Anita “Neta” Snook achieved a long list of firsts: first woman aviator in Iowa, first woman student accepted at the Curtiss Flying School in Virginia, first woman to run her own aviation business and first woman to run a commercial airfield. Yet it is for her connection with another pioneering woman pilot that Snook remains best known.

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“I’ll never forget the day she and her father came to the field,” Snook wrote of the time in December 1920 when they first met, in her book I Taught Amelia to Fly. “I liked the way she stated her objective. ‘I want to fly. Will you teach me?’” The Amelia of the title was, of course, Amelia Earhart. When Snook was in her 70s, she wrote the story of her life and of getting to know her famous pupil. That project got its start in a creative writing class.

As the title of her book indicates, Snook knew what her place in history would be. But before the two women became acquainted, Snook had already packed a book’s worth of adventure and achievement into her young life.

Born in Mount Carroll, Ill., on Feb­ruary 14, 1896, Snook became fascinated with machinery and flight at an early age. “I’d always wanted to fly as far back as I could remember,” she recalled, crediting the family doctor with igniting her interest when he took her on farm calls in his Ford Model T: “He’d race to the top of each [hill] and down the other side. We called it flying.”

“When she was little, Neta made toy automobiles that would run and boats that would sail in preference to playing with dolls,” her mother told an Iowa newspaper reporter. Neta’s dad bought a secondhand automobile when she was 9, and together they studied the instruction manual and learned about auto maintenance — a useful skill in 1905, since mechanics were a rare breed.

After Snook graduated from high school in 1915, her family moved to Iowa, where she attended Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) in Ames. Largely an agricultural college, it had a home economics department added to accommodate female students. After completing the 17 hours required for the home economics course, Snook was finally able to “choose courses that I really wanted — mechanical drawing, combustion engines, and a course in the repair, maintenance and overhaul of farm tractors.”

When not in class, Snook spent much of her time in the college library, reading about the government’s lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air craft divisions. Dur­ing her second year of college, she heard about a flying school started by Glenn Curtiss that was part of the Atlantic Coast Aeronautical Station in Newport News, Va. She applied to the school but was disappointed when her application received a curt reply: “No females allowed.” The following year she spotted a news­paper advertisement for the Davenport Aviation School, close to her home in Iowa. Snook applied and was immediately accepted, becoming the first woman to attend the school.

“Finally the day came — my first flight,” Snook recalled in her autobiography. “We raced down the field, the engine roaring and all eight cylinders firing in perfect time. I felt the tail lift but scarcely knew when we left the ground….I had no feeling of height, only of complete security with those long, sleek wings on either side which seemed almost a part of me.”

Beginning in June 1917, “Curly,” as her classmates were now calling her, helped to build and maintain the planes that were used for lessons. But when one of those planes crashed on September 9, killing the school’s new president and seriously injuring its instructor, the school closed. Some of the students were heading for the Curtiss Flying School in Newport News and promised Snook that they would make the case for admitting her.

Snook received news at the end of September that she finally had been accepted. When she reached the school on October 5, her pals from the Davenport Aviation School showed her around and introduced her to flight instructors Carl Batts and Eddie Stinson, who flew for the Wright brothers and would eventually own the Stinson Aircraft Company. Snook later noted that she was always nervous in the presence of Batts because of his stern demeanor, but she felt that Stinson was “effervescent and projected camaraderie.”

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