Moya Lear, wife of aviation visionary Bill Lear and a visionary in her own right, died December 5 at her home in Verdi, Nev., just outside Reno. She was 86. A year ago, she had undergone surgery on a cancerous lung tumor, which was found to have returned last July.
Moya’s colorful life was a sort of ongoing multi-ring circus. Her father was John “Ole” Olsen, half of the vaudeville comedy team of Olsen and Johnson, whose Broadway show “Hellzapoppin” was one of the longest-running hits of its time, opening in 1938 and running for the next seven years. It was backstage at that zany revue that a young Moya met the flamboyant Bill Lear, already a millionaire thanks to his perfection and patenting of one of the first workable automobile radios. That patent was to be the first of 150 inventions. That evening was to lead to a 36-year unconventional marriage that Moya summed up in her autobiography, Unforgettable Flight.
