Nashville writer Rob Simbeck chronicled the life of Cornelia Fort in Daughter of the Air: The Brief Soaring Life of Cornelia Fort after a member of the Fort family read some of his writings.

After one lunch, he took on the project.

“I wrote the book because I fell in love with her reading her letters,” Simbeck says.

“Daughter of the Air” takes the reader from Fort’s idyllic childhood on the family compound in East Nashville to her untimely death in 1943. The book includes the family’s historical connections to WSM radio and the Belle Meade Country Club. Not only does the book track the trajectory of a spirited young woman who died too young, it painstakingly recounts the culture of Nashville at the time.

According to Simbeck, and Daughter of the Air, a restless Cornelia Fort found her bliss on a chance outing with a friend who took her on her first flight.

“She was lost until she found flying,” he says. “She went to Sarah Lawrence. She was a good student when she wanted to be and a bad student when she didn’t. She came out of college with no life path at all. She was restless, and did not want to spend her life doing charity balls at the Belle Meade Country Club.”

Daughter of the Air opens with a letter by Fort that describes the day at Pearl Harbor when, as a civilian flight instructor, Fort noticed an orange sun insignia on one of the Japanese planes heading directly at her as a target. She managed to get the plane down, but she and student were shot at running into the airplane hangar.

“At 22, she was a much better writer than I am,” says Simbeck, who is an award-winning writer and poet and the Nashville Bureau Chief of Bob Kingsley’s Country Top 40. “Her letters and articles come from an era when people cared about making language sing as well as tell.”

It was at that same age that Fort became the first Tennessee woman to be licensed as a commercial pilot.

Her father, Rufus Elijah Fort, was respected physician who had become Nashville General Hospital’s superintendent and chief surgeon in 1897. He opened a private hospital in 1904, Fort’s Infirmary, on Seventh Avenue between Church and Union.

In 1902 he was named vice president and medical director of the newly founded National Life and Accident Insurance Company, which launched WSM radio as a marketing arm in 1923. The WSM Barn Dance, started in 1925, became the Grand Ole Opry in 1927.

Simbeck says the three-year journey to the book’s end took him to some surprising places both physically and emotionally.

“It was the only time in my life that I ever danced the Macarena,” Simbeck explains. “It was at the Disneyland Hotel with a 75-year-old WWII pilot buddy of Cornelia’s named Florene Miller Watson. She was still stunning, and I could see why they called her “fly paper,” because the Fly Boys stuck to her.”

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Fort tried to join the military as a pilot, but they were not taking women at the time. A short time later, she was recruited into the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) later called Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP).

“She lived and died for something bigger than herself,” Simbeck says. “She wasn’t particularly religious, but she was very patriotic and clearly it was at the point of a gun, because she had been shot at by Japanese planes attacking Pearl Harbor.”

How did the fist woman to die on duty in American aviation history not make her a nationally known figure? It’s complicated, Simbeck says.

“She did die young, but everyone in Belle Meade from then until now knows who Cornelia Fort is. Let’s put it that way,” Simbeck says. “There’s the airport, but some people think it’s a fort or something.”

Most of the Cornelia Fort memorabilia is either in the Nashville Room at the main library downtown or at the Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. Cornelia Clark Fort is buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery off Lebanon Road in Nashville.

“I did not go to her grave until it [the book] was at the printer, because I didn’t want to have a conversation with her until it was done,” Simbeck says.

Daughter of the Air came out in hardback in 1999 by Atlantic Monthly and in paperback in 2001. Rights reverted back to Simbeck last year. Copies can now be found through his website: robsimbeck.com.