Mary Rawlinson Creason

From the Lohman Funeral Home in Ormond Beach, Florida:

“Mary Rawlinson Creason

November 20, 1924 to March 26, 2021

“Big M”, as the family called her, took off for Heaven from her home base in Spruce Creek Fly-In Community in Florida. It was a peaceful departure, made possible by her ground crew: Crew Chief Abby Garvin, Hospice, relatives and other friends and family who did what they could, all limited by the pandemic.

Mary was an active pilot for 75 years. She soloed in 1943, in Kalamazoo, and got her commercial rating in 1946 at Muskegon Airport, before Grand Haven Airport existed. She taught hundreds of students to fly, was a charter pilot, and ran an FBO at Muskegon and Grand Haven. She flew fast and low and placed in many air races across the US, Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii. She had a Presidential appointment to the Women’s Advisory Committee to the FAA 1969-74. After selling her business in 1978, she worked in Lansing for the Michigan Department of Aeronautics for 12 years, where she was the first female pilot and worked in administration on safety and education. She was chairwoman of the Michigan Aeronautics Commission 1991-92. In 1992, she and other pilots founded the Michigan Aviation Education Foundation, which grants scholarships to students interested in a career in aviation. In 1966, she earned an Airline Transport Rating, and her ultimate dream was to become the first woman pilot for a US airline. By 1984, however, when the first woman was promoted to captain, she was too old. We believe that after that, whenever she was flying commercially on an airline and a female pilot announced the flight crew, she would smile and know that she had a part in their success. She was also very involved in introducing aviation to young people, and she did this with ACE camps at Grand Haven Airport, which many local kids attended over the years, Boyne Mountain Air Academy, and her work at Michigan Aeronautics.

Mary was the last of 7 kids, raised by her mother, Nora Belle Rawlinson, on a schoolteacher’s salary during the Depression, all of whom graduated from college and were exceptional people. Three were pilots, and her sister Mabel was unfortunately one of 38 WASPs to die during WW II. In 1944, she earned a BS from Western Michigan, and in 1996 she was awarded their Distinguished Alumna Award. Mom raised 4 kids in Grand Haven: Kennard (Wendy), Yvonne, Steve (Aleta) and Paul. She had seven grandchildren: Jamie, Nick, Jonas, Kate, Eric, Kevin and Sally. Mary is survived by her sister-in law and good friend Virginia Rawlinson, who will be 100 this year.

Mary and her husband Bill enjoyed their time in Spruce Creek Fly-In Community and their many friends there. A celebration of life will be held on Saturday, June 5, 2021, at Grand Haven Memorial Airport, in Grand Haven, Michigan, 49417, at 2 pm.”

 

A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with two high school friends. This is a rarity for me, as I haven’t lived in my home community pretty much since I graduated from high school. But this time I was getting together with my one high school friend that lives in my area (Stephanie, a successful small business owner), and another friend of ours, Renée, who flew in from Florida for a visit. We were talking about our kids, and we happened to mention that our daughter is working on earning her private pilot’s license. This reminded Stephanie of Mary Creason. Stephanie dated Mary’s son Paul “for way too long,” and recalled to us that she had been reluctant to break up with Paul, despite several red flags, because it would mean giving up seeing his mother Mary, whom Stephanie loved so much. So I learned about Mary from someone who knew her personally. Stephanie told us that Mary didn’t think much of Amelia Earhart, who she considered to be “only in it for the fame and publicity”. Even Earhart’s Wikipedia page states “…Earhart embraced celebrity culture…” Mary’s focus was much more on advancing aeronautical safety and aviation education.

 

Mary advanced women’s rights and women working in STEM fields by living her life as if those things were already reality – and by doing so, helped to create today’s reality of women leading in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Both World Wars made it possible for necessity to be the mother of invention – there were simply not enough men to do the work that Allied nations had to accomplish both at the fighting fronts and the home fronts, and so, by necessity, women were “allowed” to step up. Women stepped up. Certainly, some recognized it for the opportunity it was, and showed the world that women are as capable – sometimes more so – to do what was always traditionally assumed to be “men’s work”. Then, after the wars, most men certainly tried to stuff most women back in the boxes that had been constructed for them – but many women, having proved to themselves and everyone else that they were bigger than those boxes, refused to be stuffed back into them. And so it was on track to become normal, pretty much for the first time, for women to pilot airplanes and boats, drive trucks and tanks, manage and deploy weapons – but also for women to work in factories and docks, obtain higher education, work as nurses and doctors, work in positions of leadership and development.

 

For most families, World War II and its aftermath were the catalysts that brought women out of the kitchen and nursery – though they are still there, too. This was also true for my family. My paternal grandma signed up with the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or the United States Naval Women’s Reserve) and served for the duration of the war, mostly at the United States Naval Hospital in Annapolis, Maryland. She was honorably discharged from the Navy at the close of the war with the rank of Pharmacist’s Mate Third Class. She worked for a time after her service in the front office of a doctor’s practice, and then after she raised her children, she worked as a forklift driver for an automotive supplier. Whether she thought of it that way or not, she used her military service as a ladder to climb out of the traditional women’s roles that her mother, grandmothers and everyone else before her were trapped in.

 

My maternal grandma had to leave school after her sophomore year of high school – her father had lost his job with the railroad during the Depression, and she worked in a general store to support her family. She was married and had a new baby when World War II broke out. She had already worked as an electrical assembler at the GE factory in Fort Wayne before her baby was born, in the same facility where her husband was a supervisor. When her husband was drafted in 1944, she had to run their household by herself. She never worked outside the home after she had children, but the family moved to a farm in the 1950s and while her husband started and ran a photofinishing company, she kept their farm running, leasing some land for crops and caring for many kinds of animals herself. She was also a self-taught musician, playing the piano and organ for her church for several decades, having never had a lesson. Because she had supported her family by working as a teenager, and because she managed her own household as a young adult during her husband’s overseas deployment, she had earned the independence that made her able to thrive as a widow living alone for almost thirty years.

 

Because these Greatest Generation women saw an open crack in the door and shoved their way in, my mom was a bookkeeper, an administrative assistant for an automotive supplier, and a geometry-using quilt designer; my aunts were a surgical nurse, a small business owner, and a head of customer service/artist. Because of them I am a mathematician and educator, my sister is a forester, and my daughter is a biochemist. The door is wide open now, and we cannot allow anyone to close it, whether it is by slow and almost unnoticeable increments, or slamming it shut.