On January 24, Iris Cummings Critchell, the last living Olympian from the 1936 Berlin Games, died at 104 years of age. Iris competed at the 1936 Games as a 15-year-old in the 200 m. breaststroke. It was at these games that Adolf Hitler wanted to showcase the alleged superiority of Nazi Germany’s Aryan athletes.
Upon her arrival in Berlin, Critchell said in a 1988 interview, ‘’Everywhere you went, there were the goose-stepping police and the guards. There was a sense of the impending future, a sense of the wish for dominance by the Germans and Hitler.”.
However, Hitler was humiliated and proven wrong when African American athlete Jesse Owens, a dominant figure at the Games, won four gold medals in track. His wins were an admonishment to the Nazi claim that Aryans were the superior race.
Although Iris did not medal at the Berlin Olympics, she led the U.S. women’s 200 m. breaststroke as champion from 1936 to 1939.
After the 1940 Tokyo Olympics were forfeited by the hosting country of Japan and later halted at Helsinki, the runner-up host city in Finland, due to the war, Iris turned to her other lifetime passion, flying. While attending USC, she learned to fly through the University’s first Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP), graduating from the course in 1940.
In November 1942, Iris became a member of the second Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) class, earning her wings in May 1943. She was assigned to the 6th Ferrying Group at Long Beach, CA, and served with the Air Transport Command until the WASP were deactivated in December 1944. During World War II, she flew dozens of military aircraft across the United States, including the A-20, A-24, B-25, C-47, P-38, P-39, P-40, P-47, P-51, and P-61.
After the war, Iris continued to contribute to aviation education. In 1946, she developed the aviation curriculum and taught at the USC College of Aeronautics in Santa Maria, California.
In 1962, she and her husband, Howard, launched a unique aeronautical program for the Bates Foundation for Aeronautical Education. Until 1990, Iris served as the director of the Bates program at Harvey Mudd College. During her tenure there, she was a faculty lecturer in aeronautics and the chief flight instructor for the program’s flight training phase.
In 2015, Iris Cummings Critchell was inducted into the California Aviation Hall of Fame at the Museum of Flying in Long Beach, honoring her over 75 years of work in aviation.
