Transcript
Introduction
"I'm Jackie Cochran,' she said, pumping my hand. 'great job, Captain Yeager. We're all really proud of you.' She invited me to lunch acting as if I should know exactly who she was and caused an uproar just by entering the posh Washington restaurant. The owner began bowing and scraping and the waiters went flying. In between pumping me for all the details of my flights, I learned a little about who she was. She was a honcho on several important aviation boards and committees and was a famous aviatrix before the war, winner of the Bendix air races. She had been a close friend of Amelia Earhart's. During the war, she was a colonel in charge of the WASP, the Women's Air Force Service Pilots and ferried B-17 bombers to England. Hell, she knew everybody and bounced all over the world."
"On V-E Day, she was one of the first Americans to get down inside Hitler's bunker in Berlin and came away with a gold doorknob off his bathroom by trading for it with a Russian soldier for a pack of cigarettes. On V-J Day, she was in Tokyo, playing poker with a couple of generals on MacArthur staff and conned her way on board the Battleship Missouri to watch the surrender ceremonies. As I would learn more than once over the next couple of decades, when Jackie Cochran set her mind to do something, she was a damn Sherman tank at full steam."
"She was as nuts about flying as I was. 'If I were a man,' she said, 'I would have been a war-ace just like you, I'm a damn good pilot. All these generals would be pounding on my door instead of the other way around. Being a woman, I need all the clout I can get.' But clout was no problem for Jackie. Her husband was Floyd Odlum, who owned General Dynamics, the Atlas Corporation, RKO and a bunch of other companies. We liked each other right off the bat. I can talk flying with her just as if she wear a regular at ponchos. She knew airplanes and said flat out that flying was the most important thing in her life."
"She was tough and bossy and used to getting her own way, but I figured that's how rich people behaved. When we parted that day, she said, 'Let's stay in touch.' We sure did that. Glennis and I became Jackie and Floyd's closest friends. It was a friendship that lasted more than 25 years until their deaths. I was the executor of Floyd's estate. They treated me like an adopted son. I flew around the world with Jackie and she was right."
"She was a damn good pilot, one of the best, and I'm sure the reason she latched on to me was because for Jackie, nothing but the best would do. And she thought I was the best pilot in the Air Force. Hell, she said that to anybody, anytime. Jackie played a big role in my life and I in hers. I met two sitting presidents in her living room. Wherever she traveled overseas, she was treated like a visiting head of state. I never met anyone like her, man or woman."
"She came on like a human steamroller. Jackie Cochran didn't own a pair of shoes until she was 8 years old. Compared to what she suffered as a child in rural Florida, I was raised like a country gentleman. She never knew her real parents or why she was given away. The people who raised her lived in a shack without power of running water. As a little kid, she had to forage in the woods for food to keep from starving to death. She had no education, no affection, no nothing. She was kept filthy, dirty. Her only clothes, an old flour sack, but she was as tough as nails. She learned how to become a hairdresser, got out of Florida and finally landed in New York. She got into the cosmetics business and started her own company. She became very successful and then got interested in flying."
So that was an excerpt from a book that I covered on the podcast a few weeks ago, which is the autobiography of Chuck Yeager. And once I read that excerpt, I was very interested in learning how. How is it possible for somebody that grew up in such dire circumstances to accomplish as much as Jackie did in her life. And so today, I'm going to talk to you about her autobiography, which is Jackie Cochran: The Autobiography of the Greatest Women Pilot in Aviation History. Okay. So let's jump into the book. I'm going to start with an overview of her entire aviation career. This is actually a quote from the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institute. And really a good way to think about this is Jackie put up numbers.