November 5, 2004

Flying for 60 years

Mayetta Behringer flies the friendly skies

By Carol Rosen
Staff Writer

Most parents don’t think twice about hopping into the car and driving off to see their children or grandchildren. Yet when Mayetta Behringer takes off to San Luis Obispo to see her loved ones, she hops into her plane and flies there instead.

It’s hard to believe that this 86-year old pilot is actually a day over 60. Her looks belie her age, but she very proudly says, “I’ve been flying for nearly 60 years. I started flying in 1945, that’s when I soloed, and I was licensed in 1946.”

Climbing the ladder for one of the flights of her life, Mayetta Behringer poses with Lt. Wayne Connell in 1961 before entering the cockpit of the F9F plane. The two broke the sound barrier by diving from their altitude of 44,000 feet. It was an awesome ride!

She’s been flying ever since.

Interest began in early youth
The Milwaukee native, who now lives on the Willow Glen-Cambrian border, says she’d always wanted to fly. As a child, she read books about Amelia Earhart and wanted to become a pilot. But she’d never been in an airplane. Finally when she was in high school, her father took her to the airport and got her a ride in a Stearman, which is a biplane. That $5 gift was the best she ever received, she quipped.

“It was wonderful; I never wanted to come down. I decided it was how I’d earn my living,” said Mayetta. Except there were no jobs for women pilots in those days.

So Mayetta went off to college at the University of Wisconsin and earned her bachelor’s degree in education, majoring in English and minoring in history. “My dad was insistent that I had to be a teacher. I taught all four grades in the township high school. I had lots of fun teaching.”

She married her college sweetheart John Wiedeman, a medical school graduate who was sent to the Pacific in 1945 to the Philippines to close hospitals. In February 1946, he was on a courier plane from Cebu along with a USO unit. The plane disappeared and was never found.

Joined Ninety-Nines
That was just about the time Mayetta got her license. She bought a small plane, a Cessna 120, which she calls a “two-place tail dragger” and became a flight instructor in 1947. She also joined the Ninety-Nines, an international organization of women pilots, which started in 1929. These women supported each other and the network of the original 99 charter member pilots.

Mayetta Behringer at the controls of her Cessna 182. She often flies from San Jose to Marina or San Luis Obispo to see her children and grandchildren.

Shortly after joining, she attended the group’s Denver convention in 1949, flying out there in her Cessna 120. “I met a gal [Pat Gladney] there who talked me into moving out to Palo Alto. She was also a Ninety-Nine and had been a member since she was 17 when she became a flight instructor. I moved and joined the Ninety-Nines out here.”

Mayetta moved in with Pat’s mother, Muriel Thomas, and remained friends with Pat until her death in 1993.

Soon after moving to Palo Alto, some friends mentioned a young Navy officer at Line School in Monterey named Bill Behringer. A career Naval officer who had been in the service seven years, Behringer came to meet Mayetta one

Saturday afternoon.
In the course of their conversation, he described landing a plane on a carrier. This totally intrigued Mayetta, and after that, he came up every weekend. Less than nine months later, they married.

Nomadic existence
Once married, they began to live the life of nomads. They spent six months in Key West, two years in Atlantic City, two years in Corpus Christi, four months in Chicago, two years in Long Beach and then off to San Diego where the family lived while he served as executive officer of a jet squad out of Miramar.

Bill was assigned to Moffett for three years after San Diego and then to Alameda Naval Air Station, where he served in air operations on a carrier called the Coral Sea.

“I joined the Ninety-Nines wherever we went, and I usually did some flight instruction. When we moved to different stations, we always flew with the children, and someone else drove the car. We flew together. Bill just to get there, and I because I love flying. Bill flew his Navy plane for the challenge.”

Along the way, the couple had four children. Linda was born in Philadelphia and Susan was born in Corpus Christi. Daughter Kim was born in San Diego and son Scott in Palo Alto.

Scott and Linda are fliers, although Linda is more into horses. She has a riding school and a ranch in Northern Illinois.

Kim also worked with horses, but now does bookkeeping for a company in the San Luis Obispo area. Susan is a neonatal nurse practitioner in Flagstaff, Ariz. Mayetta has nine grandchildren and three great grandchildren with another one expected this December.

Scott, who works for Sun Microsystems, is a flight instructor and flies “consistently.” He is a pilot for Angel Flights, which flies cancer patients to treatment areas. The charity has a network all over the country, Mayetta says.

While her husband was stationed at Moffett, Mayetta got to go up in a jet fighter, an F9F, what the Blue Angels flew at the time, and break the sound barrier. The Navy was allowing reporters to fly with pilots of these planes after some training. So Mayetta went to a local Sunnyvale newspaper and asked the editor if she could write a story about the flight.

Writes article for flight
He gave her a press card, and she went through the training. She flew with Lt. Wayne Connell. “It was such a thrill,” she said. “Next to soloing it was the best thrill. The plane was easier to fly than piston airplanes; the controls are so easy—the plane slips through the air. We were 44,000 feet over the ocean.

“We had to dive to break the sound barrier. He let me fly and when we pulled out, the G suit pressure on the limbs and lower body kept the blood from flowing out of the brain so I didn’t black out,” she said laughing.

As she spoke about flying the jet her eyes lit up and she smiled describing the loops they flew. Unlike us landlubbers, she loves being in the air and the stunts just added to her fun.

However, the pilot wouldn’t let her land, it was a fast landing, she said, and she was a bit concerned because the planes were quite expensive.

Today, she flies out of San Jose International Airport to Marina Airport to see her great grandchildren or to pick up another granddaughter and fly back to San Jose or on down to San Luis Obispo to see her daughter Kim and her grandchildren Stephanie and Kyle.

Volunteer work
Mayetta is not always in the air. She has a busy life with a number of commitments. One of those is her volunteer work for Books Aloud, a group that records books for people whose sight is gone and can no longer read. Mayetta mentions a woman in Wisconsin who is nearly blind because of macular degeneration.

“It’s nice to know that I can do something to make people happy,” she says. “Being able to give people the satisfaction of hearing books” is quite fulfilling. Even though, she adds, it’s not nearly as much fun as flying.

She’s been participating in Books Aloud for more than 14 years and has recorded more than 40 books. “It takes quite a while to read a book,” she says.

She joined the organization after meeting Florence Peer, the group’s founder. “Florence belonged to our church, and another friend of mine was helping so I thought I’d try it,” Mayetta said. Until the group found a studio, they recorded the books at their homes.

In order to help, Mayetta says, you first must audition. A book committee meets once a week to determine what books will go on tape. Readers are given the book and they take it home and read it, she adds. Then you go to a studio, where you read for one hour at a time. “You must sound fresh,” Mayetta says.

Most of the books she reads are about aviation, although she has taped a few children’s books. She’s read books about flying, biographies of Amelia Earhardt and books by Anne Morrow Lindberg among others.