[graciegirl]

When we moved into our first home here we met a lot of people, ordinary people, folks like we used to know. One day while chatting with a charming woman neighbor, very like the folks I had always known... I found out that she had been one of the first women navigators with the Air Force and her husband was a retired Air Force pilot. They both retired with the rank of Colonel.

I asked her to tell me one thing that was the most different between her life before and after serving in the Air Force. ( She had never brought it up)


She thought about it for awhile and told me that before she retired, that if there was a national crisis, she was on the team who would take the president aloft and that she had access to what we used to call "the red phone".

After she retired, she joined a church here in The Villages and waited while a committee discussed whether she should be on the cookies committee for Sunday School.

This amazing and very humble woman had raised two lovely children and kept a beautiful marriage going while serving our country doing something truly amazing.

You never know what people have done who live here... and most of them are too humble to tell you.