Dear Amazing Supporters,

Thank you for being part of the campaign to have Oakland Airport renamed for Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) Maggie Gee.

Your support has been critical in spreading the word about this campaign and raising awareness about the lack of representation of women and people of color in the public sphere. The press has taken notice (www.maggiegee.org/news).

I want to share a little more about how I ended up starting this campaign and why this is so important to me that I pretty much spend every spare minute doing anything I can to keep this effort moving forward, even when it feels like this mostly amounts to asking thousands of strangers on Twitter to sign and share this petition.

My grandmother, Elaine Danforth Harmon, and Maggie Gee trained together in the WASP program and were subsequently stationed together in Las Vegas. As a result, they remained dear friends for the rest of their lives despite living on opposite coasts. My grandmother passed away in 2015 and it was her last wish to be laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. Since the WASP had fought for and (we thought) secured their veteran status in the 1970s, we assumed this would not be an issue. It turned out we were wrong though. This led our family on a journey to ensure that not just our grandmother, but any WASP, would have the right to be laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, alongside fellow military veterans. (Read more here.)

While working on the campaign for my grandmother and Arlington, I became aware of the fact that there is not a single major US airport named for a woman and there is not a single US airport of any size named for a woman of color. Almost half (27 out of 60) of the busiest US airports are named for a man. I think that is wrong.

There is a connection between the two change.org campaigns on which I have worked. I strongly feel that if women’s contributions were more highly valued in our society, notable women like the WASP would be memorialized publicly and this would mean more people learning about them. I also believe that if the story of the WASP were more commonly known, the Army never would have attempted to exclude the WASP from Arlington in the first place.

I am extremely proud to share that not only was our campaign related to my grandmother and Arlington successful, but also that my sister Erin has written a book about it. The book is called Final Flight, Final Fight (Read a review of the book here.)

Erin was the main driving force behind the social media and lobbying campaigns aimed at ensuring the WASP could be laid to rest in Arlington. Her inspirations for writing the book were to share our grandmother’s and the WASP story with a wider audience as well as to provide a real-life example of the importance of civic engagement. While our grandmother wasn’t one for tooting her own horn, she had a deep love for her family, her country, and civics. She would have gotten a copy of this book for everyone she knew. And, I know I may be a bit biased, but I absolutely love the book. It is peppered with anecdotes that reveal bits of my grandmother’s unique and fun personality, along with the nuts and bolts of what our family went through just trying to organize a simple funeral.

The book can be purchased here.

I’m sharing this with you because I want you to know how important your support is; not just in signing the petition but also in sharing it (www.change.org/maggie). I have seen one of these petitions be successful. If a little petition on change.org (and a lot of hard work) can lead to the passage of federal legislation, I am confident that your support can lead to the creation of the first major US airport named for a woman and the only US airport named for a woman of color.

Thank you so much for your support. I look forward to sharing more updates about our progress soon.

Kind regards,

Tiffany