Sharpie, the life story of Evelyn Sharp, Nebraska's Aviatrix by Diane Rith Armour Bartlels is a 307-page medium size paperback with a great many photographs. With a woman's sensitivity and an educator's insight Bartlels has used the liberty of a Grant from the Nationla Endowment for the Humanities/Reader's Digest Teachers-Scholar Award, to deeply research her subject from birth to death. Seldom do you see this depth of interviews, correspondence and records being developed to a point that the reader feels he is a witness to the subject's life. The result is a book that grabs the reader and immereses him in a spectacular life, in a poineer epoch and time. Unbelievably, it can be had for $13 at Barnes and Noble.

The first chapter starts with Sharpie's death during her first ferrying assignment delivering a P-38. The whole researched story is there and the reader is caught up into what this story is about and how shabbily these spirited and determined women were treated by our government which did not even pay burial expenses.

Now unable to put this book down, Chapter Two begins her life at birth and takes you through her adoption by a working class family, school years and first flying lessons by an itinerant pilot who couldn't pay his board and room to her adoptive parents. Sharpie was sixteen then and never looked back.

There was the unrelenting struggle to build flying time. Remember this was the '30s, no one had any money, but Sharpies unrelenting determination, ability and personality saw her through. Not only that, but she lived in an unusual little town with unusual people - Ord, Nebraska, located almost dead center of the state. Next, these unusual business men bought an airplane and gave it to Sharpie. They thought it would promote their little town and they could not have been more right. Sharpie would never let them down. She was immortalized in many ways, including The Nebraska Hall of Fame.

Mercifully, Sharpie never lived to see the worst insult her government could bestow on her beloved WASPs -- the complete disbandment order of December, 1944. After being accepted on the same orders that inducted men as Army Air Force Service Pilots with uniforms, rank, promotions and pay the same as regular Army pilots. These WASPs had been denied all that, and had to have twice as much flying time to be accepted -- Sharpie was the seventeenth. They had blue uniforms, less pay, no rank, paid for their own quarters and food. Their parents paid for their funerals. Fifty years later this injustice was finally acknowledged - fine, but a little late.

I could not recommend a better book - that is in all elements.

--Capt. Arthur W. Heiden

Sharpie, the Life Story of Evelyn Sharp, Nebraska's Aviatrix ISBN: 1-886225-16-8 Dageford Publishing, Lincoln, NE. Ph: 402-475-1123

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