The Historical Society of the Town of Middletown (HSM) welcomes Halcott resident and author Peg DiBenedetto who will discuss and read from her book “Silver Dollar Girls” in a Second Sunday program at the Middletown History Center August 11 at 1 p.m.
The Center is at 778 Cemetery Road, Margaretville. Admission to the illustrated talk is by donation.
The book, published in 2023 by Full Court Press, is a combination of World War II history and a fictional family narrative set in a rural valley during the 2020 COVID lockdown.
DiBenedetto, the daughter of Ruth Frankling Reynolds, who had served with the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during the war, had been looking for a way to incorporate her mother’s aviation experiences into her writing, which heretofore had focused on nature essays and children’s stories.
The novel features a young woman, Mae, who flees New York City during the pandemic to her great-grandparents’ abandoned farmhouse in the Catskills. There she discovers a box of papers describing how her great-grandmother Ruth became a pilot at a young age and then joined the prestigious WASP. She, with over a thousand other women, contributed to the war effort by ferrying aircraft from factories to airfields. In the book, Mae learns the reason Ruth’s aviation history was kept quiet for decades.
Ruth Franckling grew up in Woodstock and graduated from Kingston High School when she was 16. She’d wanted to fly since childhood but couldn’t afford the lessons, so she worked at the Kingston Airport and got paid in air time. By the age of 21 she’d gotten her pilot’s license. Soon afterward she received her commercial rating and then her instructor’s certification, all of which contributed to her earning a spot in the brand new WASP program.
She married another pilot, Ward Reynolds. The duo kept a pair of Piper Cubs in a level field next to their Halcott farmhouse and flew regularly around the valley and beyond.
Using occurrences from her own youth on her family’s dairy farm, along with valley lore, DiBenedetto weaves in “Silver Dollar Girls” a realistic tale of friendship, hardship and the rewards of life in a rural farming town.
The book will be available for purchase at the August 11 talk.