Two Navy SEALs land at Daniel Field to kick off the Boshears Memorial Fly-in on Friday night. The team will perform throughout the weekend. PATRICK J. KROHN/STAFF

Aviator overlooked in family of pilots

Web posted September 26, 1998

By Wendy Grossman
Staff Writer

Marie Conner Boshears never learned to drive a car, but she had a valid pilot's license until the day she died -- at age 87.

``Driving made her nervous; flying didn't,'' said her friend Betty Holmes, who was the office manager at Augusta Aviation. ``That's the way flying is -- it's very relaxing.''

Marie and her husband, Buster Boshears, flew crosscountry in open-cockpit planes, dropping into corn fields to refuel.

``They'd act like they never seen a woman pilot,'' remembers Wanda Boshears, her daughter-in-law. They hadn't -- there were few Amelia Earharts back then.

This weekend is the seventh annual Boshears Memorial Fly-in, which was organized to honor Augusta aviators Buster and Forest Boshears. Marie Boshears, who gave up flying when her boys were born, got lost in the shuffle, says Wanda Boshears.

Marie Boshears was the first woman to earn her license in Augusta and the fourth in Georgia.

Undated photo of pilot Marie Conner Boshears. SPECIAL

``Her eyes got a real glisten to them; they just exploded when she was talking about flying,'' Wanda Boshears remembers. ``I could just feel myself in the cockpit with her.''

She stood in the doorway of Wanda's room, her blue-green eyes squinting as she talked until 2 a.m. about what it felt like to fly.

The first flight in her logbook is dated Oct. 3, 1937. She learned to fly from Frank Hulse, who founded Southern Airways. She got her license Jan. 17, 1939, and logged about 130 hours.

``That was a good bit,'' said her son Buster Boshears Jr. airport manager at Daniel Field airport, adding up the numbers in the brown leather log he found in his mother's trunk.

A member of the Ninety-Nines, an international female pilots organization, Mrs. Boshears got a telegram the day after Pearl Harbor asking her to ferry DC-3s across the Atlantic, said her son Edward Boshears, a 52-year-old lawyer and state senator in Brunswick, Ga.

She was proud of the invitation -- but she didn't go.

``She was not a person that was interested in going long, far-off distances,'' Edward said. She didn't like leaving Georgia.

She grew up on a farm in Rockdale County, Ga., outside of Conyers. The oldest of eight children, five girls and four boys, Marie left home when she was 16.

Her father mortgaged half the farm; the bank was going to foreclose but Marie saved her home, said Edward Boshears. Making about $25 a month working as a cashier at Georgia Power Co., she went to the bank, got a loan and paid the mortgage off, he said.

``She was liberated before the word was used,'' said Wanda Boshears.

Marie Boshears' hair turned snow white by 21. She kept it cropped short with flapper spit curls around her face. She wore column skirts, tailored suits, pumps and always a hat.

She lived in the Charles Phinizy home, a boarding house at 529 Greene St., where Poteet Funeral Home is today. She rented the room inside the door to the left with the angels painted on the ceiling. When Marie died, her sons had her laid out in the room.

She might have met Big Buster Boshears, a rounder and a duck hunter, at the boarding house. He lived a few houses down and took his meals there, said Buster Boshears Jr.

Originally from Tiptonville, Tenn., just above Memphis, Buster Boshears Sr. was working for the Army Corps of Engineers. He built the lock and dam by Bush Field and laid out the streets around Daniel Field, said Edward Boshears.

They got married in Aiken on Feb. 21, 1942, when she was 35.

She didn't learn to cook until after the wedding. It took her an hour to cook bacon, said her remembers her granddaughter Mary Beth Welch.

Marie Boshears worked at Georgia Power until she had Buster Jr. on June 18, 1944. Her boys were born two years, two days and two hours apart, she was fond of saying.

There are two stories about why she quit flying, said Buster Boshears Jr. She said she quit because she was pregnant. Big Buster said she had a small airplane accident and it embarrassed her. Her last flight logged was Sept. 6, 1943.

She died just after her 87th birthday, on May 18.

``She was just so feisty,'' Wanda Boshears remembers. ``She packed a wallop.''

At 70, she was outside the doctor's office waiting for her ride when a man snatched her purse. She chased him down Broad Street and got it back.