doubling its population. The response of the islanders on “the rock” that took them in has been
immortalised in Canada’s now longest-running musical, Come from Away. In the show-stopping solo “Me
and the Sky”, the fictional Beverley sings Bass’s entire biography. It begins: “My parents must have thought
they had a crazy kid/ ’Cause I was one of those kids who always knew what I wanted...”
The real Bass says the seeds of theatricality were apparent during her childhood in Fort Myers, where she
was born in 1952. “As early as four years old, I remember having a real interest in flight,” Bass says, in a soft
Texan lilt. “But it wasn’t airplanes.” Bass would study her neighbours’ statue of Icarus, who flew too close to
the sun, melted the wax of his feathered wings and fell out of the sky. She did not heed the fable’s warning.
“I would get back home, climb up on the kitchen counter and try to fly across the room. And of course, I
ended up on the kitchen floor covered in bruises.”
I would get back home, climb up on the kitchen counter and try to fly across the room. And of course, I
ended up on the kitchen floor covered in bruises
Luckily by the time she was eight, the national airlines had launched their 727s, which they would fly every
night from Tampa to the local Fort Myers airport. Her aunt would drive her to watch, parking her
Volkswagen Beetle next to the chain-link fence. “I remember thinking, those pilots have the coolest job in
the world. And that’s when I announced to my parents that I was going to be a pilot.”
This might have seemed an odd proposition from an only child of ranch-owners. A girl, no less, even one
who went hunting on horseback at night in the Everglades with her father, rifle slung over one shoulder.
The three of them ran the ranch together, without a foreman or trainer, showing registered horses every
weekend for 10 years – “keeping me away from boys and from going to parties”, she says, ruefully. Her
parents never discouraged her, but Bass couldn’t get serious about flying lessons until they sold the ranch
and she left for Texas Christian University. As soon as her freshman year was over, she enrolled in a flight
school.
Every day she would go to class in the mornings, studying for a double major in Interior Design and
Spanish, then drive to the airport and stay there until 9pm, training for six hours. “That consumed my
college life, so I still didn’t date or go to parties,” she laughs.
Her first job in aviation was hardly lively, either. One of the planes at her flight school was owned by a
mortician, Wynn Styles, and one day he needed someone to fly a body to Arkansas. “All of the guys were off
on other trips, and I was literally the only one there. I volunteered to take this body: a 19-year-old girl who
had died of a drug overdose. I got the job by default.”
Bass would go on to fly his embalmed customers for two years, for $5 an hour, in a plane that was too small
for a coffin: four seats, with the back two removed and the front right seat folded down.
“The body was strapped on to a stretcher with a sheet over it, right next to me. You had to tilt the stretcher
at an angle to get it into the plane, so the sheet always fell off. I had to climb over the face to get to my seat.”
Sometimes, she remembers, the bodies were too badly damaged to be on a stretcher. One man had been in
an airplane accident, and she was taking him home to his parents. His remains were in a garbage bag, and
his uniform in another. Every day, she went to college, and every afternoon, she flew the dead, either
delivering bodies elsewhere in the country or flying out to bring them home. The only problem, she said,
was the smell of formaldehyde, a “very toxic odour” that made her eyes water and clouded her vision.
From $5 an hour with a corpse as a co-pilot, she would go on to flight instructor, chief pilot of a charter