Heading down a lonely Texas highway just after the end of World War II, drivers might have spotted something unusual – an Air Force training plane landing on the road then taxiing up to a gas station for a pit stop.

Even more unusual was the pilot who disembarked. Not a strong-jawed combat flyer, but a petite, fresh-faced brunette named Barbara Searles, who later took her husband’s name, Squire.

After replacing the oil the engine had burned, she attempted to take off. Unfortunately, the plane’s problems continued.

“I thought, ‘I know I’m low – I’m hitting a fence, but I don’t feel anything,’” she says. “I was worried I would hit two telephone poles I saw ahead, and put my head down. When I sat up the people around just gasped. I had hit the poles and knocked out telephone service for that little part of Texas.”

Relatively uninjured, Squire caught a ride to the nearest telephone and called her home base. “My boss said to take the instrument panel out and go get another plane,” she says, laughing.

Resilience and grace under pressure were just two of the traits this resident of The Terraces of Los Gatos developed as one of only 1,078 women to serve in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) — the first women to fly in any capacity for the U.S. Armed Forces.

As a 1944 inductee, Squire’s was the final class of WASPs who flew at all during the war. But she and her peers kept planes moving through the U.S. when most male pilots were flying combat missions overseas.

The squadron of female flyers was established early in the war to help ferry planes from their assembly plants to their disembarkation points, as well as to test-fly planes after repairs and help train combat pilots in live-fire exercises by flying target-towing aircraft.

She reported for duty in May 1944 at the training base at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. There, “we had all the same training as the male cadets, except that we were considered civil service members of the Air Force,” she says.

After 30 days of learning Army flying styles and administrative procedures, Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold presented the flyers their wings.

“When he shook my hand and handed me my wings, I thought, ‘Now I can do anything.’ That was really a changing point in my life,” she says. “Most of us went in not feeling we were doing anything great. We just wanted to help the war effort.”

Rather than return to college, she continued flying after the war’s end, first ferrying decommissioned Air Force training planes to be sold to private buyers, then flying new planes from the factory. She married her late husband, Robert, in 1947 and stopped flying to focus on sailing.

At 88, Squire still enjoys flying as a passenger and carries with her the vivid impressions of her piloting days. Now, she enjoys speaking to female pilots whenever she gets the chance and reminding them of the path the WASPs blazed.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Why were we so special?’ But we were sort of pioneers,” says Squire, who has lived at The Terraces of Los Gatos since 2003. “Now when I get on a commercial flight, I ask if there are any female pilots; if there are, I talk to them and say, ‘You’re here because we were here.’ It’s just such a special thing.”