling of the monument.

Spencer’s mother, Mary Alice Spencer, worked at the Taylor
Aircraft Co., which was located where Blaisdell Hall at the
University of Pittsburgh at Bradford is today.

During the Depression, few planes were being sold and few bills
were being paid, including sometimes employee salaries. As an
incentive to employees who were sometimes paid sporadically, the
company offered flying lessons.

Spencer, a 19-year-old secretary for William Piper, took
advantage of the offer and earned her pilot’s license.

“Mom became a proficient pilot and attracted considerable
attention in the area,” Tom Spencer wrote in a 1998 issue of
Reminisce Magazine. “Although women fliers were becoming more
common by 1931, they were still very much in the minority.”

It didn’t take long for Piper, who was a master marketer, to
realize the advantages of having a pretty young woman pilot work
for the company. He had her ferry parts and even planes to
customers and used her in advertisements in aviation magazines.

“The message was simple,” Tom Spencer writes, “here was light
and affordable airplane even a woman could fly.”

Mary Alice Spencer also flew to air shows to exhibit the Taylor
Co.’s famous Cub or take part in short-distance races. At one of
these air shows she met Amelia Earhart.

Spencer worked for Piper for six years and even made the move to
Lock Haven when the company relocated there after the Bradford
plant was destroyed in a March 1937 fire.

The fire destroyed the plant in less than two hours.

“Flames shot at least 50 feet in the air as one explosion
followed another,” The Era reported the next morning.

The 20 employees on the night shift tried to save 15 nearly
completed airplanes by wheeling them out of the factory and out
onto the snow.

The plant that produced the iconic Cubs will be commemorated
with a 10-foot-tall monument that includes a bronze model of the
planes being built the night of the fire – a classic J-2.

TODAY’S QUOTE: Today’s quote, appropriately enough, comes from
William T. Piper himself: “A speech is like an airplane engine. It
may sound like hell but you’ve got to go on.”