BY ANDY TAYLOR
chronicle@taylornews.org

When the Congressional Gold Medal was bestowed to surviving World War II female pilots last week, a Coffeyville native who earned her wings in Montgomery County almost 60 years ago was not present.
However, female pilot Mildred Darlene “Micky” Axton was there in spirit.
Axton, who was born, raised and educated in Coffeyville, died in February — one month shy of the national first formal recognition of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) by the U.S. Congress.

“I think my mom would have been ecstatic to have received the Congressional Gold Medal,” said Gary Axton, the Coffeyville native’s son who lives in Lubbock, Texas.
Born in Coffeyville on Jan. 9, 1919 to Beatrice Fletcher Tuttle and Ralph Tuttle, Micky Axton took her first airplane ride as a child aboard a Curtiss Jenny owned by a neighbor. The Curtiss Jenny was an early-day biplane that was part of the Inman Brothers Barnstorming Flying Circus.
The flying bug took hold of Axton, who received her pilot ‘s license in 1940 as a member of the Civilian Air Patrol in Coffeyville. At the time she received her pilot’s license, Axton was employed as a chemistry and debate teacher at Coffeyville Junior College, the same institution in which she graduated in 1938.
Women in any aviation school were a rarity in 1940. She was the lone woman in the Coffeyville Civilian Air Patrol in the 1940 class.

Micky and her husband, David “Wayne” Axton, later moved to Wichita where Wayne built bomber airplanes at Boeing. And, it was during those war years when aviatrix Micky Axton — married and the mother of one child — learned of the U.S. military plans to establish a female-only, non-combat air corps. Micky Axton, already a licensed pilot, had a leg up on her female peers and was among the first cadets of the newly-formed Women Airforce Service Pilots, known by its more familiar acronym WASP.
Trained at Sweetwater, Texas, where many other WASP pilots would earn their wings, Axton would be assigned to Pecos Army Airfield Base and attained the rank of second lieutenant.
Ironically, Micky was motivated to join the women’s air corps because her brother, Ralph Tuttle, served as a U.S. fighter pilot in the Pacific Theatre. Axton had received a letter from her brother after a fierce air battle over Guadalcanal.
“Ralph told me that 18 of the bunch of 20 he went down with had been killed. I knew I had to do something to help,” she said in a 2006 interview with “Boeing Frontiers.”
When Axton’s mother became ill in 1944, Axton returned to Wichita where she was hired at Boeing to be a flight test engineer.
And, it was at Boeing where she became the first female pilot in the nation to fly the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, a four-engine heavy bomber which was the largest aircraft of its kind at that time. She was able to pilot the massive bomber just four years removed from earning a pilot’s license in an open cockpit flight trainer in Coffeyville.
Axton later spent part of her career as a school teacher at Wichita East High School but remained active in a Commemorative Air Force.
She died on Feb. 6, 2010, at the age of 91 in Eden Prairie, Minn., after a quick bout of pneumonia, her son said.
“She was very active in the Commemorative Air Force,” Gary Axton said this week. “Mom always believed it was important to tell the story of aviation.”
So important was Micky Axton’s role in telling the story of the women in the World War II-era air corps that the Wichita-based chapter of the Commemorative Air Force restored a Fairchild PT-19 and renamed it “Miss Micky” to honor Axton. She flew in the restored aircraft when it was dedicated in her honor several years ago, Gary Axton said.
“I think of all the honors given to my mother, nothing meant more than seeing that PT-19 renamed ‘Miss Micky’,” Axton said. “That was a quite an honor.”
Attaining formal recognition of the WASP program has been a goal for surviving members of the WASP service for many decades. That’s because the WASP pilots, due to their noncombat duties, were never considered official members of the military.
The Congressional Gold Medal is, along with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Axton was partially responsible for getting the legislation pushed through the U.S. Congress in 2009 and signed into law in 2009 allowing for surviving WASP pilots to be granted their first formal recognition since earning their wings in 1943 and 1944.