1  Dorothy Graham Wescott. Born and raised in Edgefield, South Carolina, she graduated from Howard Business College in Raleigh, then worked eight months in private industry, where one of her co-workers happened to be a member of the CAP. Dissatisfied with her job and unwilling to oppose parental objection to her going overseas with the Red Cross, she joined the CAP and asked for active duty with the coastal patrol. In a 1983 interview with Colonel Lester E. Hopper, she said she'd never even heard of Manteo.

2    The base was located at a little place called Skyco and headquarters was a little two-story farm house. The landing field, from which our coastal patrol personnel had cleared the undergrowth and trees, was across a dirt road from the farm house. When our linemen went out to service the planes, they'd have to wear mosquito netting over all exposed parts of their bodies in order to tolerate the bugs. The men told jokes about how big the mosquitoes were and what they would say to each other like, "Shall we eat him here or drag him off to the swamp?" One lineman said he'd put several gallons of gasoline into what he thought was our number five airplane until he realized it was a mosquito... We had a little lunch counter there, where we did our own cooking, soup and things like that. We had one girl who was an excellent mechanic and ran the parts shop--Polly Overcash--and she rode a motorcycle out to the base. One day she begged me to go with her, and I went, but one trip in that sand was enough for me!

1 & 2  excerpts "FROM MAINE TO MEXICO" by Louis E. Keefer   As curator and historian, for the Dare County Regional Airport, I strongly recommend this book. Find out more about it under publications on the museum home page.