Posted on 04/20/2015 8:07:16 PM PDT by nickcarraway
When Hilda Gurney’s name crops up, they love to tell stories about her switcheroo involving aviator Charles Lindbergh at the Van Nuys Airport.
The pilot and her copilot husband, Harlan “Bud” Gurney, decided in 1969 to take out a small plane, and Lindbergh — a close friend of the family who often stayed with them when he was in Los Angeles — asked if he could fly alongside. But the press got wind of the renowned aviator up in the SoCal skies, and reporters descended upon the airport to wait for his landing.
Wise to the plan, Lindbergh and the Gurneys hatched a scheme to duck the reporters. They landed at the Santa Paula Airport, Lindbergh got into Gurney’s plane, and she was to take over his craft.
“When Lindbergh jumped into the plane and saw my mom in there, he asked, ‘Are you flying with me?” Harlan Gurney Jr. said. “She said, ‘Wherever this plane goes, I go.’ ”
It worked. The media flocked to the plane supposedly with Lindbergh in it, and Hilda Gurney and he were able to roll into another hangar — unmolested by the press while Harlan Gurney flew the other craft.
The story embodied her in every way — gracious, unassuming, pragmatic and a true aviator. Hilda Emilie Gurney died March 18 in Moorpark. She was 98.
Born in a small town just outside St. Louis on Dec. 7, 1916, the sixth of seven children, she was always interested in caring for people. Few were surprised when Hilda graduated from high school in 1934 and enrolled in nurse training at Missouri Baptist Hospital. She became a registered nurse but left for California shortly afterward when her sister grew ill and died of complications due to pneumonia.
She ended up taking in her sister’s four children and, in 1940, actually married her sister’s husband, Harlan Gurney. They settled in Woodland Hills, where they lived for almost 70 years.
“I was nine when my mother died, and she raised me after that,” Harlan Gurney Jr. said of Hilda, recalling his loss. “She raised me through my teenage years and treated us all like we were her own.”
But along with Hilda’s caring streak, she also yearned for an identity of her own.
Her new husband was a pilot who served as a technical consultant on the Hollywood film “Spirt of St. Louis” — named after the single-engine craft his friend Lindbergh used to solo from New York to Paris in 1927. Soon she, too, felt the call of the skies and decided to get her own pilot’s license.
Hilda Gurney would end up flying for more than three decades.
Edith Ramseyer, 85, who knew Gurney as a charter member of St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in Woodland Hills, remembered her good friend as outgoing and fiercely independent. Even after Harlan died in 1982, Hilda was determined to stay in their home, which she did until three years ago.
A lifelong Republican and president of the Woodland Hills Republican Women’s Club, Gurney never let politics overshadow friendship, Ramseyer recalled, adding that she would never try to sway her Democrat friends to the other side of the aisle.
“One time, she was registering people to vote at her house, and I thought I’d go up to help out,” Ramseyer said. “I didn’t even know she was a Republican. I was a Democrat. I remember she looked at me a little funny, but it never affected our friendship at all.”
Hilda Gurney is also survived by daughter Hilda Carolyn Gurney; son John Gurney of Cedar City, Idaho; and 10 grandchildren.
A funeral service will be held Tuesday at 11 a.m at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, followed by a burial at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.
Wow.
R.I.P.
That is an awesome story....as my own grandmother was a pilot.
RIP.
God Bless this woman aviator
Is that plane a Kitty Hawk?
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