Elinor Millet was a teenager who longed to see Denver and the mountains. So she got in a single-engine plane and flew from Nebraska.
Easier said than done. Millet, who died Dec. 20 in Wheat Ridge at age 73, was taking a solo flight that day in 1947.
She had worked at the Lincoln, Neb., airport for many months – washing planes and anything else needed – in order to earn the money for her flying lessons.
“She got her pilot’s license before she got her driver’s license,” said her son David Millet of Golden.
At the time, she was the youngest aviatrix in the country, the Lincoln paper reported. But she beat the next young woman by only months, her son said.
She was a member of the Civil Air Patrol in high school, helping to find and rescue people whose planes had gone down.
She met the man she would marry, Robert Millet, at the Lincoln airport.
The two married in 1950 and moved to Denver to find jobs.
She had taken classes in technical drafting and mechanical engineering. Eventually, she got a job at IBM in Boulder and was an engineering manager when she retired.
Millet felt the sting of discrimination at her job because she didn’t make as much as men with less responsibility, her son said.
“But she had no regrets,” he said. Her philosophy, he said, was from the poem Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: “The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on; nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”
Millet never owned a plane, but she belonged to flying clubs, including the 99s, an international club for female pilots. She and her husband both flew planes for pleasure. She had three children to rear, and flying is expensive.
Technology was one side of Millet. The other was her artwork and gardening.
She was commissioned to do portraits for several people and showed her work at area galleries.
She raised such beautiful orchids and roses that artists came to her yard to paint them.
But Millet didn’t paint the flowers. She always painted people and, sometimes, landscapes, her son said.
Elinor Louise Worden was born April 21, 1932, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and was reared in Lincoln, where she graduated from high school. She married Robert Millet on March 8, 1950.
In addition to her husband and son, she is survived by another son, Paul Millet of Elizabeth; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. She was preceded in death by a son, Phillip Millet.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at vculver@denverpost.com or 303-820-1223.
