B6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7 , 2019
months.
He was married at least four
times and had several children,
but a complete list of survivors
was not immediately available.
After retiring from the ring,
Mr. Race started the Troy,
Mo.-based World League Wres-
tling in 1999 and opened a facility
to train young wrestlers.
Reflecting on a lifetime of near
constant travel and pushing his
body to extreme limits, Mr. Race
said he had no regrets.
“You stepped into a night-
mare,” he told BostonWres-
tling.com in 2015, “but it’s a
nightmare that you created, you
wanted to be in, and I’ve always
said this: If I wanted to take that
step backwards, I wouldn’t take
it. I done what I love to do my
whole life. I’ve had no other job.”
[email protected]of Fame of four companies, in-
cluding WWE in 2004, the Na-
tional Wrestling Alliance, the
Professional Wrestling Hall of
Fame and the Wrestling Observer
Newsletter Hall of Fame.
The son of sharecroppers, Har-
ley Leland Race was born in
Maryville, Mo., on April 11, 1943,
and grew up in nearby Quitman.
He was reportedly expelled from
high school after slapping his
principal. A carnival wrestler in
his teens, he became a driver for
wrestler Happy Humphrey, an
800-pound grappler, who taught
him the ropes.
In 1960, Mr. Race’s pregnant
wife, Vivian Jones, died in a car
accident that also nearly cost Mr.
Race a leg. He said doctors didn’t
believe he would walk again, let
alone wrestle, but the injury de-
railed his career for only 18was Mussorgsky’s majestic fan-
fare “The Great Gate of Kiev.”
He was one of only six wres-
tlers to be inducted into the Halland manager Bobby “the Brain”
Heenan, who led chants of “Long
live the King!” To add to the royal
spectacle, Mr. Race’s t heme musicdifferent times,” Mr. Race told
IYH Wrestling on YouTube in- “We needed something that
addressed who I was, and of
course [owner] Vince [McMa-
hon] was not going to acknowl-
edge my eight-time thing. He also
would have a tournament to be
king. I won the tournament. I
wrestled six times that night.”
After his 1986 “King of the
Ring” victory in Boston, Mr. Race
was crowned by longtime friend
BY BEN SUMNERHarley Race, the longtime
wrestler and promoter best
known for playing the arrogant
“King of the Ring,” wearing a
regal crown and purple cape and
insisting that opponents kneel
and bow before him, died Aug. 1.
He was 76.
The cause was complications
from lung cancer, World Wres-
tling Entertainment said in a
statement, without noting where
he died.
Calling himself “the greatest
wrestler on god’s green earth,” the
6-foot-1, 245-pound Mr. Race was
a ring stalwart — and frequent
champion — for decades until a
1995 car accident ended his ca-
reer. He was sometimes over-
shadowed by bigger names and
more charismatic personalities
with bulkier muscles, but his
experience and toughness
brought him respect among col-
leagues.
Leon “Big Van Vader” White,
who was Mr. Race’s tag-team
partner for a time, told YouTube
wrestling channel the Hannibal
TV in 2017 that Mr. Race mas-
tered “the ability to tell a story
with your body physically.”
A ring veteran who wrestled
under nicknames such as “Hand-
some” Harley Race and “Mad
Dog,” Mr. Race joined what then
was the World Wrestling Federa-
tion in 1986 — it later became
WWE — as the company was
soaring in popularity. He was in
his mid-40s at the time, and he
needed a new gimmick.
“When I went to the WWE, I
had been world champion eight
obituaries
BY EMILY LANGERGrowing up on her family’s
Oregon farm, Dorothy Olsen
would scale the barn and leap
down into a pile of hay for the
thrill of those few glorious sec-
onds when it felt as if she were
flying.
“I just love to fly,” she recalled
decades later to the Chinook Ob-
server of Long Beach, Wash.
“From the time I was a little girl
... until the time I was flying
night missions as a Woman Air-
force Service Pilot over moonlit
Te xas during World War II, I just
loved to fly.”
Mrs. Olsen, one of the few
surviving WASPs, the long-unrec-
ognized corps of female pilots
who flew vital domestic missions
for the Army Air Forces during
World War II, died July 23 at her
home in University Place, Wash.
She was 103. Her daughter, Julie
Stranburg, confirmed her death
but did not cite a specific cause.
Mrs. Olsen — then Dorothy
Kocher — was working as a dance
instructor in Portland, Ore., when
she joined the WASPs in 1943, the
year the program was estab-
lished.
“World War II was a total war,”
Molly Merryman, the author of
the volume “Clipped Wings: The
Rise and Fall of the Women Air-
force Service Pilots (WASPS) of
World War II,” said in an inter-
view. “And what that meant was
that all men, women, children,
citizens needed to have a war
role.”
Mrs. Olsen, who through her
20s had scrimped to pay for the
flight lessons necessary to obtain
a private flying license, was one of
more than 25,000 women who
applied to be WASPs, one of 1,8 79
candidates accepted and one of
1,074 to complete the training
program, according to Army sta-
tistics.
She traced her interest in air-
planes to a book she had read as a
girl, “The Red Knight of Ger-
many,” about Baron Manfred von
Richthofen, a German flying ace
during World War I. For other
WASPs, inspiration came from
aviators such as Charles Lind-
bergh, who in 1927 made the first
nonstop solo flight across the
Atlantic, or Amelia Earhart, who
disappeared in 1937 during an
attempted flight around the
world.
“It was the adventure, the in-
spiration, and also the advanced
technology of airplanes” that
drew the women to flying, said
Sally Van Wagenen Keil, author of
the book “Those Wonderful Wom-
en in Their Flying Machines: The
Unknown Heroines of World War
II.”
“It was something a girl could
do,” she added, “if she could get
somebody to teach her.”
The WASPs were formed by
combining two earlier groups, the
Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying
Squadron and the Women’s Fly-
ing Training Detachment. WASPs
were treated as civilians and were
limited to domestic flights that
freed more men to fly in combat.
“There was a protective attitude
on the part of the military,” Keil
said.
But the women’s missions —
which totaled 60 million miles,
according to the Smithsonian Na-
tional Air and Space Museum —
were of critical importance and
sometimes of life-threatening
danger.
The women ferried planes
from factories to their points of
embarkation for the war, per-
formed test flights and towed
targets for gunnery practice. In
some cases, Merryman said, theyflew German or Japanese planes
that had been captured and trans-
ported back to the United States
to be tested for vulnerabilities. A
total of 38 WASPs died during the
course of the program.
“The government didn’t treat
us so well,” Mrs. Olsen told the
Chinook Observer. “A bay mate
was killed in a plane crash and the
rest of us had to take up a collec-
tion to get her body back home to
Portland because they wouldn’t
pay for it.”
Mrs. Olsen, who said she flew
more than 20 types of planes,
became known for the moxie she
brought to the sky. At least once,
she flew her plane upside down
for a thrill. Another time, the
beauty of the night sky overcame
her.
“The moonlight came over Te x-
as, and I was able to get big-band
music. It was the closest to heav-
en I have ever been,” she said.
“When I saw the lights of Coolidge
Runway, I was excited and I came
in low and buzzed the base before
landing. It was 11 o’clock during
wartime, and I guess I woke up
everybody. The commander had a
few words with me.”
The WASPs disbanded in 1944,
the year before the war ended.
Only in 1977 did they receive full
veterans’ benefits, and only in
2010 did they receive the recogni-
tion that their admirers thought
to be their due, with the conferral
of the Congressional Gold Medal.
“I was just doing what I loved.
And I was lucky,” Mrs. Olsen told
KOMO News in Seattle. “I loved it.
Every minute.”
Dorothy Eleanor Kocher was
born in Woodburn, Ore., on
July 10, 1916. She became hooked
on aviation after riding a biplane
at a state fair and thereafter spent
“all her available time and mon-
ey” on flying lessons, her daugh-ter said.
In 1945, weeks after the end of
the war in Europe, Dorothy Koch-
er married Harold W. O lsen. After
raising their children, she ran
antique shops near her University
Place home, where she had lived
since the 1960s. Her husband
died in 2006. Survivors include
their children, Stranburg, of Bea-
verton, Ore., and Kim Eric Olsen,
of University Place; a grandson;
and a great-grandson.
There are 37 living WASPs to-
day, according to Kimberly John-
son, the archivist and curator of
the WASP archive at Texas Wom-an’s University in Denton, Te x.
They and their late colleagues
were “vitally important” — not
only to the war effort, but “also for
the impact they had on the experi-
ences of women in future avia-
tion” and other careers in engi-
neering and science, said Merry-
man, who is also the director of
the Center for the Study of Gen-
der and Sexuality at Kent State
University in Ohio.
“They broke the mythology
that women were incapable of
doing anything that was technical
or scientific,” s he said.
Sometimes, before sending aplane off to combat, a WASP
would leave a note for its next
pilot, occasionally sealing the
missive with a red-lipsticked kiss.
In 1945, Mrs. Olsen received a
letter, conserved by Debbie Jen-
nings, curator of a WASP exhibit
at the Museum of Flight in Seat-
tle, sent from Italy by the pilot of a
P-38 Mrs. Olsen had ferried.
“I thought I’d write a few lines,”
the lieutenant wrote, “to let you
know that despite the fact that a
woman once flew it, the ship
performs perfectly and is appar-
ently without flaws of any kind.”
[email protected]DOROTHY OLSEN, 103
Daring World War II aviator brought her moxie to the sky — as a WASP
U.S. AIR FORCE
Dorothy Olsen stands atop a P-38 Lightning during her time with the WASPs in World War II.BY JASON SAMENOWJust three months ago, Wash-
ington finished its wettest
365 days on record, after an
astonishing 71.05 inches of rain
had fallen.
Then, about three weeks ago,
one of the most extreme down-
pours the city has ever witnessed
unleashed 3.3 inches of rain in
single hour.
But since then, we’ve suddenly
gone dry and our lush, green
landscape is turning brown.
In Virginia, Maryland and the
District, residents report trees
dropping their leaves, parched
flower beds and expanding
brown patches on lawns. Many
are mowing lawns less but are
watering for the first time in
more than a year.
“Poured 1,500 gallons’ worth
on my flower beds and ‘lawn’ in
the last two weeks,” wrote Gary
Reich in a Facebook post. “Every-
thing is definitely heat stressed in
Annapolis.”
Just 0.79 inches of rain has
fallen in the District since July 12,
about two inches less than the
norm. No measurable rain has
occurred in August, although
parts of the region saw rain
Tuesday evening.
Areas just to the west of the
Beltway, toward western Fairfax
and Loudoun counties, are even
drier. Dulles has seen
below-normal rainfall all sum-
mer long and has built a deficit
since June 1 exceeding 2.5 inches.
Some trees have becomestressed because of the lack of
rain, according to Robert Shaut,
director of tree planting at Casey
Trees. He said trees out in the
open sun exposed to hot and
windy conditions can become
water-deprived in just a few days,
and he recommended watering
younger trees, in particular.
“Newly planted trees are the ones
you have to target,” he said.
The dryness has developed de-
spite predictions. Hit-or-miss
showers and storms have regular-
ly appeared in the forecast in the
past couple of weeks, but they’ve
missed much more than they’ve
hit. The exception is in Southern
Maryland and Virginia’s North-
ern Neck, where storms have
popped up more frequently and
produced surplus rain.But the scattered and some-
times spotty nature of this year’s
summer storms is pretty typical,
whereas widespread, soaking
rain events are less common.
Summer storms flare up like
bubbles in a boiling pot, and
where they dump their rain is
largely random.
“In a lot of ways, this is what
summer should be: with some
folks getting hit and some folks
getting missed versus last year,
when it was raining everywhere
all the time,” s aid Jason Elliott, a
hydrologist at the National
Weather Service forecast office
serving the Washington region.
The feast-or-famine style of
rainfall distribution can mean
the condition of vegetation varies
over short distances.“A ldie, VA has brown lawns
everywhere,” reported Sylvia
Gashi Silver in a Facebook com-
ment. “Bethesda is green every-
where.”
The Weather Service’s Elliott
said some summertime stress on
lawns and gardens is normal, and
the region is not close to entering
a drought considering the
amount of rainfall last year.
That said, the weather pattern
may still turn drier. We have a
couple of chances for storms this
week, on Wednesday and Friday,
but the forecast rainfall over the
next week is generally less than
0.5 inches except for zones north-
east of the District, where as
much as an inch or so is predict-
ed.
Rainfall in late August andSeptember can be erratic and
depends heavily on whether the
remnants of tropical storms and
hurricanes from the Atlantic
Ocean and Gulf of Mexico track
through the area. Current fore-
casts are for near-normal hurri-
cane activity through the fall.
In other words, the outlook for
rain is uncertain in the next
month or two, and the Weather
Service’s Climate Prediction Cen-
ter gives “equal chances” for nor-
mal, below normal and above
normal rainfall.
If it stays dry, it means leaves
could shed their foliage early, and
fall color would be muted. Last
year, fall color was diminished for
the opposite reason: too much
rain.
[email protected]CAPITAL WEATHER GANG
Just months after record-setting rain, the D.C. area is suddenly... dry
HARLEY RACE, 76
As ‘King of the Ring,’ arrogant wrestler made his opponents kneel and bow
EZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Race demonstrates a move on Ted DiBiase Sr. in 2006 at Harley Race's Wrestling School in Eldon,
Mo. He was one of only six wrestlers to be inducted into the Hall of Fame of four companies.WORLD WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT
“King of the Ring” was only one of Mr. Race’s professional
monikers. He also wrestled as “Handsome” and “Mad Dog.”“You stepped into a nightmare, but it’s a nightmare
that you created, you wanted to be in.”
Mr. Race, on the rigors of his life as a professional wrestler