Scrapbooks reveal lives of UND’s first two women aviation students
With World War II on horizon, two friends at UND pursued dreams of flying, as recently opened scrapbooks show
Editor’s note: At UND, the Kay Lawrence Women in Aviation Scholarship is given in honor of Kay Lawrence, the University’s first woman pilot and an aviator who gave her life for her country in World War II. On Tuesday, UND Today will supplement the story below with a special Memorial Day item: a story featuring interviews with several winners of the Kay Lawrence scholarship and other female aviators, among them a UND graduate who’s now an Air Force pilot who flies the F-22 Raptor, a supersonic stealth fighter.
The photo at left of Kay Lawrence in UND Special Collections was donated by Marcy Gilbertson-Schoenecker.
UND Today thanks Patrick C. Miller, retired strategic communications editor for UND Today, for reporting and writing this story.
* * *
By Patrick C. Miller
Special to UND Today
It was July 28, 1943, when 22-year-old Kathryn “Kay” Lawrence — the first woman to graduate from UND with a pilot’s license — wrote a letter to her best friend, Marcy (Gilbertson) Schoenecker, who was living in Salina, Kan.
The U.S. was well into its second year of World War II against the Axis powers of Germany, Japan and Italy. Kay was in her fourth week of training at Sweetwater, Texas, with the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), a group of volunteers formed to ferry military aircraft from factories to air bases with the intention of freeing up male pilots for combat duty.
Relating her experiences to Marcy, she noted the strictness of the instructor pilots and mentioned that four women cadet pilots had already “washed out” of the flight training program.
Kay then added: “I’m working my head silly so if there’s any possibility of my getting through, by gosh, I’ll die trying.”
Six days later, Kay was killed during a solo training flight when her plane crashed not far from Avenger Field near Sweetwater. She was one of 38 WASPs to die during the war.
Her body was returned to Grand Forks, where she was buried in the Lawrence family plot in the Memorial Park Cemetery.
Long lost scrapbooks return
Kay’s letter to Marcy recently came to light when a copy of it was returned with two of her scrapbooks and other items to her nephew, 86-year-old Mike Lawrence of Grand Forks. He plans to one day donate Kay’s scrapbooks, letters and photos to UND’s Department of Special Collections.
“I want to leave all this with the university after the family sees it,” Mike said. “I think this is where it belongs.”
Sometime after Kay’s death, her mother, Chrissie Lawrence, gave Marcy a scrapbook Kay made during her high school years and another she compiled while attending UND. Marcy’s son — Steve Schoenecker, now a retired doctor living in Corvallis, Mont. — found the scrapbooks among his mother’s belongings after she died in February 2010.
Although the letter to Marcy is a poignant reminder of sacrifices Americans made during the war, content from the scrapbooks also provides a more personal look at the lives of Kay and Marcy, two young women who grew up best friends in Grand Forks. They entered UND as freshmen in 1938, both with the intention of earning their pilot’s license through the Civil Aeronautics Authority flight training program, then offered through the College of Engineering & Mines.
“Even if Kay Lawrence wasn’t UND’s first female pilot, this material would be valuable,” said Curt Hanson, head of Special Collections at UND’s Chester Fritz Library. “It shows what her life was like at the time she was here at UND. Certainly the fact she was one of the first WASPs gives it a women’s military history application.”
A pre-war snapshot in time
The aging covers of two scrapbooks from the late 1930s and early ’40s can barely contain the tattered yellowed pages holding newspaper clippings grown brittle with time, keepsakes from long-ago events and other mementos from Kay’s life.
Text and photos within the more than 80-year-old scrapbooks tell the story of two intelligent, vibrant, energetic young women who dreamed of becoming aircraft pilots decades before the founding of UND’s Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences. They graduated from Grand Forks Central High School together, enrolled at UND and both signed up for pilot training.
They belonged to the same sorority, were both UND cheerleaders and participated in the same athletic, social and academic activities.
“Kay strikes me as someone who wasn’t just going to sit around and do nothing,” Hanson said. “Whether it was cheerleading, basketball, softball or becoming a pilot, she was not your shrinking violet. She had gusto.”
Mike said his Aunt Kay was probably influenced by her grandmother, Kathryn Harrison, who was a medical doctor in Seattle.
“I think that’s where Kay’s desire to fly came from,” Mike explained. “If her grandma could be a doctor, she could be a pilot. I believe that with all my heart because she’s named after her grandmother.
“Kay wanted to do something like my great-grandmother did.”
Two lives take different paths
Although Kay and Marcy’s lives diverged when Marcy left UND after her sophomore year to marry George Schoenecker, a professional baseball player from Minnesota who played for the Grand Forks Chiefs, they remained close and kept in touch. Marcy followed her husband’s baseball career to Kansas, where she started a family.
Even after Kay’s death, the Lawrence and Schoenecker families remained close. Steve recalled growing up hearing stories about his mother’s best friend.
“They must have been quite a force of nature, the two of them together,” he said. “I have no doubt Kay would have been a lifetime friend of my mom’s if she would have survived.”
Underscoring this point is a letter to Kay and Marcy from famous heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey in response to a letter he’d received from them. (Click on the image at right to read the letter.) They’d read comments from him disparaging women in athletics, and they let him know they didn’t agree with his opinion.
“Thank you for your very intelligent and honest letter,” Dempsey wrote. “All I have to say is that I have the highest regard and respect for girl athletes, and women in general.
“Insomuch as you are intelligent,” he continued, “I do not think I need to say anymore, except that I agree heartily with all your statements.”
Steve felt it was important to keep the scrapbooks, even though he didn’t know if any of Kay’s relatives were still alive.
“It just makes me feel so happy to know that these things were reconnected with the rightful people who should have them,” he said. “I knew Mike would really appreciate them.”
Google makes a connection
If not for a May 2021 article in UND Today on the UND’s Women in Aviation Chapter honoring Kay Lawrence on Memorial Day that year, the connection might not have been made. Steve related how a Google search provided a link to the article revealing that Kay had a living relative in Grand Forks.
Steve contacted UND about the memorabilia he possessed that once belonged to Kay, inquiring whether it would be possible to contact Mike Lawrence to return it to him. Within days after Mike and Steve visited by phone, the scrapbooks, photos, documents and other items were on their way to Grand Forks.
“I’m so lucky this happened,” Mike said. “There’s so much stuff in here that I didn’t have a clue to some of the things that Kay did. It’s just going to be so much fun to look through this.”
Paging through one of the scrapbooks for the first time, Mike remarked, “It’s all the activities of a young lady going through college. Oh my gosh, it’s unbelievable how detailed this is.”
The number of aircraft photos in the scrapbook underscore Kay’s interest in aviation. Mike spotted a clipping showing a training aircraft flying above the UND campus and exclaimed, “Look at the aircraft! That’s what she would have been flying.”
Kay became the only woman among 40 students at UND to receive her pilot’s license. Statewide, she was the only female of 100 students enrolled in the program at North Dakota colleges. It made her and Marcy the focus of media coverage, but it wasn’t necessarily positive and tended to reflect the attitude of the time.
Steve noted that Marcy’s scrapbook contains an October 1939 clipping from an unidentified newspaper questioning how she and Kay were selected for pilot training.
The reporter wrote, “I ran over to see the gals and offer my consolation, and what happened? I asked them how they got in and Kay comes out with — ‘Oh we took physical examinations.’ Well girls, evidently there’s nothing to it to hear them.”
Under the clipping, Marcy penned a terse comment, “Some nerve!”
The winds of war
Kay attended UND from 1938 to 1942, graduating with a degree in education and her pilot’s license. She worked for the Boeing Aircraft Co. in Seattle before being accepted for training in the WASP program.
Toward the back of Kay’s scrapbook, there are blank pages and several loose newspaper clippings from August 1941, all related to the ongoing war in Europe and U.S. Army Air Corps pilot training.
It appears as though Kay suddenly had less time to keep the scrapbook current. In four months, the Japanese would launch their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, sending America into the war and forever changing the lives of two best friends: Kay and Marcy.
>> Don’t miss it. Read how Kay Lawrence’s legacy as UND’s first woman aviator is inspiring new generations of pilots in second installment of two-part series.
>> Do you want to read more UND Today stories? Just hit the link or go to our home page to subscribe to our newsletter.
