It was her 99th birthday.
“We’re having a ball,” Nutter told the “Dayton Daily News” Saturday evening. “I’m enjoying every minute of it.”
Nutter and her husband, the late Ervin J. Nutter, regularly attended Art Ball together.
Nutter was delighted at the opportunity to return to the annual gala as a guest of U.S. Congressman Michael Turner. A special birthday cake was made in her honor.
The lavish ball raised more than $100,000 for the museum and attracted nearly 900 party-goers, according to the museum. The event featured dancing, cocktails, wine and entertainment well into the evening.
Nutter, a former nightclub and San Francisco Ballet dancer, was called the "most photographed girl in the world" after then New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia told her to cover the skimpy outfit she was wearing with a coat before he would be photographed with her, according to The Dayton Engineers Club.
At age 20, the model and Medford, Ore., native was featured in a 1939 “LIFE” magazine article about the Golden Gate International Exposition held on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.
Nutter had a short acting career with the Paramount studio and was part of the USO during World War II.
She and her first husband became pilots after her dancing career ended. Nutter took a job with Piper Aviation in the 1960s, according to her Engineers Club biography, and became one of its spokespersons.
She met Ervin Nutter, the owner of Elano Corporation — an aerospace industry company — during a business trip to Dayton. The couple married in 1965.
Zoe Dell Nutter directed the promotion of the Small Aircraft Division for Elano, according to Wright State University, the home of the Ervin J. Nutter Center. She piloted rescue missions as an officer in the Civil Air Patrol and served a dozen years as a trustee of the National Aviation Hall of Fame. Nutter was elected the organization's first female president in 1988.
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