INVALID GIRL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 January 1944, Page 5

INVALID GIRL

ADOPTED AS MASCOT. BY AIR FIGHTER UNIT IN PACIFIC. (R.N.Z.A.F. Official News Service.) NEW GEORGIA. Gloria Lyons, 19 years of age, lies in the Christchurch Public Hospital with tuberculosis of the spine. Patient, but cheerful, she faces her stay there —two years. At a forward Pacific base of the R.N.Z.A.F. stands another “Gloria Lyons”—a sleek Warhawk fighter, and in the pilot’s cockpit a small typewritten note is pasted. To the Pilot:

Gloria Lyons is our 4 S.U. Mascot.

She is doing a long term in hospital and we want both our Glorias to last a long time. 4 S.U., December 43.

Four young New Zealand airmen of No. 4 Servicing Unit attached to the New Zealand Fighter Wing sat in their tent one evening, reading the mail which had come in that day. For one there were seven or eight letters; another also received a good batch; but for the other two it was a lean mail day. So they got their heads together, and not long afterward this advertisement appeared in a Christchurch newspaper:— “Two lonely airmen wish to correspond with two smart young ladies, 1821, view friendship. Interests, dancing, music, sport. Photo .if possible.” Among the replies came one, rather diffidently, from Gloria’ Lyons, on behalf of herself and a fellow-patient. A few more letters broke the ice, and now a regular correspondence flows. She tells the airman to, whom she writes of what goes on in New Zealand, he describes to her what life is like in the tropics It is amazing how things get round in these camps, but the airman did not have to stand “chipping” from his mates. Instead, the story caught their imagination, and when a Warhawk with the identification letter “G” was passing through the maintenance line the idea blossomed in some head of naming the fighter after the sporting bedridden girl and adopting her as the unit’s mascot.

So, when Gloria Lyons of the Pacific front line takes the air with her colleagues to beat the Japanese out of the skies, her namesake follows its fortunes keenly and hopefully, and the thoughts of the boys of No. 4 Service Unit are with the welfare of both.