Valley Pilots Club Wants to Take Women on a Flight of Fancy

The Valley 99’s, a group of local pilots, will be at the San Fernando Valley Air Show looking for a few good women.

Mary Glassman of Canoga Park, president of the local chapter, says too many women think they are too old too learn.

“We have women in our Future Pilots Program who are in their 50s and 60s,” Glassman says.

The 99’s offer a mentor program, educational classes, and lots of new friends to take you up whenever you wish. The cost of flying time and instruction needed to earn a pilot’s license is estimated at $5,000.

Glassman says she flew for the first time moments after scattering her husband’s ashes over the desert.

“I had gone up with a pilot and gotten very emotional after the ashes were scattered, so the pilot told me to take over the controls,” she recalls.

“I had always been interested in flying, but I had two teen-age girls and worked as a cashier for a grocery company. There just wasn’t the money then,” she says.

Several years later, she took lessons. Although she does not own her own plane, she says getting rides is never a problem when you’re a member of the 99’s.

Member Bertie Duffy says she was thirty-something when she learned to fly. Her husband was already a pilot. In their divorce, she says, the custody battle was over their six airplanes.

“I finally said he could keep the other five, if I could have the Stearman,” says Duffy, who now makes a business of giving rides in her World War II-vintage open-cockpit biplane.

Duffy’s plane will be on display, and the 99’s will have a booth, during the show at Van Nuys Airport on Aug. 20 and 21.

‘A Woman of Independent Means’ Goes to Hollywood

When Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey came into possession of letters written by her grandmother, she couldn’t have known what an impact they would have on her life and family.

Then, in 1978, her biographical book based on those missives was published. It was titled “A Woman of Independent Means.”

The book became a best-seller and catapulted Hailey into literary stardom. Until then, she had been known as the wife of playwright Oliver Hailey.

The book chronicles the life of a woman who was a living example of self-determination, and her victories and challenges seemed to strike a chord in many readers.

Actress Barbara Rush did a celebrated one-woman show based on the book in 1984 and 1985.

For reasons that Hailey, of Studio City, may have once considered annoying but now sees as fortuitous, the book never made it to film or television--until now.

Producer-director Robert Greenwald, in cooperation with NBC, is shooting a six-hour mini-series, due to air next year. Tarzana resident Sally Field, who told Hailey she has had a long interest in bringing the book to television, plays Hailey’s grandmother during most of the 60 years recorded in the book.

Hailey’s daughter, actress Brook Hailey, will play her mother in the miniseries, which is now shooting in Houston. Hailey herself will have a walk-on part.

The past two years have been a period of both joy and tragedy for the Valley author, whose husband died last year and whose mother suffered a disabling stroke.

The joy, she says, is in seeing an actress and director who were moved and inspired by her book bring it to life on the small screen.

Nudist Lays Bare Genesis of Once-Controversial Resort

Though once considered risque, the nudist camp in Topanga Canyon is peacefully thriving, and that’s a great relief for founder Ed Lange.

The Topanga Chamber of Commerce, which once refused to sell Lange a ticket to its annual dinner, now meets every month at his Elysium Fields resort. Chamber members keep their shirts and everything else on, Lange said.

Schoolchildren take tennis lessons on the grounds and middle-aged, bathing suit-clad women take water aerobics classes in the pool.

After surviving everything from prayer vigils to unhappy neighbors, Lange appreciates the lack of controversy. Lange, 74, says he became a nudist because of something we now call women’s lib.

“When I was a young man growing up in Chicago, I was struck by the sexual games people played with each other,” Lange says.”It seemed to me the tensions between men and women were caused by a convoluted set of game rules. The man wanted sex and the woman wanted a commitment, and what went on between them was that women cleverly bartered their bodies in exchange for what they wanted to gain,” he says.

Lange says he was disgusted by what he considered the blatant gamesmanship by both sexes and thought there must be a better way for men and women to relate.

“When I came across a magazine dedicated to the liberation of the human body through nudism, I thought, ‘Well, there’s the answer.’ It’s pretty hard to play games when you don’t have anything on,” he adds.

Lange checked into nudism and liked the concept. When he came to Southern California about 40 years ago, one of his first stops was a nudist colony in Sunland called The Ranch.

When that organization was hassled out of existence, he says, he began putting together the idea for what has become Elysium Fields.

“My original idea was to open a clothes-optional resort in Ojai, but it was too far from the population center of Los Angeles,” Lange says. “When I came across the Topanga site, I knew it was the place.”

He envisioned a place where families and individuals could enjoy fresh air and sunshine without, he says, the clothing barrier.

“Clothes are one way people judge others as to their financial and social status,” says Lange. “When you don’t have those clues, when you are not dressed, people tend to drop a lot of pretenses.”

“Nudity has nothing to do with sex, and we have never tolerated that at Elysium. There are sex clubs and swinging organizations for those people who are looking for that. That is not what we are about,” he says.

Betty Lesley, who has been a member for 15 years and an employee for 10 years, says: “There’s never been anything racy going on at Elysium. My daughter had her wedding reception here. Everyone wore their Sunday best and had a great time.”

Programs include a purification ceremony and co-ed sweat lodge, conducted by Native Americans, and a one-day retreat for women that includes swimming, use of the hot tub, a Swedish massage and a facial as well as a humorist and a psychic.

Overheard

“I decided to watch the Whitewater hearings, since the you-know-who murder trial is on hiatus. I can’t believe we pay the salary of those elected officials in Washington who never saw a television camera they didn’t want to talk to death.”

Student talking to her mother