Iris Cummings Critchell, 104, Dies; Swimmer Turned Prominent Aviator

New York Times

29-01-2025

Iris Cummings Critchell, a swimmer who was the last survivor of the American team that competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin and an influential aviator who flew bombers as a pilot with the Women's Air Force in World War II, died on Friday in Claremont, Calif. She was 104.
Her death was announced by Harvey Mudd College, in Claremont, where she was an instructor of aeronautics emerita.
Ms. Critchell was 15 years old and known as Iris Cummings when she competed in Berlin, in Games in which Adolf Hitler hoped to showcase the supposed superiority of Nazi Germany's Aryan athletes.
She had started swimming competitively a few years earlier, after her parents took her to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, where her father served as a track-and-field official. She excelled in the trials for the 1936 Olympic team, but she and the other members struggled to raise funds for the trip to Hamburg, Germany, from New York on the steamship Manhattan.
'We had been wandering around trying to raise money, not training,' she told Swimming World magazine in 1984. 'In those 10 days before the boat sailed, I didn't even get in a pool, I never saw a coach, and I didn't have any chance to train. I think we may have gone back to Philadelphia for five days and then back to New York, because we couldn't afford hotels in New York.'
Most members of the team eventually found sponsors, arriving in Berlin 'less than two weeks before the first competitions,' she said. The sights that greeted them elicited dread.
'Everywhere you went, there were the goose-stepping police and the guards,' she told the LA84 Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds youth sports, in 1988. 'There was a sense of the impending future, a sense of the wish for dominance by the Germans and Hitler.'
But the dominant figure at the Summer Games was Jesse Owens, a Black athlete who won four gold medals in track — a rebuke to the Nazis' claim that Aryans were the superior race.
While Iris didn't win a medal at the 1936 Olympics, she went on to capture three national 200-meter breaststroke titles. But after the 1940 Olympics in wartime Tokyo were canceled, she put competitive swimming aside in favor of another passion that would hold her interest for the rest of her life: flying.
Iris Cummings was born on Dec. 21, 1920, in Los Angeles. Her father was a physician and sports enthusiast who had been the athletic director at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her mother, a graduate of Swarthmore, taught high school Latin and Greek.
When Iris was 8, she saw the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh in a Los Angeles air show. That was the beginning of her fascination with flight.
In the late 1930s, while she was still swimming competitively, she began taking flying lessons and earned a pilot's license. By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, she was adept enough to join the elite unit known as the Women's Air Force Service Pilots, or the WASPs.
Based in Long Beach, Calif., she flew fighter planes and bombers assembled in California to an airport in Newark, where they were loaded onto ships and sent to England. It was during this assignment that she met her future husband, Howard Critchell, a bomber pilot stationed in Louisiana, where she stopped for refueling. They were married on Christmas Eve in 1944.
After the war, Ms. Critchell received a bachelor's degree with a concentration in science and mathematics from the University of Southern California, where she went on to teach aviation — an uncommon accomplishment for a woman at the time.
Ms. Critchell's 'intellectual and academic inspiration,' she once told NBC Sports, was her mother, who was a 'college graduate and a high school language teacher when very few women ever went to college.'
In 1962, she and Mr. Critchell, who was working as a commercial pilot for Western Airlines, began teaching in the Bates Foundation Aeronautics Program at Harvey Mudd College, where their students included the future astronauts George Nelson and Stanley G. Love. Ms. Critchell ran the program on her own after Mr. Critchell retired from teaching in 1979. When the program was shut down in 1990, she remained affiliated with the college, lecturing and working as a librarian there.
Mr. Critchell died in 2015. Ms. Critchell is survived by their daughter, Sandie Clary; their son, Robin Critchell; three grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
In addition to her work at Harvey Mudd College, Ms. Critchell created aviation outreach programs for public high schools, developed manuals for the Federal Aviation Administration and worked as a pilot examiner there for more than 20 years. She was a longtime member of the Ninety-Nines, a nonprofit organization supporting female pilots.
She also competed in women's transcontinental air races, known informally as the Powder Puff Derby, a term coined by Will Rogers. In 1957, she finished first in a race to Philadelphia from San Mateo, Calif., sharing an $800 prize with her co-pilot, Alice Roberts.
Ms. Critchell was inducted into the National Association of Flight Instructors Hall of Fame in 2000. Her other honors included the F.A.A.'s Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award, in 2006, and the Nile Gold Medal from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, in 2007.
But for her, the flying was the real prize. 'It's a treat to be up there with the elements and appreciate it all,' she once remarked.
Shortly before ending her career as a pilot in 2016, she said, 'I've been flying 76 years, and it's a privilege to just be around.'