October 21, 2020 • 43 mins
Dr. Katherine Sharp Landdeck joins the show for a second time, to talk with Tracy about Kate’s new book – but mostly about Jacqueline Cochran – who was an incredible pilot, and one of the driving forces behind the Women Airforce Service Pilots.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tray, cy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We
have an interview to share with you today. Long time
listeners of the show may remember Dr Catherine sharp Landeck
(00:23):
who sat down with me in teen to talk about
the Women Air Force Service pilots of World War Two,
and this time Kate and Tracy talk a little about
Kate's new book, but mostly about Jacqueline Cochrane, who was
known by Jackie, who was an incredible pilot, one of
the driving forces behind the Women Air Force Service pilots,
and a lot more so here's the interview. We have
(00:50):
mentioned Jacqueline Cochrane, often known as Jackie, on the show
a few times before. Among other things, she was an aviator,
and previous hosts talked about some of her record breaking
flights in episode called four Flights of Female Aviators. She
made really so many historic flights just as examples. She
(01:10):
was the first woman to break the sound barrier, and
she sat so many records in distance and speed and altitude.
For a while she held more of those types of
records than any other pilot of any gender. She was
also a big part of the Women Air Force Service Pilots,
which we talked about previously in a two part episode
of the show. That two part episode was an interview
(01:33):
with Dr Catherine sharp Landeck, who at the time was
working on a book on the WASP. And that book
is finally here. It's called The Women with Silver Wings,
The Inspiring True Story of the Women Air Force Service
Pilots of World War Two. And as I was reading
this book, I got really captivated by some details about
Jackie Cochrane that we had not gotten into before on
(01:55):
the show. Really, so I asked Kate she would be
willing to come onto the show again to talk about
Jackie Cochrane, And here she is today. Hi, Kate, I'm
so glad you're here. Hi. Tracy is so glad to
have a chance to talk about Jackie and talk with
you again. Yeah. So before we get onto Jackie, your
book is finally here. Who. I'm so excited because the
(02:15):
last time that we had talked about it was four
years ago, so I know this has been a many,
many years labor for you. Can you can you tell
us a little bit about your book before we talk
about Jackie. Sure, yeah, the thanks for asking. So the
book is the story of the women of the WASP.
The women are for Service pilots, but it really does
go through from the nineteen thirties, that golden age of
(02:36):
aviation and those early women in aviation, then through the
war years and all the different types of jobs that
they did, whether it's faring aircraft or towing targets behind
planes and that sort of thing. And one of the
reasons that took so long to write this book really
is because I go into those post war years, what
happens to them after the war and that nineteen fifties
(02:57):
and sixties, and then through their fight in the nineteen
seventies to be recognized as veterans of World War Two,
all the way through to the fight to get them
back into Arlington National Cemetery. So it really is a
kind of a lifetime story of this whole group of women,
and really I think helps tell the story of women
in twenty century America. That's awesome. Um, I've read this book.
(03:21):
It's it's great. Thank you. I'm so glad you liked it.
I really did. And and Jackie Cochrane is a big
part of that whole story. Absolutely. So. She was born
May eleven, nineteen or six, and when she was born,
her name was Bessie Lee Pittman. Can you tell me
a little bit about what her childhood and her upbringing
were like? Yeah, absolutely, So. Jackie was born in the
(03:44):
Panhandle of Florida. She was the fifth child of Mill
right right. He worked in the logging of the Panhandle
of Florida. And you know, she grew up in saw
mill towns. They moved from town to town, following the
trees and following the jobs that they that they had,
(04:04):
very poor, really really poor dirt floor, no toilets, all
of that that you imagine for real poverty, working class
poverty of this era. So she got married at a
at a pretty young age. She married a man named
Robert Cochrane. When she was fourteen, she had discovered that
she was pregnant. And this part of the story, it's
(04:25):
really tragic. Her son, Robert Jr. Died in an accidental
fire when he was still a child. She and her
husband later divorced, and it seems like not long after
that divorce, she just sort of reinvented herself as Jacqueline Cochrane.
Can you tell me about how that happened? Yeah, exactly.
(04:45):
So Jackie was, as she had gone through her late teens,
became a good hairdresser, very good hairdressers, one of the best,
with the new permanent wave machine and things like that.
And after her son died and she divorced her has
friend who you know, they hadn't been living with one
another for a while. There's all sorts of turmoil. Did
he asked for the divorce for her adultery? Did she
(05:07):
ask for the divorce for his? But she goes on
and they get divorced, and she gets on a train
for New York City and she is just going to
start over, completely new life, completely new world. And she does.
She completely reinvents herself. She tells people she's an orphan.
She drops the name Bessie, claims she got Jacqueline out
(05:29):
of a phone book. I don't know why she kept
her ex husband's last name of Cochrane, other than the
fact that perhaps she wanted to separate herself from the Pittman's,
which was her family, as much as possible. And she,
you know, yeah, she claims she was an orphan and
all alone and had been abused and and all sorts
of things. Uh, And it tells this story and just
(05:52):
makes a lot of stuff up. But she wants to
create an entirely new image. She takes on a new
way of speaking and you know it, puts on a
fake accent, tries to get rid of that southern twang
from from the Florida and Alabama, and just is an
entirely different woman. And she had been before. This is
(06:14):
so amazing to me. And it skips ahead a little bit.
She also she wound up starting her own cosmetics company
and ran it really successfully. Yeah, so Jackie was an
entrepreneur right even before she goes to New York. She
you know, he talks her way into getting to run
(06:35):
the permanent wave machine in a particular hairdresser salon, and
you know, by blackmailing the woman who ran it, because
the inspectors came and Jackie was only fifteen and nobody
under sixteen was supposed to work. And she said, I'm
going to tell him how young I am if you
don't let me learn you know, these new equipment. And yeah,
(06:55):
I mean she was really very determined to take her place.
She ends up buying pieces of different salons and hiring
and training hairdressers to work in them so she could
get a piece of their work. You know. She was
very entrepreneurial, very smart, uh and very almost vicious in
(07:17):
her determination to to move forward. So yeah, in the
nineteen thirties, in the middle of the depression, she opens
a major cosmetics company, Jacqueline Cochrane Cosmetics, and is a
huge success. You can still find advertisements for her products anywhere.
And in the midst of all that, she was also
learning to fly airplanes. I think she took flying lessons
(07:39):
in two and then it was just astoundingly fast that
she mastered the ability to fly and became amazing at it. Yeah.
So one of the things that Jackie did, she was
definitely a businesswoman and had all these ideas. And before
she was able to open her cosmetics company, she had
been at a party. She'd been invited either as a
(08:00):
single woman or or whatever, and she had met Floyd Odlam,
who was the richest man in America at the time,
and had a conversation with him. He was an incredible businessman,
and had a conversation with him about how she'd like
to maybe open cosmetics company or work for a cosmetics company,
and he said, well, why don't you beat your competition
(08:23):
and fly to these different places. And she'd always loved aviation,
she'd been caught up in the same aviation fever that
everyone else had in the twenties and thirties, and saw
this opportunity and they made a bet, Floyd and Jackie
did that she couldn't get it uh in in you know,
record time. She went to Roosevelt Field in New York
(08:46):
and did it. She got her license in under three weeks,
despite weather and all of those things, and then went
on to do amazing things. And Floyd paid for her
license because she beat that deadline. That and I think
one of the really important things about that moment in
(09:07):
time when Jackie gets her license in two is she
also gets publicity. Remember the newspapers in the nineteen thirties
were very much about aviation. They had aviation writers. Even
Ernie Pyle, the great World War Two writer, was an
aviation writer on the aviation beat on various newspapers and magazines.
And Jackie got publicity. You know this this girl who
(09:32):
took her vacation to learn to fly, and you know,
her picture in the paper and for this poor girl
from Florida who you know, worked in textile factories when
she was eight and nine years old, for her to
be in the New York papers as something special. She
(09:54):
saw aviation as her opportunity to finally achieve her goals
and to get at it for being something special, which
is what she really wanted more than anything else. It's
such an incredible story to me. Um. She and Floyd
later got married. They did, They were together for a
really long time. But like this, he's an interesting person,
(10:15):
but like this episode is not not really about him
so much. It's really about Jackie's story. Um. Her love
for flight and her ability to fly, and her ability
to make all these connections and convince people to do
things really were that was all a big part of
the formation of the Women Air Force Service pilots. And
(10:37):
we've already we did a two part episode previously. We
talked so much about that, Um, we did not talk
as much about how another woman, Nancy Love, was also
part of all that, And they were just very different
women with very different approaches. And I don't really want
to characterize it as a rivalry, but it wasn't necessarily
(11:00):
up an affirming relationship. All the time. Can you talk
about that a little bit. Yeah. The sad thing about
this is I think Nancy and Jackie should have been friends.
They both had similar goals during World War Two, they
had similar ambitions, but but they just they were not friends. Uh.
(11:20):
Nancy Love was very ambitious herself and very smart and
very competitive, just as Jackie was. But she'd had a
different upbringing. She came from a prominent Boston family. She'd
grown up in Michigan. But she had all the right
connections and she had all the right refinements. She her
father had lost all her money, so she didn't all
(11:41):
his money during the depression, so she didn't have a
lot of money, but she had those connections and that
kind of style and characteristic. Where Jackie was very rough
around the edges and went in and was very direct
and said I want this, you give this to me.
Nancy said, hey, let's let's make this work. And people
liked Nancy, where often, um, Jackie, you either loved or
(12:03):
hated her. Right, And Nancy and Jackie both thought that
women could serve their country during the war, and that
was something they both had in common. They saw this
source of help for the United States as pilots during
the war. Nancy saw this idea of let's have an
(12:23):
elite group of women, just really women that already had licenses,
many of whom Nancy already knew, and let's have them
fairy planes. Jackie had a much bigger idea. She wanted
thousands of women to fly and do all these very
different jobs. So they had very different visions and they
(12:44):
had very different supporters coming in. Where Nancy had the
support of the Fairy Command General George General Tunner, Jackie
had General Arnold and and others who were supporting her
on the other side. So it was a clash of
idea is But then you have these two women who
had known each other for years. They belonged to the
same country club in Long Island, the Long Island Aviation
(13:08):
country Club. Who knew that there were things like this
right where they played tennis, but instead of golf, they
all flew in their airplanes to these clubs. So these
women knew each other before the war and weren't friends.
I don't know that they were enemies or rivals, but
they weren't friends. So you get those two different ideas,
and they both wanted to be leaders, and they both
(13:30):
believed in their ideas and some conflict is going to arise.
We're going to talk some more about the WASP in
a minute, but we're gonna have a moment for a
sponsor break. Reupliate. You alluded to this earlier. Jackie Cochrane
(13:50):
really seems to have had a memorable personality and one
that was like very distinctive. And one of the things
that really has stuck out to be in conversations about
the WASP is how over time the base where the
wasper training became known as Cochrane's Convent. Can you talk
(14:11):
about that a little bit. Yeah, So Jackie was very
conscious of her reputation, and she was conscious of the
reputation of the women who served under her, and she
did not want any scandals. This was a huge part
of her mantra and her mission that she gave to
(14:32):
the women who worked with her and helped run the
program is there will be no scandals. There will be
no pregnancies, there will be no drinking, there will be
no bad reputations for these women. Remember, you know, first,
there's this is a time here that's much more conservative
than our own day. But there was a huge scandal
(14:53):
I guess not really scandal. There was a huge campaign
against the Women's Army Corps, these women who volunteered and
served for the army uh, and a lot of bad
publicity calling these women they were either prostitutes or lesbians
or you know, just overall unacceptable women, right, not not
(15:15):
what women were supposed to be at the time, and
Jackie was terrified that her women would have some sort
of conflict in that way where the public would think
less of them. This is a period of great homophobia
and attitudes about women, so Jackie was very conscious of
that as well. So she was strict with these girls.
(15:38):
I say girls because that's what she called them all
the time. But she was very strict with these women.
She would not allow them to drink uh, And if
they got caught with alcohol on the place they were
sent out, they were shipped out. Now there's lots of
stories of these women keeping their bottles in the tanks
of the toilets because nobody checked there when they did
the inspections and that sort of thing. But you know,
(16:01):
she would not allow unmarried men to be on the field.
When the program first started, this was a scandal. At
least three women got pregnant in the early days of
the program. Uh. The story is that it was one
of the commanding officers, one of the early commanding officer
and as lieutenant Yes, and Jackie threw a fit got
(16:24):
the men both thrown out. She often bragged that she
sent one of them to the Illusions as punishment. Whether
she really could do that or not, but that's the
story she told. But she protected the reputation of the
women because nobody ever found out that women got pregnant.
So it's not that there wasn't a scandal, it's there
wasn't a problem, as Jackie would have seen it, but
(16:45):
nobody saw it. So she very quickly clamped down on
this whole place. She when they moved to Sweetwater, Texas,
she gets all the men off the field. There's unmarried
men or married men are the flight instructors. Married men
are the army officers that are on the field. She's
not gonna allow any. And there were nearby bases where
men were training as well. They all heard about these women.
(17:10):
You know, an airfield full of women who loved airplanes
and knew how to flyer planes. So all these men
would come in and fly in and oh, my planes broken,
I better land. Uh, and you know, see all these
these women, and very quickly the base was completely off
the radar. Nobody was allowed to land there unless you know,
(17:31):
they were crashing and on fire kind of thing. She
was going to keep them locked down, and so it
becomes known as Cochrane's Convent because she just was absolutely
going to protect the reputation of the women, thus protecting
her own reputation. Yeah, um, so we're we're not going
to go through too much more about the WASP, just
(17:52):
because you were so gracious to spend two entire episodes
talking to me about the WASP a few years ago,
and those are all still in the archive. Something that
I didn't remember that Jackie Cochrane was part of was
the Mercury thirteen. So to jump ahead to the space program,
we've mentioned the Mercury thirteen briefly on the show before.
(18:13):
These were women who were training to be astronauts. Talk
to us a little about that. So there's a great
book about these women that it was by Margaret Widecamp,
who's a curator at the Smithsonian National Airspace Museum, called
Right Stuff, Wrong Sex, and she goes into the whole program.
So I highly recommend it. But Jackie was in those
(18:35):
post war years, Jackie was very much involved in everything,
very much kept her close ties with the Air Force,
advocated for the Independent Air Force, and helped with that,
friends with Chuck Yeager, all those things. And when this
idea of the men astronauts started, right, NASA begins and
you get the Mercury astronauts and they're doing all the testing.
(18:58):
And if you've seen the film the Rights stuff, that
one of the big scenes in it is when they're
going through this medical testing and they're at the Lovelace Clinic.
Randy Lovelace was the medical doctor who was doing all
this medical testing for to prepare for space. And what
Jackie did was she helped fund She was friends with
Lovelace and helped fund bringing in thirteen women to go
(19:22):
through this medical testing to see if women could physically
do the same thing, if women could potentially be astronauts
right at NASA as well, and she she helped fund it.
And you have a number of these women that went
through the training and passed the tests and did all
the same things that you see in the right stuff
(19:42):
that the men were doing, and all those horrible experiments
and isolation and everything, and the women went through the
same thing. But but NASA makes very clear that they
are not interested in women being astronauts. They are not
going to allow it. The man astronauts do not want
women astronauts to be a part of it either, and
(20:05):
so Jackie cuts the funding and says, well, if NASA
doesn't want it, and the men don't want it, and
Congress doesn't want it, I'm not going to pay for it.
There's a side rumor that Jackie wanted to be one
of the women, of course was too old by them,
but but yeah, it's it's one of those moments in
time that Jackie does things where she funds things until
(20:28):
there's too much pushback, especially by the men who are involved,
and then and then withdraws to support. Yeah. I didn't
really I didn't know uh as much about her funding
it at all. Um. One of the things that's interesting
to me about both the WASP and the Mercury thirteen
is that there was a similar focus on the publicity
(20:49):
aspect of them. So there would be sort of photo
shoots of women powdering their noses at the plane, or
sort of pose shots of of women doing in quotation
marks feminine things, um with the space program and UM,
it's just interesting to me that that that idea was
(21:10):
continuing from the war on through into the Space program. Yeah. Absolutely,
and I think that, you know, that's any time women
in aviation, especially we're doing these things and kind of
pushing that limit of, you know, what was socially acceptable,
because aviation has been seen as a pretty masculine space.
(21:30):
You know, aviation has and space has, and so the
women often were encouraged and anytime Jackie was involved, it
was mandatory that they present themselves as non threatening, that
very feminine. You know, we're doing our hair, we're doing
our nails, we're putting our lipstick on, and the reflection
of the plane, see where where women would just happened
(21:53):
to be women who fly airplanes really fast, so that
that keeping that femininity it was very important to Jie. Yeah,
this was also something that was outside of the world
of aviation. Two. We did an episode not that long
ago about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, which
similarly was focused on conventionally attractive white women who had
(22:14):
to wear lipstick and had to dress a certain way,
and even their uniforms were made so that they looked
like the the right kind of women in quotation marks.
So in addition to all this, Uh, she had a
political career. There are a lot of people that that
credit Jacqueline Cochrane with convincing Dwight Eisenhower to run for president. Um.
(22:37):
And then she also attempted to have a political career
of her own. She ran for Congress in nineteen fifties.
Six and you mentioned this race, uh briefly in your
in your book, Um, can you tell us a little
about it? Yeah, So jack you again was very ambitious
and uh definitely supported Eisenhower. Her papers are actually at
(22:58):
the Eisenhower Library in Kansas right now. She donated them
there because she was so loyal to Eisenhower and having him.
She had him out to the ranch and he wrote
his memoirs in one of their cottages and played golf
there and all of those things. But she decided to
run for Congress herself, which was very bold for Jackie.
(23:19):
It pushed those limits, all right. It was a very
ugly race. She said some very unkind racist things about
her opponent, and she he said some very unkind sexist
things about her, calling her that woman. Uh, And uh,
(23:39):
she was not successful, and it was very disappointing to her.
She flew her own plane from place to place promoting herself.
She had written a memoir called The Stars at Noon,
which was kind of a biography, I think, in part
to help promote this plan so people would know more
about her. And that biography of course supported her whole
(24:02):
made up story about being the orphan child and things
like that, and it was named after her achievement of
breaking the speed of sound and that sort of thing.
But but yeah, she she was very ambitious and was
very disappointed she did not win, uh that race. Yeah,
it was a fairly close race too, I think. So
(24:24):
we're going to take another quick break before we talk
a little bit more about how she was kind of
a complicated person. There are some aspects of Jacqueline Cochrane's
life and work and legacy that are a little complicated.
(24:44):
Beyond the things about sort of fabricating a background and
reinventing herself as a different person and all of that.
She was such a huge advocate for the women Air
Force Service pilots to exist. But then after the war,
when when everybody was trying to figure out, like, what
is the role of women in the military. She advocated
(25:06):
against women flying for the military, so women could be
in the Air Force Reserve, but not as pilots. Can
you talk about that? Yeah, this is one of those
moments in time that Jackie is so complicated, and she
has a lot of supporters. A lot of the WASP
just were so grateful to her, and and a lot
of the modern women pilots thinks she, you know, was
(25:27):
a real badass, which she was. Can I say that
we disharmined that recently? Good good, good, good, right? Um?
But but you know, she she has a lot of admirers.
The Air Force Academy has her sword and a case,
you know, right in a big place of prominence and
things like that. But Jackie was also very conservative when
(25:48):
it came to women's roles, and she was very conservative
when it came to spending money. And she believed, and
she says this, she she fought against women getting into
the Air Force Academy because she thought it would be
waste of money. And Jackie believe that normal women and
she's this is these are her words, normal women get
(26:11):
married and have children, and so any money that the
Air Force spent training pilots would be a waste of
money and a waste of time because all the women
were just going to leave and have babies anyway. So
this is the same argument that's used against you know,
giving women, you know, clerkships as lawyers, or giving women
(26:33):
internships once they've gotten their medical degree, if they've even
been admitted to medical school. All those same arguments against
giving women those opportunities Jackie used as well, despite the
fact that she was out there breaking the speed of
sound and flying all these air races and doing all
these extraordinary things. But she talks about that was her
(26:57):
greatest regret, that she didn't have more children, that she
didn't have a normal life. And I think it's so hard.
You know, it was late in her life that she
was saying these things, and I think it's so hard
to put those two realities together. Who she was even
when she was young, and who she became and who
(27:18):
she believed that she was. But yeah, she she didn't
she wanted women to fly, and she wanted women to
be pilots. But she was very consistent even from the
nineteen thirties and saying women shouldn't be commercial pilots. Nobody
wants to be in a commercial airplane behind women. And
(27:39):
this is a time in the thirties when Amelia heard
and Helen Ritchie and all these people are saying, of
course women can be airline pilots. Jackie is very consistent
with that throughout the nineteen fifties, sixties, seventies, that women
should be pilots, but they should do those other flying jobs.
They should do air races, but they should be you know,
(28:01):
pilots of planes that that take photographs or polite instructors
and more traditional jobs, but not airline pilots and not
military pilots. Even though she had all these women as
military pilots during the war, she fought tooth and nailed
to get them into all these different airplanes to prove
that women could do all these things. But she just
(28:23):
after the war totally walked away from that position. It's
very strange. Yeah. Well, and I feel like we talked
before in the earlier episode about the LOP about how
that program was meant to be releasing men to do
so to fly in combat, basically to do other necessary
wartime work, and it was not about replacing men. So
(28:48):
all these things that they were doing to kind of
mitigate the perceived threat to men and men's positions within
the military um and it's it's one of those things
that sort of makes some sense in the context of
the war and making people comfortable with something that they
were not comfortable with during the war, But then the
fact that it continued after the war was over is
(29:12):
like where it to me, becomes just a lot more
contradictory in terms of UM what you sort of imagine
somebody who fought so hard for the women who were
working with her to do afterward. There's a moment in
your book where I think she goes to a reunion,
she goes to some gathering afterward, and it's like the
women there who saw her as a big supporter of them, like,
(29:33):
didn't even really know that she had just been arguing
against their being able to fly with the Air Force. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
she'd been she'd given testimony, and you know, I went
in and read the testimony that she gave before the
Senate in the nineteen seventies, and the senators had brought
her in and you can almost hear them, you know,
(29:53):
you're just reading the transcript, but you can almost hear
how stunned they were bringing this woman in who had
fought so hard to get women into those planes during
World War Two and fought so hard to say women
can do this flying. They can fly anything you give them,
just give them a chance. And then in the seventies
she's saying, no, you absolutely shouldn't let women into the
(30:16):
Air Force academy. You absolutely shouldn't let women fly these
military planes. They can do it, of course, obviously, but
they shouldn't because they should all be home having babies.
Do you think any of this was in her mind
a response to the women's liberation movement and sort of
a push back against that. I think, um, you know,
(30:37):
I've wondered that myself, and she was definitely not a
women's liber But she's so contradictory. She does all these
things and she wants to beat them, and she doesn't
want to what she's air racing and what she's doing
all these records. She doesn't want to win the women's records.
She doesn't want to win the women's races. She didn't
(30:58):
do women's air races. She wanted to race against the
men and wanted to beat the men, and wanted to
break the sound speed of sound because she could, and
she did it three times on one day, and all
these things. But but yeah, and then she doesn't want
women to have these opportunities. And at least to a conflict.
There's um one of the women who had who had
(31:20):
been one of these fellow lady astronaut trainees that Mercury thirteen,
one of them had been a WASP and was at
a reunion with Jackie and came up to her and said, hey,
and because one of the reasons Congress said women couldn't
be in the astronaut corps was because they weren't jet pilots. Right,
if you look at all the men who were astronauts,
(31:40):
they were all jets, and they said, no, you can't,
you can't be in because you're not jet pilots. Well,
Jackie was flying military jets because her husband was buying
the companies that owned the jets so that she could
do the test flights in them and do all these things.
So she had all these opportunities. And Jackie's confronted is
(32:00):
you know, why can you do all these things and
we can't. Well, you can do whatever you want, just
you know, go away. Goodness knew her own contradictory nous
and just she's so complicated, she was so sincere about it. Yes,
you mentioned earlier during that that congressional race that some
(32:24):
of her comments about her opponent, he was from India,
were racist and part of her legacy with the WASP
included working to keep the WASP racially segregated. Can you
talk about that a little. Yeah, So, you know this
idea of the WASP being an all white organization. You know,
there were two Chinese Americans, one Native American, but there
(32:44):
were no black women pilots. And actually, since the last
time we've talked, I've found the names of at least
six black women who applied who all appear to have
been qualified to have joined the WASP. And Jackie wasn't
willing to step beyond that barrier. You know, the armed
forces were segregated at the time, and she wasn't willing
(33:05):
to step past that to invite black women. And you
study her oral histories, she's she did many oral histories
over the years, and she talked about it and talked
about she would have been fine letting black women in.
But you know, the armed forces were segregated, and they
trained in the South, and they had bases in the South,
(33:27):
and you couldn't have an integrated unit. And she talked
about that she liked black people, and she, you know,
had hired black people in her office in Washington, d C.
Because these were black women were the hardest working and
the best and and things like that. So she she
talks about this in a way that she doesn't want
(33:48):
to seem racist and doesn't want to be believed to
be racist. So it's a really interesting an interesting mix
of she's not going to give these opportunities, but she
hires black women to work in her office and d
C almost exclusively. You know, she'd make made a joke
in one of her Earl histories that they called her
(34:09):
office in the Pentagon little Harlem because it was all
these black women. Yeah, and but then she doesn't allow
black women in as pilots, and yeah, in her race
in California, she calls him all sorts of names. Racism
is racism, but it's racism of her time, if that
(34:29):
makes sense, just as his was sexism of his time.
And again, she's so complicated that, you know, people say,
you know, if you could go back and have dinner
with anyone in the past, who would it be. It's
like Jackie would be really on the top of my
list just so I could figure her out. Yeah, yeah, Well,
and that's she had such a big life and did
(34:52):
so many things, and so many of the things that
she did were genuinely amazing. Yeah. I mean, when you
look at her record as a pie lit when you
look at her going from such poverty two working her
way out of that and founding this successful cosmetics company
and doing all these things, that's really incredible. So all
(35:17):
that together is kind of a tangle. What do you
think is really important to know about her legacy today?
I think Jackie fought for everything she got. She fought
for every single thing, and she never gave up. And
she was so complicated and imperfect, but she had just
an insatiable drive. One of the women who worked for
(35:39):
her during the war, D. D. Dton, said that she
had a brain like a buzz saw. That was part
of part of who she was. That she she got
an idea and she just did it and made it
happen and didn't care who got in the way, what
knots there were in that would she was going to
cut right through them to achieve her goals. And she
(36:00):
was also incredibly generous, and I think that side of
her gets lost a lot. She helped uh. I think
talked briefly in the other episode that she took a
group of women to England to fly with the Air
Transport Auxiliary, and one of those American women was Ann
Wood Kelly and Anne talked in later years about that
(36:22):
she had had an unfortunate situation with her husband that
she had married in England and he wasn't letting her
leave with her son. And Jackie went over there and
made it happen and supported Anne when she came back
to the United States and made sure she was okay
and that her kid was okay, and just things like that,
and others talk about how Jackie donated um. There was
(36:46):
a group of Girl Scout troops from the town that
Jackie lived in, and they were going to go to
Europe really cheap, but they couldn't get across the country
because they had an old bus and no place to say,
and they couldn't afford it. And Jackie called ahead to
all the Air Force baces along the way and got
this group of Girl Scouts and their parents the right
(37:08):
to stay at these Air Force baces with you know,
v I p treatment all along the way, all the
cross country from California to the East coast. So it's
such a complicated legacy for Jackie, of generosity, of ruthlessness, ambition, insecurity, kindness.
(37:31):
She was one of the greatest pilots that ever lived. Period. Yeah,
I'm so glad that. I mean you you suggested that
maybe we do an episode about her back four years
ago when we talked about the WASP, and I was
a little reluctant because we we were trying not to
repeat topics that that earlier hosts had talked about. It
(37:52):
was like, we talked about that. But then as soon
as I read early on in your book some of
the conversation about her earlier life and how she sort
of said, I'm starting over. I'm going to be a
different person now, I was like that, Wait, I should
have listened to Kate four years ago. I'm very patient. Um. Well,
(38:16):
thank you again so much for sitting down with me today. Folks,
um are interested in your book again? It is The
Women with Silver Wings, The inspiring true story of the
Women Air Force Service Pilots of World War Two, by
Catherine sharp Landeck. Thank you again. Is there anything else
you want to share before we before we wrap up.
(38:38):
I think that's it. But thank you so much, Tracy.
It's always a pleasure talking with you. I appreciate it
so much. Thank you so so much. Thank you so
so much to Dr Catherine Sharp Landeck for joining us
on the show. I'm always so happy to talk to her.
She's incredibly knowledgeable about so many things. And before we
(38:58):
close out today's episode, I also have some listener mail.
Fantastic bring it on. This listener mail is from Corey,
and Corey says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I've been meaning
to write this email to you for over six months,
but a last COVID hit in my world just got
flipped upside down. Corey goes on to talk about a
trip that she and her husband were planning to go on.
(39:21):
It was a cruise to Antarctica. Um after some unexpected
delays with that, they were finally able to go at
the tail end of twenty nineteen, and the email continues,
the scenery was magnificent. Whales were jumping as we cruised
out of the harbor, and I cried because I was
so happy we finally got to go on our big
(39:41):
dream vacation. At about four am on the twenty night.
They felt like ad mcgo made a horrible mistake. You see,
our boat was not very big. It only held about
a hundred and fifty passengers and crew. It was a
converted research vessel, and we were on the bottom of
the boat near the engines with one tiny porthole. It
was hotter than hades and the waves just started rolling
(40:02):
aside to side. That's when the nausea and anxiety hit.
And to top it off, I was fourteen weeks pregnant
with our first baby, which also meant that I couldn't
use the seasickness patch like the rest of the ship.
Because the waves are so big, we were forbidden to
go on deck to cool off. All this is to
say that I spent two point five days sleeping in
the lounge area, vomiting in front of strangers, and literally
(40:25):
crawling down the hallways to try on my gear. There
was but one beacon of light in this After fifty
five hours, by some divine intervention blessing from the podcast
Gods or Kiss Met, my phone had downloaded approximately two
hundred fifty old stuff you Missed in History Class episodes
to my podcast library. Most I had heard, but some
(40:48):
I had not. While my husband rang in the New
Year with fifty random strangers, I listened to episode after
episode of your show in the fetal position. So thank
you for making such an awesome show. You were a lifesaver.
I was just as bad on the way back, but
I was more prepared and I just hold up in
our tiny room that had finally cooled down and kept
listening to podcasts um by the way. Once we reached
(41:10):
Antarctic waters, everything was wonderful. It was truly the absolutely
best vacation we've ever taken. Hiking with penguins, kayaking with whales,
ice climbing for my first time in camping in twenty
four hours of the daylight were absolutely incredible experiences I'll
never forget, and having gotten to experience it right before
the pandemic makes me cherish it even more. I highly
(41:30):
recommend the trip. I'd even go back again when next
time we're flying. Thanks again, Um, and then Corey also
sent some pictures. Thank you so much for this email, Corey.
I just I wanted to read this because listeners to
the show have talked have heard me talk about going
on various cruises on several of them. I have been
stricken with sea sickness, not nearly as bad as this. Um.
(41:52):
I was not also pregnant at the time, which just
seems like would make it so much, so much worse.
But I have so much sympathy for Corey's sixties sickness
feels so bad and it can just put such a
such a damper on what was otherwise a very lovely trip.
So you have my thoughts with your your seasickness should
you ever go on another ocean voyage like this. And
(42:14):
I'm glad that the podcast was able to bring some
comfort during all of that. So anyway, thank you, thank
you again for sending this note. I know most people
are still not able to travel, so thank you also
for sending those pictures of Antarctica so we could just
have a little vicarious travel moment, a vacation in our minds. Yes,
(42:37):
of some pre pandemic travel. As is always the case,
we hope so much that everybody is taking as much
care of themselves as possible. We know that there is
so much stacked against a lot of people in a
lot of situations right now. UM, so I hope folks
that are doing well and if you would like to
(42:58):
write to us about this certainly other episode for a
history podcast at i heeart radio dot com. And then
we're all over social media at miss in History and
that is where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Counterest
and Instagram. And you said can subscribe to our show
on Apple podcast, the I heart radio app, and anywhere
you get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class
(43:20):
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tray, cy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We
have an interview to share with you today. Long time
listeners of the show may remember Dr Catherine sharp Landeck
(00:23):
who sat down with me in teen to talk about
the Women Air Force Service pilots of World War Two,
and this time Kate and Tracy talk a little about
Kate's new book, but mostly about Jacqueline Cochrane, who was
known by Jackie, who was an incredible pilot, one of
the driving forces behind the Women Air Force Service pilots,
and a lot more so here's the interview. We have
(00:50):
mentioned Jacqueline Cochrane, often known as Jackie, on the show
a few times before. Among other things, she was an aviator,
and previous hosts talked about some of her record breaking
flights in episode called four Flights of Female Aviators. She
made really so many historic flights just as examples. She
(01:10):
was the first woman to break the sound barrier, and
she sat so many records in distance and speed and altitude.
For a while she held more of those types of
records than any other pilot of any gender. She was
also a big part of the Women Air Force Service Pilots,
which we talked about previously in a two part episode
of the show. That two part episode was an interview
(01:33):
with Dr Catherine sharp Landeck, who at the time was
working on a book on the WASP. And that book
is finally here. It's called The Women with Silver Wings,
The Inspiring True Story of the Women Air Force Service
Pilots of World War Two. And as I was reading
this book, I got really captivated by some details about
Jackie Cochrane that we had not gotten into before on
(01:55):
the show. Really, so I asked Kate she would be
willing to come onto the show again to talk about
Jackie Cochrane, And here she is today. Hi, Kate, I'm
so glad you're here. Hi. Tracy is so glad to
have a chance to talk about Jackie and talk with
you again. Yeah. So before we get onto Jackie, your
book is finally here. Who. I'm so excited because the
(02:15):
last time that we had talked about it was four
years ago, so I know this has been a many,
many years labor for you. Can you can you tell
us a little bit about your book before we talk
about Jackie. Sure, yeah, the thanks for asking. So the
book is the story of the women of the WASP.
The women are for Service pilots, but it really does
go through from the nineteen thirties, that golden age of
(02:36):
aviation and those early women in aviation, then through the
war years and all the different types of jobs that
they did, whether it's faring aircraft or towing targets behind
planes and that sort of thing. And one of the
reasons that took so long to write this book really
is because I go into those post war years, what
happens to them after the war and that nineteen fifties
(02:57):
and sixties, and then through their fight in the nineteen
seventies to be recognized as veterans of World War Two,
all the way through to the fight to get them
back into Arlington National Cemetery. So it really is a
kind of a lifetime story of this whole group of women,
and really I think helps tell the story of women
in twenty century America. That's awesome. Um, I've read this book.
(03:21):
It's it's great. Thank you. I'm so glad you liked it.
I really did. And and Jackie Cochrane is a big
part of that whole story. Absolutely. So. She was born
May eleven, nineteen or six, and when she was born,
her name was Bessie Lee Pittman. Can you tell me
a little bit about what her childhood and her upbringing
were like? Yeah, absolutely, So. Jackie was born in the
(03:44):
Panhandle of Florida. She was the fifth child of Mill
right right. He worked in the logging of the Panhandle
of Florida. And you know, she grew up in saw
mill towns. They moved from town to town, following the
trees and following the jobs that they that they had,
(04:04):
very poor, really really poor dirt floor, no toilets, all
of that that you imagine for real poverty, working class
poverty of this era. So she got married at a
at a pretty young age. She married a man named
Robert Cochrane. When she was fourteen, she had discovered that
she was pregnant. And this part of the story, it's
(04:25):
really tragic. Her son, Robert Jr. Died in an accidental
fire when he was still a child. She and her
husband later divorced, and it seems like not long after
that divorce, she just sort of reinvented herself as Jacqueline Cochrane.
Can you tell me about how that happened? Yeah, exactly.
(04:45):
So Jackie was, as she had gone through her late teens,
became a good hairdresser, very good hairdressers, one of the best,
with the new permanent wave machine and things like that.
And after her son died and she divorced her has
friend who you know, they hadn't been living with one
another for a while. There's all sorts of turmoil. Did
he asked for the divorce for her adultery? Did she
(05:07):
ask for the divorce for his? But she goes on
and they get divorced, and she gets on a train
for New York City and she is just going to
start over, completely new life, completely new world. And she does.
She completely reinvents herself. She tells people she's an orphan.
She drops the name Bessie, claims she got Jacqueline out
(05:29):
of a phone book. I don't know why she kept
her ex husband's last name of Cochrane, other than the
fact that perhaps she wanted to separate herself from the Pittman's,
which was her family, as much as possible. And she,
you know, yeah, she claims she was an orphan and
all alone and had been abused and and all sorts
of things. Uh, And it tells this story and just
(05:52):
makes a lot of stuff up. But she wants to
create an entirely new image. She takes on a new
way of speaking and you know it, puts on a
fake accent, tries to get rid of that southern twang
from from the Florida and Alabama, and just is an
entirely different woman. And she had been before. This is
(06:14):
so amazing to me. And it skips ahead a little bit.
She also she wound up starting her own cosmetics company
and ran it really successfully. Yeah, so Jackie was an
entrepreneur right even before she goes to New York. She
you know, he talks her way into getting to run
(06:35):
the permanent wave machine in a particular hairdresser salon, and
you know, by blackmailing the woman who ran it, because
the inspectors came and Jackie was only fifteen and nobody
under sixteen was supposed to work. And she said, I'm
going to tell him how young I am if you
don't let me learn you know, these new equipment. And yeah,
(06:55):
I mean she was really very determined to take her place.
She ends up buying pieces of different salons and hiring
and training hairdressers to work in them so she could
get a piece of their work. You know. She was
very entrepreneurial, very smart, uh and very almost vicious in
(07:17):
her determination to to move forward. So yeah, in the
nineteen thirties, in the middle of the depression, she opens
a major cosmetics company, Jacqueline Cochrane Cosmetics, and is a
huge success. You can still find advertisements for her products anywhere.
And in the midst of all that, she was also
learning to fly airplanes. I think she took flying lessons
(07:39):
in two and then it was just astoundingly fast that
she mastered the ability to fly and became amazing at it. Yeah.
So one of the things that Jackie did, she was
definitely a businesswoman and had all these ideas. And before
she was able to open her cosmetics company, she had
been at a party. She'd been invited either as a
(08:00):
single woman or or whatever, and she had met Floyd Odlam,
who was the richest man in America at the time,
and had a conversation with him. He was an incredible businessman,
and had a conversation with him about how she'd like
to maybe open cosmetics company or work for a cosmetics company,
and he said, well, why don't you beat your competition
(08:23):
and fly to these different places. And she'd always loved aviation,
she'd been caught up in the same aviation fever that
everyone else had in the twenties and thirties, and saw
this opportunity and they made a bet, Floyd and Jackie
did that she couldn't get it uh in in you know,
record time. She went to Roosevelt Field in New York
(08:46):
and did it. She got her license in under three weeks,
despite weather and all of those things, and then went
on to do amazing things. And Floyd paid for her
license because she beat that deadline. That and I think
one of the really important things about that moment in
(09:07):
time when Jackie gets her license in two is she
also gets publicity. Remember the newspapers in the nineteen thirties
were very much about aviation. They had aviation writers. Even
Ernie Pyle, the great World War Two writer, was an
aviation writer on the aviation beat on various newspapers and magazines.
And Jackie got publicity. You know this this girl who
(09:32):
took her vacation to learn to fly, and you know,
her picture in the paper and for this poor girl
from Florida who you know, worked in textile factories when
she was eight and nine years old, for her to
be in the New York papers as something special. She
(09:54):
saw aviation as her opportunity to finally achieve her goals
and to get at it for being something special, which
is what she really wanted more than anything else. It's
such an incredible story to me. Um. She and Floyd
later got married. They did, They were together for a
really long time. But like this, he's an interesting person,
(10:15):
but like this episode is not not really about him
so much. It's really about Jackie's story. Um. Her love
for flight and her ability to fly, and her ability
to make all these connections and convince people to do
things really were that was all a big part of
the formation of the Women Air Force Service pilots. And
(10:37):
we've already we did a two part episode previously. We
talked so much about that, Um, we did not talk
as much about how another woman, Nancy Love, was also
part of all that, And they were just very different
women with very different approaches. And I don't really want
to characterize it as a rivalry, but it wasn't necessarily
(11:00):
up an affirming relationship. All the time. Can you talk
about that a little bit. Yeah. The sad thing about
this is I think Nancy and Jackie should have been friends.
They both had similar goals during World War Two, they
had similar ambitions, but but they just they were not friends. Uh.
(11:20):
Nancy Love was very ambitious herself and very smart and
very competitive, just as Jackie was. But she'd had a
different upbringing. She came from a prominent Boston family. She'd
grown up in Michigan. But she had all the right
connections and she had all the right refinements. She her
father had lost all her money, so she didn't all
(11:41):
his money during the depression, so she didn't have a
lot of money, but she had those connections and that
kind of style and characteristic. Where Jackie was very rough
around the edges and went in and was very direct
and said I want this, you give this to me.
Nancy said, hey, let's let's make this work. And people
liked Nancy, where often, um, Jackie, you either loved or
(12:03):
hated her. Right, And Nancy and Jackie both thought that
women could serve their country during the war, and that
was something they both had in common. They saw this
source of help for the United States as pilots during
the war. Nancy saw this idea of let's have an
(12:23):
elite group of women, just really women that already had licenses,
many of whom Nancy already knew, and let's have them
fairy planes. Jackie had a much bigger idea. She wanted
thousands of women to fly and do all these very
different jobs. So they had very different visions and they
(12:44):
had very different supporters coming in. Where Nancy had the
support of the Fairy Command General George General Tunner, Jackie
had General Arnold and and others who were supporting her
on the other side. So it was a clash of
idea is But then you have these two women who
had known each other for years. They belonged to the
same country club in Long Island, the Long Island Aviation
(13:08):
country Club. Who knew that there were things like this
right where they played tennis, but instead of golf, they
all flew in their airplanes to these clubs. So these
women knew each other before the war and weren't friends.
I don't know that they were enemies or rivals, but
they weren't friends. So you get those two different ideas,
and they both wanted to be leaders, and they both
(13:30):
believed in their ideas and some conflict is going to arise.
We're going to talk some more about the WASP in
a minute, but we're gonna have a moment for a
sponsor break. Reupliate. You alluded to this earlier. Jackie Cochrane
(13:50):
really seems to have had a memorable personality and one
that was like very distinctive. And one of the things
that really has stuck out to be in conversations about
the WASP is how over time the base where the
wasper training became known as Cochrane's Convent. Can you talk
(14:11):
about that a little bit. Yeah, So Jackie was very
conscious of her reputation, and she was conscious of the
reputation of the women who served under her, and she
did not want any scandals. This was a huge part
of her mantra and her mission that she gave to
(14:32):
the women who worked with her and helped run the
program is there will be no scandals. There will be
no pregnancies, there will be no drinking, there will be
no bad reputations for these women. Remember, you know, first,
there's this is a time here that's much more conservative
than our own day. But there was a huge scandal
(14:53):
I guess not really scandal. There was a huge campaign
against the Women's Army Corps, these women who volunteered and
served for the army uh, and a lot of bad
publicity calling these women they were either prostitutes or lesbians
or you know, just overall unacceptable women, right, not not
(15:15):
what women were supposed to be at the time, and
Jackie was terrified that her women would have some sort
of conflict in that way where the public would think
less of them. This is a period of great homophobia
and attitudes about women, so Jackie was very conscious of
that as well. So she was strict with these girls.
(15:38):
I say girls because that's what she called them all
the time. But she was very strict with these women.
She would not allow them to drink uh, And if
they got caught with alcohol on the place they were
sent out, they were shipped out. Now there's lots of
stories of these women keeping their bottles in the tanks
of the toilets because nobody checked there when they did
the inspections and that sort of thing. But you know,
(16:01):
she would not allow unmarried men to be on the field.
When the program first started, this was a scandal. At
least three women got pregnant in the early days of
the program. Uh. The story is that it was one
of the commanding officers, one of the early commanding officer
and as lieutenant Yes, and Jackie threw a fit got
(16:24):
the men both thrown out. She often bragged that she
sent one of them to the Illusions as punishment. Whether
she really could do that or not, but that's the
story she told. But she protected the reputation of the
women because nobody ever found out that women got pregnant.
So it's not that there wasn't a scandal, it's there
wasn't a problem, as Jackie would have seen it, but
(16:45):
nobody saw it. So she very quickly clamped down on
this whole place. She when they moved to Sweetwater, Texas,
she gets all the men off the field. There's unmarried
men or married men are the flight instructors. Married men
are the army officers that are on the field. She's
not gonna allow any. And there were nearby bases where
men were training as well. They all heard about these women.
(17:10):
You know, an airfield full of women who loved airplanes
and knew how to flyer planes. So all these men
would come in and fly in and oh, my planes broken,
I better land. Uh, and you know, see all these
these women, and very quickly the base was completely off
the radar. Nobody was allowed to land there unless you know,
(17:31):
they were crashing and on fire kind of thing. She
was going to keep them locked down, and so it
becomes known as Cochrane's Convent because she just was absolutely
going to protect the reputation of the women, thus protecting
her own reputation. Yeah, um, so we're we're not going
to go through too much more about the WASP, just
(17:52):
because you were so gracious to spend two entire episodes
talking to me about the WASP a few years ago,
and those are all still in the archive. Something that
I didn't remember that Jackie Cochrane was part of was
the Mercury thirteen. So to jump ahead to the space program,
we've mentioned the Mercury thirteen briefly on the show before.
(18:13):
These were women who were training to be astronauts. Talk
to us a little about that. So there's a great
book about these women that it was by Margaret Widecamp,
who's a curator at the Smithsonian National Airspace Museum, called
Right Stuff, Wrong Sex, and she goes into the whole program.
So I highly recommend it. But Jackie was in those
(18:35):
post war years, Jackie was very much involved in everything,
very much kept her close ties with the Air Force,
advocated for the Independent Air Force, and helped with that,
friends with Chuck Yeager, all those things. And when this
idea of the men astronauts started, right, NASA begins and
you get the Mercury astronauts and they're doing all the testing.
(18:58):
And if you've seen the film the Rights stuff, that
one of the big scenes in it is when they're
going through this medical testing and they're at the Lovelace Clinic.
Randy Lovelace was the medical doctor who was doing all
this medical testing for to prepare for space. And what
Jackie did was she helped fund She was friends with
Lovelace and helped fund bringing in thirteen women to go
(19:22):
through this medical testing to see if women could physically
do the same thing, if women could potentially be astronauts
right at NASA as well, and she she helped fund it.
And you have a number of these women that went
through the training and passed the tests and did all
the same things that you see in the right stuff
(19:42):
that the men were doing, and all those horrible experiments
and isolation and everything, and the women went through the
same thing. But but NASA makes very clear that they
are not interested in women being astronauts. They are not
going to allow it. The man astronauts do not want
women astronauts to be a part of it either, and
(20:05):
so Jackie cuts the funding and says, well, if NASA
doesn't want it, and the men don't want it, and
Congress doesn't want it, I'm not going to pay for it.
There's a side rumor that Jackie wanted to be one
of the women, of course was too old by them,
but but yeah, it's it's one of those moments in
time that Jackie does things where she funds things until
(20:28):
there's too much pushback, especially by the men who are involved,
and then and then withdraws to support. Yeah. I didn't
really I didn't know uh as much about her funding
it at all. Um. One of the things that's interesting
to me about both the WASP and the Mercury thirteen
is that there was a similar focus on the publicity
(20:49):
aspect of them. So there would be sort of photo
shoots of women powdering their noses at the plane, or
sort of pose shots of of women doing in quotation
marks feminine things, um with the space program and UM,
it's just interesting to me that that that idea was
(21:10):
continuing from the war on through into the Space program. Yeah. Absolutely,
and I think that, you know, that's any time women
in aviation, especially we're doing these things and kind of
pushing that limit of, you know, what was socially acceptable,
because aviation has been seen as a pretty masculine space.
(21:30):
You know, aviation has and space has, and so the
women often were encouraged and anytime Jackie was involved, it
was mandatory that they present themselves as non threatening, that
very feminine. You know, we're doing our hair, we're doing
our nails, we're putting our lipstick on, and the reflection
of the plane, see where where women would just happened
(21:53):
to be women who fly airplanes really fast, so that
that keeping that femininity it was very important to Jie. Yeah,
this was also something that was outside of the world
of aviation. Two. We did an episode not that long
ago about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, which
similarly was focused on conventionally attractive white women who had
(22:14):
to wear lipstick and had to dress a certain way,
and even their uniforms were made so that they looked
like the the right kind of women in quotation marks.
So in addition to all this, Uh, she had a
political career. There are a lot of people that that
credit Jacqueline Cochrane with convincing Dwight Eisenhower to run for president. Um.
(22:37):
And then she also attempted to have a political career
of her own. She ran for Congress in nineteen fifties.
Six and you mentioned this race, uh briefly in your
in your book, Um, can you tell us a little
about it? Yeah, So jack you again was very ambitious
and uh definitely supported Eisenhower. Her papers are actually at
(22:58):
the Eisenhower Library in Kansas right now. She donated them
there because she was so loyal to Eisenhower and having him.
She had him out to the ranch and he wrote
his memoirs in one of their cottages and played golf
there and all of those things. But she decided to
run for Congress herself, which was very bold for Jackie.
(23:19):
It pushed those limits, all right. It was a very
ugly race. She said some very unkind racist things about
her opponent, and she he said some very unkind sexist
things about her, calling her that woman. Uh, And uh,
(23:39):
she was not successful, and it was very disappointing to her.
She flew her own plane from place to place promoting herself.
She had written a memoir called The Stars at Noon,
which was kind of a biography, I think, in part
to help promote this plan so people would know more
about her. And that biography of course supported her whole
(24:02):
made up story about being the orphan child and things
like that, and it was named after her achievement of
breaking the speed of sound and that sort of thing.
But but yeah, she she was very ambitious and was
very disappointed she did not win, uh that race. Yeah,
it was a fairly close race too, I think. So
(24:24):
we're going to take another quick break before we talk
a little bit more about how she was kind of
a complicated person. There are some aspects of Jacqueline Cochrane's
life and work and legacy that are a little complicated.
(24:44):
Beyond the things about sort of fabricating a background and
reinventing herself as a different person and all of that.
She was such a huge advocate for the women Air
Force Service pilots to exist. But then after the war,
when when everybody was trying to figure out, like, what
is the role of women in the military. She advocated
(25:06):
against women flying for the military, so women could be
in the Air Force Reserve, but not as pilots. Can
you talk about that? Yeah, this is one of those
moments in time that Jackie is so complicated, and she
has a lot of supporters. A lot of the WASP
just were so grateful to her, and and a lot
of the modern women pilots thinks she, you know, was
(25:27):
a real badass, which she was. Can I say that
we disharmined that recently? Good good, good, good, right? Um?
But but you know, she she has a lot of admirers.
The Air Force Academy has her sword and a case,
you know, right in a big place of prominence and
things like that. But Jackie was also very conservative when
(25:48):
it came to women's roles, and she was very conservative
when it came to spending money. And she believed, and
she says this, she she fought against women getting into
the Air Force Academy because she thought it would be
waste of money. And Jackie believe that normal women and
she's this is these are her words, normal women get
(26:11):
married and have children, and so any money that the
Air Force spent training pilots would be a waste of
money and a waste of time because all the women
were just going to leave and have babies anyway. So
this is the same argument that's used against you know,
giving women, you know, clerkships as lawyers, or giving women
(26:33):
internships once they've gotten their medical degree, if they've even
been admitted to medical school. All those same arguments against
giving women those opportunities Jackie used as well, despite the
fact that she was out there breaking the speed of
sound and flying all these air races and doing all
these extraordinary things. But she talks about that was her
(26:57):
greatest regret, that she didn't have more children, that she
didn't have a normal life. And I think it's so hard.
You know, it was late in her life that she
was saying these things, and I think it's so hard
to put those two realities together. Who she was even
when she was young, and who she became and who
(27:18):
she believed that she was. But yeah, she she didn't
she wanted women to fly, and she wanted women to
be pilots. But she was very consistent even from the
nineteen thirties and saying women shouldn't be commercial pilots. Nobody
wants to be in a commercial airplane behind women. And
(27:39):
this is a time in the thirties when Amelia heard
and Helen Ritchie and all these people are saying, of
course women can be airline pilots. Jackie is very consistent
with that throughout the nineteen fifties, sixties, seventies, that women
should be pilots, but they should do those other flying jobs.
They should do air races, but they should be you know,
(28:01):
pilots of planes that that take photographs or polite instructors
and more traditional jobs, but not airline pilots and not
military pilots. Even though she had all these women as
military pilots during the war, she fought tooth and nailed
to get them into all these different airplanes to prove
that women could do all these things. But she just
(28:23):
after the war totally walked away from that position. It's
very strange. Yeah. Well, and I feel like we talked
before in the earlier episode about the LOP about how
that program was meant to be releasing men to do
so to fly in combat, basically to do other necessary
wartime work, and it was not about replacing men. So
(28:48):
all these things that they were doing to kind of
mitigate the perceived threat to men and men's positions within
the military um and it's it's one of those things
that sort of makes some sense in the context of
the war and making people comfortable with something that they
were not comfortable with during the war, But then the
fact that it continued after the war was over is
(29:12):
like where it to me, becomes just a lot more
contradictory in terms of UM what you sort of imagine
somebody who fought so hard for the women who were
working with her to do afterward. There's a moment in
your book where I think she goes to a reunion,
she goes to some gathering afterward, and it's like the
women there who saw her as a big supporter of them, like,
(29:33):
didn't even really know that she had just been arguing
against their being able to fly with the Air Force. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
she'd been she'd given testimony, and you know, I went
in and read the testimony that she gave before the
Senate in the nineteen seventies, and the senators had brought
her in and you can almost hear them, you know,
(29:53):
you're just reading the transcript, but you can almost hear
how stunned they were bringing this woman in who had
fought so hard to get women into those planes during
World War Two and fought so hard to say women
can do this flying. They can fly anything you give them,
just give them a chance. And then in the seventies
she's saying, no, you absolutely shouldn't let women into the
(30:16):
Air Force academy. You absolutely shouldn't let women fly these
military planes. They can do it, of course, obviously, but
they shouldn't because they should all be home having babies.
Do you think any of this was in her mind
a response to the women's liberation movement and sort of
a push back against that. I think, um, you know,
(30:37):
I've wondered that myself, and she was definitely not a
women's liber But she's so contradictory. She does all these
things and she wants to beat them, and she doesn't
want to what she's air racing and what she's doing
all these records. She doesn't want to win the women's records.
She doesn't want to win the women's races. She didn't
(30:58):
do women's air races. She wanted to race against the
men and wanted to beat the men, and wanted to
break the sound speed of sound because she could, and
she did it three times on one day, and all
these things. But but yeah, and then she doesn't want
women to have these opportunities. And at least to a conflict.
There's um one of the women who had who had
(31:20):
been one of these fellow lady astronaut trainees that Mercury thirteen,
one of them had been a WASP and was at
a reunion with Jackie and came up to her and said, hey,
and because one of the reasons Congress said women couldn't
be in the astronaut corps was because they weren't jet pilots. Right,
if you look at all the men who were astronauts,
(31:40):
they were all jets, and they said, no, you can't,
you can't be in because you're not jet pilots. Well,
Jackie was flying military jets because her husband was buying
the companies that owned the jets so that she could
do the test flights in them and do all these things.
So she had all these opportunities. And Jackie's confronted is
(32:00):
you know, why can you do all these things and
we can't. Well, you can do whatever you want, just
you know, go away. Goodness knew her own contradictory nous
and just she's so complicated, she was so sincere about it. Yes,
you mentioned earlier during that that congressional race that some
(32:24):
of her comments about her opponent, he was from India,
were racist and part of her legacy with the WASP
included working to keep the WASP racially segregated. Can you
talk about that a little. Yeah, So, you know this
idea of the WASP being an all white organization. You know,
there were two Chinese Americans, one Native American, but there
(32:44):
were no black women pilots. And actually, since the last
time we've talked, I've found the names of at least
six black women who applied who all appear to have
been qualified to have joined the WASP. And Jackie wasn't
willing to step beyond that barrier. You know, the armed
forces were segregated at the time, and she wasn't willing
(33:05):
to step past that to invite black women. And you
study her oral histories, she's she did many oral histories
over the years, and she talked about it and talked
about she would have been fine letting black women in.
But you know, the armed forces were segregated, and they
trained in the South, and they had bases in the South,
(33:27):
and you couldn't have an integrated unit. And she talked
about that she liked black people, and she, you know,
had hired black people in her office in Washington, d C.
Because these were black women were the hardest working and
the best and and things like that. So she she
talks about this in a way that she doesn't want
(33:48):
to seem racist and doesn't want to be believed to
be racist. So it's a really interesting an interesting mix
of she's not going to give these opportunities, but she
hires black women to work in her office and d
C almost exclusively. You know, she'd make made a joke
in one of her Earl histories that they called her
(34:09):
office in the Pentagon little Harlem because it was all
these black women. Yeah, and but then she doesn't allow
black women in as pilots, and yeah, in her race
in California, she calls him all sorts of names. Racism
is racism, but it's racism of her time, if that
(34:29):
makes sense, just as his was sexism of his time.
And again, she's so complicated that, you know, people say,
you know, if you could go back and have dinner
with anyone in the past, who would it be. It's
like Jackie would be really on the top of my
list just so I could figure her out. Yeah, yeah, Well,
and that's she had such a big life and did
(34:52):
so many things, and so many of the things that
she did were genuinely amazing. Yeah. I mean, when you
look at her record as a pie lit when you
look at her going from such poverty two working her
way out of that and founding this successful cosmetics company
and doing all these things, that's really incredible. So all
(35:17):
that together is kind of a tangle. What do you
think is really important to know about her legacy today?
I think Jackie fought for everything she got. She fought
for every single thing, and she never gave up. And
she was so complicated and imperfect, but she had just
an insatiable drive. One of the women who worked for
(35:39):
her during the war, D. D. Dton, said that she
had a brain like a buzz saw. That was part
of part of who she was. That she she got
an idea and she just did it and made it
happen and didn't care who got in the way, what
knots there were in that would she was going to
cut right through them to achieve her goals. And she
(36:00):
was also incredibly generous, and I think that side of
her gets lost a lot. She helped uh. I think
talked briefly in the other episode that she took a
group of women to England to fly with the Air
Transport Auxiliary, and one of those American women was Ann
Wood Kelly and Anne talked in later years about that
(36:22):
she had had an unfortunate situation with her husband that
she had married in England and he wasn't letting her
leave with her son. And Jackie went over there and
made it happen and supported Anne when she came back
to the United States and made sure she was okay
and that her kid was okay, and just things like that,
and others talk about how Jackie donated um. There was
(36:46):
a group of Girl Scout troops from the town that
Jackie lived in, and they were going to go to
Europe really cheap, but they couldn't get across the country
because they had an old bus and no place to say,
and they couldn't afford it. And Jackie called ahead to
all the Air Force baces along the way and got
this group of Girl Scouts and their parents the right
(37:08):
to stay at these Air Force baces with you know,
v I p treatment all along the way, all the
cross country from California to the East coast. So it's
such a complicated legacy for Jackie, of generosity, of ruthlessness, ambition, insecurity, kindness.
(37:31):
She was one of the greatest pilots that ever lived. Period. Yeah,
I'm so glad that. I mean you you suggested that
maybe we do an episode about her back four years
ago when we talked about the WASP, and I was
a little reluctant because we we were trying not to
repeat topics that that earlier hosts had talked about. It
(37:52):
was like, we talked about that. But then as soon
as I read early on in your book some of
the conversation about her earlier life and how she sort
of said, I'm starting over. I'm going to be a
different person now, I was like that, Wait, I should
have listened to Kate four years ago. I'm very patient. Um. Well,
(38:16):
thank you again so much for sitting down with me today. Folks,
um are interested in your book again? It is The
Women with Silver Wings, The inspiring true story of the
Women Air Force Service Pilots of World War Two, by
Catherine sharp Landeck. Thank you again. Is there anything else
you want to share before we before we wrap up.
(38:38):
I think that's it. But thank you so much, Tracy.
It's always a pleasure talking with you. I appreciate it
so much. Thank you so so much. Thank you so
so much to Dr Catherine Sharp Landeck for joining us
on the show. I'm always so happy to talk to her.
She's incredibly knowledgeable about so many things. And before we
(38:58):
close out today's episode, I also have some listener mail.
Fantastic bring it on. This listener mail is from Corey,
and Corey says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I've been meaning
to write this email to you for over six months,
but a last COVID hit in my world just got
flipped upside down. Corey goes on to talk about a
trip that she and her husband were planning to go on.
(39:21):
It was a cruise to Antarctica. Um after some unexpected
delays with that, they were finally able to go at
the tail end of twenty nineteen, and the email continues,
the scenery was magnificent. Whales were jumping as we cruised
out of the harbor, and I cried because I was
so happy we finally got to go on our big
(39:41):
dream vacation. At about four am on the twenty night.
They felt like ad mcgo made a horrible mistake. You see,
our boat was not very big. It only held about
a hundred and fifty passengers and crew. It was a
converted research vessel, and we were on the bottom of
the boat near the engines with one tiny porthole. It
was hotter than hades and the waves just started rolling
(40:02):
aside to side. That's when the nausea and anxiety hit.
And to top it off, I was fourteen weeks pregnant
with our first baby, which also meant that I couldn't
use the seasickness patch like the rest of the ship.
Because the waves are so big, we were forbidden to
go on deck to cool off. All this is to
say that I spent two point five days sleeping in
the lounge area, vomiting in front of strangers, and literally
(40:25):
crawling down the hallways to try on my gear. There
was but one beacon of light in this After fifty
five hours, by some divine intervention blessing from the podcast
Gods or Kiss Met, my phone had downloaded approximately two
hundred fifty old stuff you Missed in History Class episodes
to my podcast library. Most I had heard, but some
(40:48):
I had not. While my husband rang in the New
Year with fifty random strangers, I listened to episode after
episode of your show in the fetal position. So thank
you for making such an awesome show. You were a lifesaver.
I was just as bad on the way back, but
I was more prepared and I just hold up in
our tiny room that had finally cooled down and kept
listening to podcasts um by the way. Once we reached
(41:10):
Antarctic waters, everything was wonderful. It was truly the absolutely
best vacation we've ever taken. Hiking with penguins, kayaking with whales,
ice climbing for my first time in camping in twenty
four hours of the daylight were absolutely incredible experiences I'll
never forget, and having gotten to experience it right before
the pandemic makes me cherish it even more. I highly
(41:30):
recommend the trip. I'd even go back again when next
time we're flying. Thanks again, Um, and then Corey also
sent some pictures. Thank you so much for this email, Corey.
I just I wanted to read this because listeners to
the show have talked have heard me talk about going
on various cruises on several of them. I have been
stricken with sea sickness, not nearly as bad as this. Um.
(41:52):
I was not also pregnant at the time, which just
seems like would make it so much, so much worse.
But I have so much sympathy for Corey's sixties sickness
feels so bad and it can just put such a
such a damper on what was otherwise a very lovely trip.
So you have my thoughts with your your seasickness should
you ever go on another ocean voyage like this. And
(42:14):
I'm glad that the podcast was able to bring some
comfort during all of that. So anyway, thank you, thank
you again for sending this note. I know most people
are still not able to travel, so thank you also
for sending those pictures of Antarctica so we could just
have a little vicarious travel moment, a vacation in our minds. Yes,
(42:37):
of some pre pandemic travel. As is always the case,
we hope so much that everybody is taking as much
care of themselves as possible. We know that there is
so much stacked against a lot of people in a
lot of situations right now. UM, so I hope folks
that are doing well and if you would like to
(42:58):
write to us about this certainly other episode for a
history podcast at i heeart radio dot com. And then
we're all over social media at miss in History and
that is where you will find our Facebook, Twitter, Counterest
and Instagram. And you said can subscribe to our show
on Apple podcast, the I heart radio app, and anywhere
you get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class
(43:20):
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!