Dorothy Schmidt Cole, recognised final yr because the oldest residing US Marine, has died at age 107.
Beth Kluttz, Cole’s solely baby, confirmed Friday that her mom died of a coronary heart assault at Kluttz’s dwelling in Kannapolis, North Carolina, on January 7.
The Charlotte Observer stories Cole enlisted as one of many earliest feminine Marine reservists following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She had left her Ohio dwelling to go to Pittsburgh, the place she hoped to volunteer for the Navy, however as a result of she was solely 4 toes, 11 inches tall, she was deemed too brief to fulfill Navy requirements.
Undaunted by her rejection, Cole determined to learn to fly an airplane and persuade the Marine Corps to let her be a pilot.
In July 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve into regulation, giving ladies the possibility to fill positions left open by males headed to fight. The Corps delayed formation of the department till February 1943, and Cole enlisted 5 months later at age 29, turning into one of many earliest volunteers for the department.
Despite placing in 200 hours within the cockpit of a Piper Cub, Cole accomplished six weeks of boot camp at Camp Lejeune with the Women’s Reserve’s First Battalion and wound up “behind a typewriter instead of an airplane.” Cole’s husband, Wiley, was within the Navy and served on the plane service USS Hornet, which sailed in each the Pacific Theater and the Solomon Islands marketing campaign throughout World War II earlier than it was torpedoed and sunk in October 1942.
Cole moved to San Francisco after the battle to be with Wiley. They married and had their solely baby in 1953. The couple have been each employed by the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley in California earlier than Wiley Cole died of a coronary heart assault in 1955.
Kluttz moved from California to North Carolina in 1976 and Cole adopted her to the realm round 1979.
