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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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.