Introducing: Snippets of the Lives of the Incredibly Awesome

This November, Workman Publishing will release The Obits, a new annual that collects the best of The New York Times obituaries from the previous year. The Obits Annual 2012 is a “who’s who” of some of the most intriguing people of the twentieth century, but not everyone featured is a household name. There’s Colonel Albert Bachmann, a Swiss spymaster, whose paranoid suspicion of a Soviet invasion of Switzerland led him to create a secret intelligence service unknown even to his own government; and Madame Nhu, the glamorous official hostess of South Vietnam, who—at a party no less—once threatened to claw out the throat of a general threatening a coup d’état.  In celebration of these and the other incredibly awesome lives that appear in The Obits, the Workman blog will briefly chronicle six fascinating figures over the next six weeks.  Today, discover some snippets from the incredibly awesome life of Violet Cowden, one of the first women to serve as a U.S. military pilot.

• When the United States entered World War II, Violet Cowden, a schoolteacher from Spearfish, South Dakota, asked to join the Civil Air Patrol. When she didn’t hear back, she joined the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, an early incarnation of what would become the Women Airforce Service Pilots—or, as they were to be known, the WASPS.

• Born in a sod house in South Dakota in 1916, she rode her bicycle six miles each way to a local airfield for her first flying lessons, eventually becoming a licensed pilot.

• Over the course of the war, Mrs. Cowden—who had to pay for own food and lodging and worked seven days a week—logged hundreds of thousands of miles transporting planes from factories to domestic airfields and costal debarkation points.

• Her P-51 Mustang, a single-seat fighter, was the love of her life.

For more on Violet Cowden and other amazing lives, pick up The Obits, available this November–and tune in next week for another edition of Lives of the Incredibly Awesome.