She also ferried planes between manufacturers and Air Force bases.Īfter the war - and the WASP was disbanded, Hixson was offered a chance to join the Air Force Reserves as a non-flying second lieutenant assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton but Hixson continued to fly. During World War II, Hixson trained with the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in Sweetwater, Texas, and flew the B-25 twin-engine bomber as an engineering air force pilot. She started flight lessons when she was 16 and earned her pilot’s license when she was 18. Hixson never really fit into what people thought women should be doing in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s or 1960s.īorn in Hoopeston, Ill., Hixson always wanted to fly. It’s a great waste of our country’s mentality the way women are weighted away from this area because of what people think.” In 1973, she told an Akron Beacon Journal reporter, “I think they (NASA) should send up the person who can bring back the best and most information. Instead, NASA bowed to popular sentiment and banished Hixson and the 12 other women from the space program. Studies showed that women could handle heat better, could better stand the mental and physical strain, were less prone to heart attacks - and were less expensive to send into space (they weighed less, and required less oxygen and food). Common sense dictated the choice of a woman instead of a man. Hixson - or some other woman of the so-called “Mercury 13” - should have gotten the nod. Instead, fellow Ohioan John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth in 1962. Card courtesy of The University of Akron Archives.Īkron school teacher Jean Hixson could have been America’s first person in space if NASA had just listened to reason. Evelyn Poole Stewart McNeil is buried in Northlawn Cemetery. Philip’s Episcopal Church.Her collection of photographs which documented the Akron’s African-American community was donated to The University of Akron. Evelyn Poole Stewart McNeil died in Akron on Jan.7, 1992. After her husband died in 1968, Stewart continued to run the studio, finally retiring in 1978.Įvelyn Stewart remarried Dr. The two photographed the African-American leaders in the city, the special events and everyday life in the community. The Stewarts specialized in photographing the African-American community. Poole and Stewart married in 1950 and together ran the Stewart Photographic Studio. Stewart was a photographer who ran a studio on North Howard Street. Sometime during the 1940s, she met Horace Stewart, an immigrant from British Guyana. For a time she worked for the Cleveland Call and Post, the African-American weekly newspaper, as a reporter and photographer covering Akron. Little is known about her early education. ![]() She moved to Akron with her family, which included a brother George and two sisters Clara and Wilma. She was born Evelyn Poole in Memphis, Tenn., in 1918. Evelyn Poole Stewart McNeil, a professional photographer, captured the history of the African-American community of Akron on film.
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