FRANS HALS Drive and Gerard Dou Street are running here. Jan Steen Court, Van Ruysdael Lane, Amsterdam Road, Rotterdam Street, Van Gaale Lane. Modern neighborhoods, with bungalows built the way Ladies Home Journal editor Ed Bok from Den Helder wrote America should put everywhere. The name of the town is Dutch Village, California, an hour and a half from Los Angeles. It’s a somewhat unusual location for so much Dutch, but on the other hand, there is an airport nearby, and down the road is La Cresta. That’s where Kay van Doozer used to live.
The Van Doozers have over time spelled their name as Van Dooze, VanDusen, VanDuser, or Van Deusen, but they all go back to Abraham and Katrijn van Deursen, from Haarlem’s Grote Houtstraat, the couple who braved an early ocean crossing. They arrived so early on in Manhattan that Broadway was not even yet Bredeweg, but Heereweg. They made their home there.
Kay van Doozer was named after her generations-removed grandmother Katrijn: Katherine, and she was just as gutsy. She was 19 when she first saw a Fokker plane at the airport, at a time when Anthony Fokker, also from Haarlem, hit front pages all across the land with his grand plans for American aviation. She took up flying lessons and got her license.
HER NAME is now mostly forgotten, but around Bakersfield some people still remember her. Rightly so: secretary of the Ninety-Nines, the club of female pilots, founded by Amelia Earhart – she organized fly-ins and women came from everywhere. She did air races with her friend Eleanor Verkuyl, and usually won them. But when the war broke out, things got serious. She flew to Canada for special training, squeezed herself in the back of a bomber and landed in Scotland: she was going to help the British Air Force.
The Air Transport Auxiliary was intended to transport mail, medicine and wounded soldiers, but instead Kay (second left on the photo) flew broken planes to the factory for repair. When they were whole again, she flew them back to their base for new missions. Those were risky flights, often in aircraft types that she had never flown before, with all sorts of defects, no radio contact and regularly shot at by German fighters. 174 ATA pilots were killed in action, one out of ten, men and women. Together, the team flew and delivered 309,000 planes.
AFTER THREE years of war flights, Kay van Doozer returned to the US as an instructor to train young pilots in Texas. When it was all over, and she had done her part to help her country win the war, she made a beeline to La Cresta. There, near the airport, the Van Gaale family was going to build a beautiful Dutch windmill that would remind her of her origins.
In November 1949, 75 years ago this month, she had just settled when an explosion blew up her home. Katherine van Doozer, descendant of Katrijn and Bram van Deursen from Haarlem, and one of the first women in the air, was only 43 and still had a life ahead of her. She died in the fire.
