Shown here in the June 1939 issue of Radio Craft is sixteen-year-old Kathryn Hutchinson of the famous Flying Hutchinsons. According to the magazine, she was an amateur radio operator, although her call sign was not specified. She is shown here working on part of the Amateur Radio display of the 1939 World’s Fair, which was part of the Westinghouse exhibit in cooperation with the ARRL.
Flying Hutchinsons, circa 1932. Wikipedia image.
The Flying Hutchinsons had earned their fame in 1931, when Kathryn was about eight, when they visited the capitals of all 48 states by air. The next year, when Kathryn was nine, the family achieved further fame in an attempted around-the-world flight. The attempt ended off Greenland when the plane crash landed and the family was stranded for several days before being picked up by a fishing trawler and taken to the U.K. Kathryn’s parents, George and Blanche, wrote two books detailing their adventures, The Flying Family in Greenland (1935) and Flying the States (1937).
You can see Kathryn and the rest of her family in this 1932 newsreel in which her father defends the flight:
You can hear Kathryn and the rest of the family at this 1939 radio program. More information is available at this link. I believe the program is actually a dramatization of the completion of a flight that never took place. Begun in 1939, the Hutchinsons made it as far as Mexico before the war broke out, making impossible a visit to all nations on earth.
Kathryn Hutchinson James died in Florida in 2015 at the age of 92. At the time of her death, she was a registered Republican. Her mother, Blanche D. Hutchinson died in 1995.
