Aerobatic champion Patty Wagstaff was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, happy to have witnessed women's increased role in aviation.
"I didn't know any women pilots, so I looked up to entertainers like Peggy Lee," said Wagstaff, the first woman to win the U.S. National Aerobatic Championships. "Now it's wide open" for women in aviation.
In Saturday night's induction ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, Wagstaff joined three others as new inductees: former Apollo astronaut William Anders, who circled the moon in 1968; the late Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to receive a pilot's license; and the late Jack Ridley, who was flight test engineer for Chuck Yeager's record-setting supersonic flight in 1947.
Dennis Quaid, who played Mercury astronaut Leroy "Gordo" Cooper in the 1983 film "The Right Stuff," hosted the black-tie gala that drew 900 people.
Quaid, 50, described American astronauts as his boyhood heroes.
"They replaced wanting to be a cowboy," he said.
In 1991, Wagstaff, of St. Augustine, Fla., became the first woman to win the U.S. National Aerobatic Championships. She repeated her national aerobatic victory in 1992 and 1993. The airplane she flew in those contests is in the National Air and Space Museum.