" If you happened to attend the National Air Races held at Cleveland in 1932 (a rank improbability, we admit, but one must get into these stories some way or other), you saw a slender blonde named Marie McMillin make a parachute jump from a height of 24,800 feet, a record no woman has since approached. Well, the heroine now lives in Queens and, since the grounding of all civilian fliers and (of course) parachute jumpers, has turned her considerable energies toward forming a corps of lady parachutists who will be trained to make spot landings beside wounded soldiers and administer first aid. “Literal angels of mercy, dropping right down in inaccessible places—can’t you picture it?” she asked us when we called to check up on her progress. We said we could indeed picture it, and she told us that several influential Washington personalities also could picture it. Anything may happen is the impression we got. Mrs. McMillin is strangely unlike a lady parachutist, though, and she has a fondness for John Frederics hats and talks more like a successful ladies’-club executive.
Pearl White was a primary influence in her eventful life. Mrs. McMillin wa a rather sickly little girl whose heart, she confided to us, used to go “Tick, tick, tick” and then go “Tock.” The Pearl White movie serials, “The Perils of Pauline” and others, apparently acted as a tonic. “I’d sit for hours and watch her,” Mrs. McMillin told us. “And do you know, skinny and sickly as I was, I knew I could do the same.” This conviction persisted subconsciously even after she had grown up, married, borne a child, and gone to work as an information clerk in the Neil House, the second largest hotel in Columbus, Ohio, her home town. One day she was chewing the fat with a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch and he asked her, “Marie, what would you really like to do?” “I guess I was thinking of something else,” she told us, “but I said, ‘Well, Charlie, I could jump out of an airplane.’ ” Charlie gave her a long, searching look, hopped into a phone booth, and called his city editor. Emerging from the booth, he said, “You’re going to jump out of a plane for the Columbus Dispatch, Marie, and you’re going to get five hundred dollars for it.” “When he mentioned that five hundred dollars, I didn’t doubt for a minute my inability that I wasn’t going to not make the jump,” Mrs. McMillin related, emerging from the double-double negative on her feet, as usual. She made the jump, pocketed the five hundred, resigned her job, and embarked on a career of barnstorming that lasted until we entered the war.
Mrs. McMillin has made four hundred-odd jumps. The only time she has been injured was when a large sign fell on her in Dallas while she was walking along the street. The sign read, “Walk Slowly, Drive Carefully, and Live Longer.” “This made me think,” she said, but added nothing about what it made her think. During her tours she got acquainted with the country’s leading aviators. She knew Lindbergh very well—“the quiet type,” she says. “Corrigan’s the quiet type, too, but deeper.” Mrs. McMillin, who has been a widow for some years, has a daughter of sixteen, who is not going to be a jumper or aviatrix; her ambitions are fixed on the stage and she attends the Professional Children’s School. “We look at it this way,” Mrs. McMillin told us. “She does the acting, I do the jumping, and never the twain shall meet. Would Katharine Hepburn jump from an airplane?” We said “No,” but only because we sensed that Mrs. McMillin wanted us to say no. "