Remarks on induction of Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb into USAO Alumni Hall of Fame, Saturday, October 25, 2003, compiled by R. Eugene Earsom. Information liberally borrowed and adapted from that found on the Jerrie Cobb Foundation, Inc., Website (http://www.jerrie-cobb-foundation.org), e-mail exchanged with Ruth Lummis (JCF12JC@aol.com), and "Jerrie Cobb, Aviation Pioneer" by Debbie Michalke in The Chronicles of Oklahoma, vol. LXXIII, no. 4, Winter 1995-96.

December 17, 2003, will mark the centennial of powered, heavier-than-air, human-carrying flight. On that date in 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright each flew twice at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, with their longest flight being 852 feet (not quite the length of 3 football fields) and lasting 59 seconds.

Because we mark this anniversary in 2003, there is a delicious, but bittersweet coincidence in the naming of our next inductee into the USAO alumni hall of fame. Delicious, because of the records set by this remarkable woman who has excelled in a field that even her father said held no future for a woman. Bittersweet, because even as we sit here, but for a yellow fever epidemic raging along the Putamayo River in the Amazon basin, this 72-year-old woman, who is in her 40th year as a pilot/missionary serving primitive peoples in South America, would be here in person to receive this recognition from her fellow former students and alumni of USAO. By battery-powered short-wave ham radio, the only way she has of communicating (since there is no electricity, no telephone, and no mail service), Jerrie said she hopes to join us for the alumni reunion in 2004.

I have discovered that this intensely devout and private woman now refuses out of hand the many awards and honors that continue to come her way, but as her friend Ruth Lummis, director of the Jerrie Cobb Foundation, has told me, being an okie means a lot to our inductee and Oklahoma is the first place she heads when she flies up from the jungles of Amazonia, quietly and without fanfare, to visit family and friends; so she is deeply honored that we have chosen to induct her today.

Oklahoma history is replete with the names of aviation pioneers, such as Post and Page, Cessna and Braniff, Tinker, Cooper, Garriott, and Stafford...and our inductee. Born March 5, 1931, in Norman, to William Harvey and Helena Stone Cobb, Geraldyn was the younger sister of Carolyn Cobb, who loved tea parties and dolls. Jerrie, who insisted on this shortening of her formal given name, preferred running through fields, playing sports, riding horses and climbing trees, and never particularly liked school. Her father, a colonel in the army air corps reserve, bought a waco bi-plane to get the air hours he needed to fly overseas in World War II. Jerrie’s persistent badgering of her parents resulted in their allowing her to fly on her 12th birthday, elevated on pillows so she could see over the rim of the rear cockpit of the Waco as she and her father zoomed along at 92 mph.

Her second flight instructor was one of her teachers at Classen High School in Oklahoma City who allowed her to solo in his AEronca plane shortly after her 16th birthday. She worked a variety of odd jobs so she could afford to ride the bus from Oklahoma City to Moore, where she would buy 5 gallons of regular gasoline, walk 3/4 mile to the grass field along the east side of the railroad tracks, log her flight time, walk back to the gas station, leave the gas can and catch the bus back to Oklahoma City. On her 17th birthday in 1948, she received her pilot’s license.

As I learned from one of her classmates at the Oklahoma College for Women, Jerrie had a hard time appreciating the relevance of English, history and mathematics, and the only high school activity that held her interest was softball. She tried out for and was hired to play first base for the semiprofessional Sooner Queens softball team which she hoped would provide her with enough income so she could get her commercial pilot’s license. It was apparently a battle royal when she took her plan to her parents who wanted her to stop playing games and give up this silly dream of being a pilot as they insisted she must go to college. The compromise struck allowed her to play with the Sooner Queens in the summer, but go to OCW in the fall. The Sooner Queens had Jerrie as first baseman for only 3 seasons and OCW held her for only 2 semesters -- but she did get her commercial license!

By the time she was 21, Jerrie was flying around the world, delivering sleek fighter planes and four-engine bombers for the U.S. air force.

In the post-war era, Jerrie was told that "pilots are a dime a dozen today, and they’ve had thousands of hours in fighters and bombers," so she might as well forget about ever getting a job in aviation, but she persisted and in 1950 began patrolling pipelines in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri for pay that barely kept fuel in the plane. Briefly, she taught flight and ground operations to middle-aged oil field workers in Duncan who joked about taking lessons from a "dame." She then got a job at the Oklahoma City downtown airpark as a flight instructor, pilot-for-hire, and cafe waitress.

In spite of Amelia Earhart’s exploits, female pilots were still a novelty, so Jerrie was recruited to compete in a number of races of which she won only one, but in which she learned valuable lessons in conserving fuel, spotting weather changes, and plotting unknown courses.

Jerrie took a secretarial job at Miami International Airport while waiting for a pilot slot to open up, where she met Jack Ford, the founder of a company which delivered surplus American airplanes to other countries. He lamented to her his difficulty in finding pilots with experience flying over oceans and mountains in single engine planes. Jerrie said she was a pilot waiting for a job, to which Ford responded that he had no objections to women flying, but piloting was a man’s job. Jerrie’s response, reportedly through clenched teeth, was her remarkable set of credentials. Ford’s reply was, "if that’s true, you are the rare woman, indeed." to which Jerrie retorted, "there are hundreds of such rare women."

She apparently won Ford over, because a week later he hired her and over the next two years, she flew scores of planes to South America over breathtaking jungles, through mountains in the clouds, to countries with indistinguishable boundaries in Amazonia that were often war-torn. In fact, she has a prison record in Ecuador where she spent nearly two weeks in a military jail because Ecuador was at war with Peru, the country waiting for her to deliver the plane she had been piloting.

During one of her trips to South America, she had to make an emergency landing at the headwaters of the Naya river, a tributary of the Amazon, and encountered the native peoples for the first time, an experience that would capture her imagination and ultimately her heart.

As you might imagine she and Jack Ford developed a relationship which blossomed into love that would probably have culminated in marriage, but for his untimely death in an airplane explosion.

Returning to Oklahoma, Jerrie met officials of the company that manufactured the aero commander aircraft at Wiley Post airport who recruited her to help them set a new nonstop distance and altitude record in conjunction with Oklahoma’s semicentennial in 1957. This she did by flying 1504 miles in 8 hours and 5 minutes from Guatemala City over mountains, the Gulf of Mexico, and Texas in the face of high winds, hail, slashing rains, and even tornadoes, breaking the distance record with an average speed of 190 mph. Five weeks later she set a national and world altitude record of 30,500 feet. She helped the Aero Commander people market their plane internationally by flying to the Paris air show. They say that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, except she did it backwards and in heels. While still in the air, approaching the french coast and without an autopilot, Jerrie changed out of her flight suit into a dress, stockings, and high heels, a maneuver no one expected of a man, but, after all, she was landing in Paris! She clearly learned a few things during her time at OCW.

During the Paris air show, she was awarded gold wings from the governing body of world aviation records, only the 4th American to receive this honor. Upon her return to the States, she received the Amelia Earhart memorial award, and an achievement award from the national pilots’ association. The women’s national aeronautic association named her the 1959 woman of the year.

It was at about this time that Jerrie began to be interested in the space program that was started in the United States in the wake of the Soviet Union’s successful launching of Sputnik and subsequent manned suborbital flight. She met several members of the national aeronautic and space administration’s committee for Project Mercury, which was already aware of medical studies showing that women were able to tolerate pain, heat, cold, loneliness, and monotony better than men, but no data existed for women under the "stresses of space," so Jerrie became the first woman to undergo NASA testing in 1960. She endured the same 75 grueling tests administered to the men vying for the first Mercury mission and set the standard for future training for women in space. The United States was aware that the Soviets were readying women in their cosmonaut program, and Jerrie had been hoping that the United States would beat the Soviets to this record, but without explanation NASA canceled tests for the 12 women astronauts-in-training that Jerrie had helped select.

One of the later explanations for the cancellation came out of a congressional hearing in 1962: there were no women jet test pilots, a prerequisite for the program. Jerrie patiently explained that there were no female jet test pilots because the only jet test pilots belonged to the military which did not allow women as jet test pilots. She went on to explain that many of the women in the NASA program had 3 times the amount of air hours required of the male astronauts, and that NASA needed pilots for spacecraft, not jets. Under political pressure, NASA changed course (partially), and said in 1963 they would choose 10-15 candidates from a list of 200 applicants on which Jerrie was one of 3 women, but NASA chose no women, and in June, Valentina Tereshkova of the Soviet Union, a factory worker, became the first woman in space. Jerrie resigned her position as a NASA consultant, and after considerable prayer and self-assessment, she left the space race and returned to the primordial world of South America in 1964, forsaking outer space for inner space.

In her plane dubbed "the bird" she found purpose and fulfillment in flying food and medicines to missionaries, doctors, and anthropologists, all purchased out of her own pocket. She learned to speak the dialects of 16 tribes in Amazonia to help bring to them the gospel. She said she had no desire to change the natives, but wanted to help them survive in the 20th century. Friends of Jerrie organized the Jerrie Cobb foundation to support her missions and to purchase seed, medicine and supplies. She accepts no contributions for herself, supporting herself and the bird by conducting aerial surveys for Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.

In 1973, Jerrie was presented the Harmon international trophy for the "top woman pilot in the world" by President Nixon at the White House. In 1976 Jerrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, and in 1981 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of congress. As a result, Jerrie is probably the only Alumni Hall of Fame inductee with both a prison record and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. On June 18, 1983, 20 years after Jerrie left NASA, Sally K. Ride, a 32-year-old physicist (not a jet test pilot!), became the first American woman to go into space on a six-day space shuttle mission.

Jerrie has authored an essentially autobiographical work and was the subject of another biography, which has kept her name somewhat prominent in aviation circles, so in 1998 when the former United States senator from Ohio and first U.S. astronaut to orbit earth, asked to return to space aboard the shuttle Discovery, there was a boomlet of support for Jerrie as well. The Tampa Tribune editorialized: "when NASA dumped its female astronaut training program in 1960, the agency all but forgot the first woman cleared for space travel. Jerrie Cobb had all the right stuff, just like Glenn and his fellow Mercury astronauts. Now if NASA wants to study the effects of age on men’s ability to fly in space, wouldn’t it be logical to learn the same thing about women? Cobb deserves that much." Even NASA administrator Daniel Goldin said, "It’s logical that a woman will be next and there is no one in America more qualified and deserving to be in that space shuttle than Jerrie."

Suffice it to say, Glenn orbited; Cobb did not.

But let’s leave Jerrie with the last word:

"Last night I sat with the chief of this Indian village as he lay dying from meningitis. My medicines could not help him. He was a fine, young leader of his people. Through our efforts here, his tribe had learned to grow crops to feed themselves, trading rice with neighboring tribes for wild game. He had learned that he did not have to live in fear of any man, did not have to fear death, his spirit to be eaten by some huge snake or left to roam alone the jungle forever; he understood God’s promise of life everlasting.

"Every time he could find the strength he would ask me about God. I assured him that God loved him, cared for him and would receive him to his heavenly kingdom. He died peacefully."

"It all seemed so unfair. He was a victim of a white man’s disease. Often I wonder why I am here. I know I can’t serve 6 million Indians. Sometimes when I’m lying in my hammock at night in some Indian communal maloca, I get so down and out. But the next day the sun does shine, the ‘bird’ and I take off on another jungle flight, and yes, I realize that many are dying, many are suffering, but some are living because we are here...."

Because Jerrie, her sister Carolyn, and Ruth Lummis, director of the Jerrie Cobb foundation, are all out of the country, Dr. John Feaver, President of the University, will accept this honor for Jerrie.