She's A Brigadier, Dear!!

It was one of those events that you felt in your gut and your heart. The air was electric because for the first time Colonel Stayce Harris was about to be pinned with her stars for the rank of Brigadier General. The room was filled with friends, high-ranking everybodies and her relatives. This entry would be ten pages long if I started to record all her credits. But here's a few, Stayce was the First African American female to fly the B-747-400, the First African American Female to command an Air Force Flying Squadron, taking command of the 729th Airlift Squadron in February 2001 at March Air Force Base, Ca. She was rated as a C-141B aircraft commander logging over 2500 hours and actually landed that aircraft on Antartica. There is much ceremony to the pinning --six separate times the stars go on-- two for her uniform jacket, two for her shirt, two for her hat. I heard a lot of wonderful things said about her this night, but the grace note for me revealed more about her than any words. The person pinning stars on her uniform was a pioneering Air Force nurse. It happens that the nurse is elderly and tiny. Unconsciously, Stayce bent her knees so the Nurse would not have to stretch, to be able to easily pin on those stars. She is altogether a trailblazer, but also a well rounded human being--her interests in travel, jazz, her soro, the Links and others were all identified by cheering sections. At one point as I wiped away my tears, I looked around and saw a bunch of ranking officers doing the same thing, all of us overcome by the history being made in the room. The General said she waited four months for the actual pinning ceremony because she wanted to have it take place at the Tuskegee Airmen Conference, because they were her heroes. Personally, I was no more good when she asked the entire front row of women to stand. Imagine, they were all pilots of extraordinary achievement, including the first Black female combat, yeah COMBAT, pilot. You can bet that Stayce was a hero to those women. She's poked holes in the ceiling and the sky so young women like my granddaughters can fly at whatever they dream of doing. When I was young, no such thing was possible, so she's a hero to me, too, I'm Ruth Adkins Robinson.