Founders
Episode 167 #167 Jackie Cochran (Aviation)
Founders

Episode 167: #167 Jackie Cochran (Aviation)

Founders

Episode 167

#167 Jackie Cochran (Aviation)

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography by Jackie Cochran.

What I learned from reading Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography by Jackie Cochran. 

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[4:37] At the time of her death on August 9, 1980, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history. Her career spanned 40 years, from the Golden Age of the 1930s as a racing pilot, through the turbulent years of World War Il as founder and head of the Women's Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) program, into the jet age, when she became the first female pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. She was a 14-time winner of the Harmon trophy for the outstanding female pilot of the year and was accorded numerous other awards and honors in addition to the trophies she won with her flying skills. 

[6:15] Jackie was an irresistible force. Time and time again in the many, many interviews I was so kindly granted, the repeated theme was "Jackie just could not be stopped." And indeed, this driving, cussed determination is signally evident in Jackie's own writings. Her unremitting persistence is clear in everything she did, from regaining the doll of which she was robbed at the age of six to her need to be the world's top aviatrix. Generous, egotistical, penny-pinching, compassionate, sensitive, aggressive -indeed, an explosive study in contradictions—Jackie was consistent only in the overflowing energy with which she attacked the challenge of being alive. Always passionately convinced of any viewpoint she happened to hold (nothing Jackie ever did was by halves), she raced through life, making lifelong friends and unforgetting enemies, surely breaking all records in the sheer volume of her living on this earth—as she did in the air. 

[8:07] To live without risk for me would have been tantamount to death. 

[14:16] Whenever I turned on a light, I'd think of how my foster family had been able to sit back and sit around that goddamn mojo lamp. Not me

[16:39] I always knew I was different from the others

[24:02] "What are you going to be when you grow up, Jackie?" they'd ask me. I never wavered in my response. "I'm going to be rich," I'd say, knowing even then that they thought I was silly or crazed. "I'll wear fine clothes, own my own automobile, and have adventures all over the world." They'd laugh. I was certain that's where I was going, I felt no embarrassment about my big dreams. No dreams, no future. They could laugh, but most of my mill friends wanted as little from life as they were destined to get. 

[26:51] To get the best performance, to do better than anyone has ever done before, you've got to take chances. 

[30:21] You almost had to have been there to know what such a range of existences did for me. Because of where I came from and then where I went, I ended up understanding intimately one very sustaining line of life: I could never have so little that I hadn't had less. It took away my fear. It pushed me harder than I might ever have pushed myself otherwise. The poverty provided me with a kind of cocky confidence and made me relatively happy with what I had at any given moment. 

[42:05] Jackie always felt that there was nobody better than she was. She was equal to anybody and had as much confidence as anybody. That's why she was able to accomplish so much. If somebody else can do it, so can I. That was her theory, her motto. 

[45:16] She could be ruthless when she wanted to pursue something, and she'd go at her goal with an intensity that wouldn't stop.

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#167 Jackie Cochran (Aviation)

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.

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