Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  “I guess you’re not up to it.”

  “Not up to what?” Jerrie asked.

  “Not up to entering the race next month—the International.”

  “Oh,” Jerrie yawned her reply. “I guess I could. But I don’t have a plane, and I don’t have a sponsor. Maybe next year.” But her parents weren’t giving up that easily. A few days later, Helena reopened the discussion.

  “Too bad, too bad,” she muttered within earshot of her daughter.

  “What’s too bad?” Jerrie asked.

  “Your father tells me that race starts in Hamilton, Ontario. I’d kind of like to see my Connecticut friends. If you were flying in it I’d go up to Canada with you and then go on to Connecticut.”

  “You would?” Jerrie was surprised.

  “I just said I would, didn’t I?” Helena heaved a sigh she hoped would play on Jerrie’s conscience.

  The final phase of their assault on their daughter’s depression came when Harvey announced that the Ponca City Oil Company was willing to sponsor with the loan of the company’s twin-engine Piper Apache. Jerrie couldn’t deny her parents or herself. The race did sound fun.

  “We’ll have to fatten you up a bit first,” Helena said. “After all, I don’t want a sick pilot for my first long trip by air.”

  “We have to get some color in your cheeks, too,” Harvey added. “They won’t let you across the border in your condition!”

  Her parents’ unconditional love and support worked wonders. A year after hiding in the safety of her parents’ home, after the calls from Jack finally stopped, Jerrie was ready to return to the air and fly the international air race.

  * * *

  As the congressional race in California’s 29th district picked up steam in the summer of 1956, the country quickly took notice. It was hard not to be enthralled by the battle between American-born famed aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran-Odlum and Dalip Singh Saund, whose Sikh religion felt as foreign as his native India. The candidates were so strikingly different, the contrast was irresistible. Jackie was always immaculately made up from her hair to her pressed dresses, while the stockier, bushy-haired Dalip wore the same suit to multiple appearances. Jackie piloted her Lodestar between events or was driven in her air-conditioned Oldsmobile with several changes of clothes in tow. Dalip drove more than 26,000 miles in his six-year-old Buick accompanied by his wife, son, two daughters, and other family members. Jackie hired four professional campaign organizers who managed her every move. Dalip, the hardworking family man, relied on relatives to do the same.

  Jackie’s team warned her that Dalip was likely to take aim at her wealth, her lavish campaign style, and even Floyd’s business interests in an attempt to chip away at her credibility. Her best bet, they advised, was for her to scale things back, to connect with voters as one hardworking, patriotic American to another. But Jackie didn’t like that approach. She maintained that her celebrity was her most valuable asset, so she turned to her famous friends for help.

  That help came in the form of endorsements. Several congressmen avowed that Jackie would be an asset in Washington. Second World War air ace turned special assistant to the Air Force chief of staff Jimmy Doolittle told her she represented “the type of patriotic, courageous, honest, intelligent person” America needed in Congress. President Eisenhower’s brother Edgar Newton Eisenhower, a noted lawyer, confirmed that she had the support of the whole Eisenhower family, including Ike. Retired USAF General George C. Kenney lauded her “courage, integrity and good old-fashioned common sense” as valuable traits. Jackie took these words of encouragement and turned them into promotional material. When President Eisenhower paid a visit to the Ranch to take a picture and write a formal letter of endorsement, Jackie promptly created leaflets. Who she knew became a driving force in her campaign, which soon took a nasty turn.

  While Jackie was meeting and greeting voters, Floyd busied himself digging into Dalip’s past. He pored over Dalip’s memoir My Mother India and curated a list of excerpts that could be read as un-Americanism. He looked for Communist ties and searched for laws that would make Dalip ineligible for office since he hadn’t been born in the United States and had been in the country on an expired visa for years before declaring his candidacy. Floyd even tried to find evidence that Dalip’s abandoning his birth name, Piyush, was proof he was hiding something. Incredibly, neither Dalip’s team nor dogged journalists managed to find evidence of Jackie’s own birth name, and by extension never tracked down living relatives on the East Coast. Everyone readily accepted the story in her memoirs that she’d picked it out of a phone book.

  Dalip’s team fought back with retaliatory personal attacks that amounted to a stunning smear campaign. He accused Jackie of running for office to further Floyd’s business interests, of failing to register as a voter until after the war, and of spending more than quadruple what he had spent campaigning. When Jackie referred to Dalip as “that Hindu,” he shot back, dismissing her as “that woman” or the “wealthy Mrs. Odlum.” He maintained that she was so far removed from her poor upbringing that she couldn’t possibly understand the hardships faced by laborers. He accused Jackie of racism in an attempt to dissuade black and Mexican voters from supporting her. He cited her lack of formal education as evidence that she was unfit for politics, to which she replied that at least she spoke clean and unaccented English. When Dalip accused her of having no relevant experience, Jackie pointed to her wartime service and Distinguished Service Medal.

  Jackie had her defenders. Military brass with whom she’d worked during the war and former WASPs wrote editorials expressing their dismay over these false characterizations, but the negative press coverage started taking a toll as the campaign wore on. After reading such horrific things about herself every day for weeks on end, Jackie couldn’t help but take it personally. She took an overly defensive stance in public appearances while privately she alternated between feeling sorry for herself and feeling unappreciated. Eventually, she turned her anger toward her staff, lashing out about how poorly the campaign was going, until her campaign manager warned her she ought to be nice if she didn’t want a fistful of resignation slips in her hand. The machine of her political dream was crumbling.

  When the votes came in in the early morning hours of November 7, Jackie’s worst fears were confirmed. She captured 48.5 percent of the district’s votes to Dalip’s 51.5 percent. Absentee ballots would come later, but Jackie wasn’t optimistic they would affect her standing. She admitted defeat. “I doubt that the absentee vote will change the presently known results,” she wrote to Dalip in a telegram. “If you have been elected as our representative in Congress I warmly congratulate you.” She issued a similarly simple press release offering Dalip her congratulations and her hope that during his time in office, the “interests of our 29th District will be well served.” Campaign activities wound to a close as letters of condolence poured in. “Your loss is to me a personal one for I know so well what fine work you would have done in the Congress,” Ike Eisenhower wrote. “My heartfelt regrets go to you and Floyd.”

  Gradually, Jackie felt the full weight of the loss. It was like the WASPs’ deactivation all over again, a very public failure rooted in her own ego. If she had listened to her campaign managers and downplayed her celebrity, things might have been different, but she hadn’t. She was too wrapped up in being Jacqueline Cochran to see how her reputation was proving to be more of a hindrance than a help. She finally admitted to herself that running for Congress had been a mistake, particularly as a Republican in a Democratic region. Jackie was a pilot first and businesswoman second, not a politician, which meant whatever her next big campaign or undertaking, it would be something in the realm of flight.

  * * *

  The international air race was one of the worst of Jerrie’s career. The first leg from Hamilton to Buffalo was fine, but as she approached the airport to land and refuel she was told to enter a holding pattern. Another contestant had made an emergency, gear-up landing.
Jerrie’s handicap was high, and the hour she spent circling while airport attendants cleared the runway from the crash killed her time. There was no way she could recover.

  Losing the race so early on was one thing, but losing out on a reunion with other pilots was another. Now that she was back in the air, she couldn’t miss a chance to reconnect with her sisters in flight, so she flew to her next stop in Marathon, Florida, then on to Havana. High in the air, she unconsciously began making plans. She had loved Miami before she’d joined Fleetway. Why not move back and look for a job there? Or maybe somewhere else in the Caribbean, since she loved the area? It was time to rejoin the flying world.

  Unfortunately, Jerrie found that little had changed in the aviation landscape during her ferrying years; airline managers and airplane companies alike remained reluctant to hire female pilots. She wrote hundreds of letters to dozens of companies and airports looking for any job until she found one in Kansas City, Missouri, with the Executive Aircraft Company, running ground school, charter scheduling, and occasionally flying. But being back at work wasn’t enough. She wanted more from her career. She wanted something spectacular. Something like an international record.

  Chapter 14

  Oklahoma, Spring 1957

  “Jerrie?”

  Jerrie recognized the voice on the other end of the line as belonging to Ivy Coffey. A journalist for the Ponca City News, Ivy had been one of the few people patient enough to press through Jerrie’s natural shyness and extract enough details about her life as a ferry pilot for a story. Jerrie had been thrilled that the resulting article hadn’t painted her as a cross between a barnstormer and a bearded lady. As a thank-you gesture, Jerrie had taken Ivy to lunch, and the two had struck up a strong friendship.

  “Do you want to set a world’s record?”

  Jerrie had confided this private dream to Ivy, so figured she wasn’t just making conversation. “Do you want a Pulitzer Prize?” she replied with what she thought was a similarly obvious question.

  “Do you think you could set two world records?” Ivy asked, upping the ante.

  “Ivy Coffey, tell me what you’re talking about! This minute!”

  “Okay,” Ivy began, “the Oklahoma Semi-Centennial Exposition Committee agrees with me that a great way to publicize the state and to draw national attention to the semi-centennial would be for you to set a world’s record in an Oklahoma-built airplane.”

  “Wow.” Jerrie was stunned. Her dream had just fallen into her lap. “Ivy, when you say Oklahoma-built airplane, do you mean an Aero Commander?” Jerrie had developed a fondness for this propeller-driven plane back in her ferrying days, and it was one of the only notable Oklahoma-built planes in the air.

  “What else?” Ivy replied. “Jerrie, they all want to see you and talk about the possibilities.”

  Jerrie took the next day off from Executive Aircraft to meet with the Aero Design and Engineering Company in Oklahoma City. They talked about the plane and how she intended to go about her record-setting flights. They agreed that Jerrie would aim for two international propeller plane records in the 1,750- to 3,000-kilogram weight class, one for nonstop distance and the other for altitude. The semi-centennial committee would pay all expenses, Aero Design would provide the plane, and the pilot would earn one dollar for the year. The arrangement suited Jerrie just fine—she wasn’t doing it for the money—and so she set about planning.

  Jerrie tackled the distance record first. Oklahoma City was the obvious endpoint for the flight, and the existing distance record held by a male Soviet pilot was 1,236.64 miles. To beat the record, she picked Guatemala City as her starting point. Her flown distance would be 1,504 miles, enough for the record, and she’d score one for the United States over the Soviet Union in the process. The problem was that Oklahoma City wasn’t an official entry point to the United States. To make the landing both official and legal, she worked with the United States Customs, Immigration, and Public Health Services Bureau to make Oklahoma City a temporary immigration point for her flight only. Scores of people from the right department had to be moved through a sea of red tape just to be in Oklahoma for one day.

  On May 25, Jerrie and her Aero Commander, christened Boomtown I, were in Guatemala City. Representatives from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale and the Federal Aviation Administration were there, too. The officials checked that the specially installed barographs were in good working order; they would be recording all her flight data since Jerrie couldn’t take a passenger on a record flight. Not only was it against the rules, but the added weight would also slow her down. Jerrie did her final checks. She knew her routes, she’d studied the weather patterns. She climbed into the cockpit and, ready, sped down the runway. As she took off, she waved goodbye to the newsmen following her for the story in a second plane, Boomtown II, then tore off over the mountains surrounding the city.

  She kept the plane steady as she covered the 750-mile stretch over the Gulf of Mexico. Over Texas, she fought her way through and around cumulonimbus clouds carrying tornadoes, hail, and slashing rains, but she didn’t deviate from her planned course more than she had to. As she approached the Texas border, she began the familiar dance unique to female pilots: racing along at 190 miles per hour against the Soviet record without the benefit of an autopilot system, she slithered out of her flight suit and wiggled into the gingham dress, stockings, and high heels she’d brought with her, all without a flying or fashion disaster.

  Eight hours and five minutes after taking off, she landed appropriately dressed with the Soviet record broken. She waited a half hour for the journalists to arrive in Boomtown II, then posed for pictures. One newsman noted she looked as fresh as though she had just dressed for a date. The barographs were sent to Washington to be unsealed and the flight verified by the United States Bureau of Standards, but no one had doubts she’d done it. Jerrie had one record down and one to go.

  Preparing for the altitude flight was a different beast. For this record, Jerrie would have to fly vertically rather than horizontally, pushing the Aero Commander beyond its tested limits in the process. By design, the Commander could reach 27,000 feet; any higher and the air became too thin for the propellers to keep the plane aloft, but she would have to force it higher if she wanted to secure the record. There was also the change in temperature to consider. On the tarmac in Oklahoma, it would be about ninety degrees, but at her peak altitude, it would be around ten below. But the most challenging part of the flight for Jerrie wasn’t the technical part, it was the fact that she’d never gone that high. She had no idea how she’d feel—she might be excited, or she might mistake the onset of hypoxia for excitement and put herself in a potentially fatal situation. All in all, though Jerrie had more experience in the air than most people her age had in cars, this was one of the most dangerous flights of her career. And it was going to be a public one. The semi-centennial committee wanted the altitude record to open the state’s celebratory exhibition, so if anything happened, it would be in front of an audience.

  The day of the flight arrived. On June 13, 1957, oxygen mask in place over her nose and mouth, Jerrie took off from Aero Design’s runway just before three-thirty in the afternoon in her twin-engine Commander and started her upward trajectory. She flew steadily higher, pushing every ounce of power she could get out of her engines to hit a record altitude in her class of 30,330 feet. She could barely breathe, but not for lack of oxygen—the mask was still in place. The tranquil beauty of the deepest, bluest sky she’d ever seen, unblemished by a horizon, took her breath away. Looking out the cockpit window, she saw no boundaries, no limitations. The Sun felt closer, and the stars seemed brighter, so bright she felt as though she could reach out and touch them. As the laboring plane hung in the thin air, Jerrie wanted nothing more than to continue her upward climb all the way into space, an urge that gripped her as nothing had before.

  The Commander couldn’t stay at that altitude; the propellers needed air. Jerrie guided the plane back down
through the thicker atmosphere, and less than two hours after taking off she landed among a horde of reporters waiting by the runway. Again the barographs were removed and sent to Washington for verification as journalists asked her about the flight. “I think I’ll just take it easy and stick with straight flying for a while,” she told the gathered journalists. She didn’t mention anything about the pull of the dark sky, but it had left its mark.

  * * *

  “Check under the hood?”

  John Herschel Glenn Jr. gave a wry laugh. “Don’t bother, I’m sort of in a hurry this morning.”

  Hurry was an understatement. It was July 16, 1957, and John was high over New Mexico, traveling 300 miles an hour as he deftly lined up his US Navy Chance Vought F8U Crusader probe into the waiting tanker’s funnel-like drogue. He held his position as the tanker transferred fuel into his jet’s tanks. It was the first of three midair refueling stops on his world record attempt at a high-altitude, supersonic, cross-country speed record, though flying as fast as he was, it was more like a race car driver making a pit stop without actually stopping.

  A career military pilot with combat experience in both the Second World War and the Korean War, John was now a test pilot working with the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington. He’d been working with the Crusader for months, now testing its Pratt & Whitney J-57 jet engine. While it had an excellent record, there was some question as to whether it had logged enough hours at combat power and high altitude to be cleared for installation in military jets. John’s plan was to test the engine on the supersonic cross-country flight, drawing attention to the new plane at the same time. After all, it was taxpayer money making those planes fly, so publicity couldn’t hurt. When he’d realized the Crusader would be flying faster than a bullet out of the muzzle of a gun, he’d named the flight Project Bullet.