As they walked up the front path, which wound its way past several stately magnolia trees, Dawson Trotman explained that the Fuller Evangelistic Foundation actually owned the house and rented it to the Navigators at a fraction of its worth. It was Charles Fuller’s way of supporting the work of Dawson and Lila Trotman and the Navigators.
Dawson Trotman opened the huge leaded-glass front door for Betty. The house echoed with laughter and overflowed with interesting people. Dawson and Lila Trotman had four children and a fifth on the way. Fifteen full-time Navigators workers and a woman who helped Lila with the cooking, cleaning, and laundry that twenty-one people generated also lived in the house. Betty felt at home from the start, especially at dinner when everyone sat together around a huge oak table carrying on lots of lively conversation.
The day after Betty arrived, Dawson Trotman drove her to downtown Los Angeles where the Navigators had its main office. A space had already been cleared in the corner of the office for CAMF, and a desk, chair, and filing cabinet had been placed there for Betty to use. After thanking Dawson for the space, Betty set her leather satchel down on the desk. Inside it were several pages of notes that Jim Truxton had asked Betty to turn into a booklet on the aims of CAMF. After familiarizing herself with the new office, Betty took out a pencil and went straight to work. By the end of the day, she was pleased with what she had accomplished. Listed neatly on the page in front of her were eight aims for the new organization:
- To serve as a clearing house of information for airmen looking for ways to use their military training after the war.
- To provide missionary bases around the world where aircraft, pilots, and mechanics could be housed at the lowest possible cost.
- To help transport missionaries and their supplies to areas that were not accessible on commercial airlines.
- To help gather information on terrain and weather patterns in remote areas to make flying safer for missionaries.
- To supply traveling maintenance and repair units to serve all missionary aircraft around the world.
- To provide aircraft and pilots to help in emergency relief situations.
- To publish a newsletter keeping the public up-to-date on the work of CAMF.
- To establish CAMF groups in various countries that would help others to see and understand the importance of missionary work around the world.
As Betty reviewed the list, a feeling of satisfaction came over her. A broad smile spread across her face. She was pleased that God had directed her to be involved with others who had a vision similar to her own. She determined to do whatever was necessary to make the new organization successful.
A week later a typewriter arrived, a gift from Betty’s father, who no longer needed it in his office. Betty put it straight to work as she typed up the eight aims into booklet form and wrote letters to people interested in the new organization.
As the days sped by, Betty came to appreciate Dawson Trotman. He was a networker, and he introduced her to many Christian men and women who would be key to the future of CAMF. He set up an appointment for her to meet Dr. Fuller, the voice behind the “Old-Fashioned Gospel Hour,” a radio program that attracted ten million listeners, many of them in the military. Dr. Fuller was very impressed with the idea of an organization that would support missionaries with airplanes, and to show his support, he gave Betty a check for fifty dollars for CAMF.
The money came at just the right time to pay for the publishing of Speed the Light on Wings of the Wind, the name that had been given to the booklet containing the aims of CAMF. Thousands of copies of the booklet were produced and sent out to anyone who might be interested in the work of CAMF. As well, Betty set up a regular Tuesday night prayer meeting where people could gather to pray that God would bless the work of the new organization and direct the booklets into the right hands.
In December 1944, Betty was able to report to Jim Truxton, now stationed in Panama, that she was beginning to make a number of contacts as letters began to arrive in the mail in response to the booklet.
Christmas that year was Betty’s second away from home. She spent it at the Trotman home with the other guests, where for some reason she was asked to play Santa for the gift exchange. She entered right into the spirit of the season, borrowing a large red bathrobe from one of the Navigators staff members and stuffing it with pillows. She put on a pair of red slippers, and Lila Trotman produced a Santa hat and whiskers from somewhere for her. Betty sprinkled flour on her hair to make it look white before putting on the hat and whiskers. Then she waited to make her entrance.
As she descended the sweeping staircase, with its mahogany paneling and chandelier sparkling overhead, she felt more like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind than Santa Claus. As the last strains of “Jingle Bells” faded, Betty burst into the room yelling Merry Christmas. People erupted in laughter at the sight of her. She was, after all, known as one of the quieter, more reserved house guests. She reached into the pillowcase tossed over her shoulder and began pulling out presents.
A few days after Christmas there was more cause for celebration. The radio carried news that General MacArthur’s forces, which had invaded the Philippines two months before, had finally forced the last of the Japanese to retreat. And in Europe, the German army’s furious attack at the Battle of the Bulge had been turned back by determined American troops. The tide of the war was turning in the Allies’ favor.
After Christmas Betty threw herself back into the work of CAMF. There was so much to do and only her to do it. She worked six days a week, often until seven at night, answering the ever increasing volume of people’s inquiries about CAMF. To avoid writing the same thing over and over, Betty started a newsletter, which she called Missionary Aviation. Once again, Dawson Trotman proved helpful, suggesting she also send the newsletter to those on the Navigators mailing list to help get the news out about CAMF. Betty licked fifteen thousand stamps, and soon the newsletter was on its way to many different parts of the world. Within weeks, even more mail began pouring in, and Betty was in need of help to answer it all.
Betty was introduced to Selma Bauman, a Bible college student who volunteered to help her with some of the secretarial work. On her first afternoon at the office, Selma typed six letters to people who had inquired about CAMF. To her relief, Betty started to see the backlogged pile of correspondence begin to disappear.
As they worked, both Betty and Selma prayed regularly that God would clearly show the men they were writing to whether or not they should be involved in CAMF. One of the early responses was from an RAF flight instructor named Grady Parrott, an American stationed at Falcon Field in Phoenix, Arizona. The British government had hired Grady to help train young English pilots in the Royal Air Force Cadets. Grady’s job was to train the pilots in advanced flight techniques and aerial combat maneuvers. Before the war, Grady had been an accountant, and Betty began to think of all the things an accountant would be useful for in a new ministry like CAMF. At every opportunity she prayed that God would direct Grady and his family to become involved with the organization.
In March 1945, Jim Truxton wrote to Betty from Panama that he would be stopping over in Los Angeles for two weeks on special assignment. Betty had told him about Grady Parrott, and Jim asked Betty to try to arrange a meeting between the two men. She got right on it, and when Jim Truxton arrived in Los Angeles, Grady Parrott was there to meet him. So, too, was Jim Buyers, who had served with him at Floyd Bennett Field in New York and was one of the original group of men who had conceived the idea of CAMF. Betty and the three men were soon talking like old friends. Although they came from differing backgrounds, they shared the same vision to use aviation to help spread the gospel. Together the four of them would become CAMF’s first board of directors. CAMF was officially incorporated three months later. Jim Truxton was president, Grady Parrott vice president, Jim Buyers executive secretary, and Betty Greene secretary-treasurer. CAMF was now a fully licensed not-for-profit organization.
Despite having an official board of directors, most of the work still fell to Betty, who undertook the work cheerfully with Selma Bauman’s help. In June, when the Navigators needed the office space back, CAMF moved to a small sixth-floor office in the Park Central Building overlooking Pershing Square. At about the same time, Jim Truxton’s sister Margaret moved to Los Angeles, and she and Betty became friends. Soon Margaret was spending her days, and sometimes her evenings, with Betty and Selma answering mail from Christian airmen all over the world.
With the correspondence and office work now under control, Betty accepted more requests to speak about CAMF and its aims. She spoke at a conference in Los Angeles sponsored by the Church of the Open Door. Three thousand people sat quietly as Betty spoke about a new way to help missionaries to do their jobs safely and speedily using airplanes. After the talk, people flocked around Betty to ask how they could help the new organization. Betty jotted down the names and addresses of all those interested so they could be put on the mailing list to receive Missionary Aviation. The response was the same at most places Betty spoke.
But as busy as Betty was, one thing bothered her. It also bothered the three other members of the board of directors. Although they were sending out bags of newsletters by mail and answering many phone calls, CAMF did not have a single airplane or pilot actually out in the mission field. After all, that was the whole point of the organization.
The first glimmer of hope that the new organization might finally get to do what it was called to do came through Grady Parrott. Grady had a friend named Bill Nyman, who was on the board of Wycliffe Bible Translators (which also operated under the name Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL in some countries), an organization dedicated to writing down native languages that had previously never been recorded on paper and then translating the Bible into those languages.
Wycliffe Bible Translators had been invited by the Peruvian government to work with some of the remote Indian tribes in the Amazon jungle in the eastern part of the country. Although Wycliffe had experience in the jungles of southern Mexico, the Amazon basin was very different. Hundreds of miles of impenetrable jungle sometimes separated tribes, making it almost impossible to reach them overland. Wycliffe had decided it needed an air division, and Bill Nyman had approached Grady Parrott to be its first pilot.
Since Grady and his wife, Maurine, had already pledged themselves to work with CAMF, instead of going to work for Wycliffe, Grady spoke to Bill Nyman about CAMF’s possibly supplying the airplanes and pilots needed to transport Bible translators and equipment into these remote areas. This prompted Wycliffe Bible Translators founder and director Cameron Townsend to ask CAMF to send someone to Mexico to meet with him and discuss the kind of air service it might be able to provide.
On September 2, 1945, World War II officially ended. Japan surrendered to American forces aboard the battleship Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay. A week later, Betty Greene found herself on the first overseas mission for the Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship. She sat in a commercial airplane as it flew south through heavy thunderstorms. She was on her way to meet Cameron Townsend at a Wycliffe Bible Translators conference being held in Mexico City. She would be in Mexico for two weeks, and when she returned to Los Angeles, she would put together a report for the board of directors on how CAMF could help.
