Virginia Mae Cordy - September 29, 1927 - July 22, 2021 thebeacon.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thebeacon.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Irish pilot Lady Mary Heath was at the height of her fame and one of the best-known women in the world in the 1920s when, just before the National Air Races in Cleveland in 1929, she crashed her light plane into a factory roof and was seriously injured.
Lady Heath was taken to Lakeside Hospital, where she remained in a coma with life-threatening injuries for several weeks, tended to by a young nurse named Ruth M. Stewart.
Lady Heath survived. When she finished her convalescence at the hospital she gave Ms. Stewart a signed photograph of herself and the hand-drawn map of the airport that had been in her pocket when she crashed.