Woman Into Space: The Jerrie Cobb Story

By Jerrie Cobb and Jane Reiker

Fascinating autobiography of the pioneering female pilot and women’s advocate Jerrie Cobb.

Jerrie Cobb (1931-2019) was teaching men to fly by the age of 19, and in her twenties set several records for speed, distance and altitude. She was part of the Mercury 13, a group of women who, in a privately funded venture in 1959, underwent the same physiological testing that the men of the Mercury 7 program were subjected to. She was the first of the group to undergo the testing and the only one to pass all three phases. Nevertheless she was not considered a candidate for space travel by NASA, though she was appointed as a consultant to the space program in 1961.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839747588

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

WOMAN INTO SPACE

THE JERRIE COBB STORY

BY

JERRIE COBB

WITH

JANE RIEKER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

PROLOGUE: URGE TO INFINITY 6

1—BICYCLE TO SPACE? 7

2—SPEAK UP, DEAR 11

3—HORSE POWER 14

4—SKYBORNE 17

5—PILOT IN PIGTAILS 20

6—SHE’S ALL YOURS 24

7—HOMER AND HOMERS 27

8—PRETTY PT 32

9—PRO AT LAST 38

10—TAR-36 CALLING TETERBORO 42

11—BEPALMED 47

12—I KNOW A GIRL WHO... 52

13—THE SOUTH AMERICAN RUN 60

14—JACK 75

15—THE NORTH ATLANTIC RUN 79

16—HELLO BURBANK, GOODBYE 87

17—BOOMTOWN 93

18—MR. HARRIS, I HAVE AN IDEA... 106

19—RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME 113

20—PHASE ONE: THE MERCURY ASTRONAUT TESTS 119

21—RECOMMENDED! 124

22—BUSINESS AS USUAL (ALMOST) 128

23—MY LIFE STORY 131

24—PHASE TWO: EXCELLING IN LONELINESS 137

25—SEVEN MILES HIGH 146

26—PILOTAGE 152

27—PHASE THREE: THE NAVY TESTS 157

28—THE FLATS 165

29—THE RED TAPE JUNGLE 170

30—CONGRESS LISTENS 173

31—LOOKING FORWARD 179

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 180

DEDICATION

In His Name,

and for Jack and Lettie

and the kindred who watch with them.

PROLOGUE: URGE TO INFINITY

TO EVERY THING there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven, according to Ecclesiastes.

For everything there are beginnings and endings, tops and bottoms, sides or limits. There is an end to all things we know on earth. Only two things can we conceive of as infinite: God and the sky. I find one in the other.

The sky seems to me to hold the real symbols of abiding faith. Clouds are magnificent altars, the sun and the stars perpetual vigil lights, and the vastness of the whole space the biggest pulpit of all, voicing a timeless message.

To those of us who have been privileged to know the sky, it is a path to follow. We don’t know where it leads or what we will find as we go farther along the path. But go we must.

We have an urge to infinity.

That, really, is my story.

1—BICYCLE TO SPACE?

THE MORNING OF February 20, 1960, I took a bicycle ride toward space.

The date was my fifth day of undergoing the same series of tests given to select the seven Mercury Astronauts, at the Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Cycling to get to outer space sounds ludicrous, but such other pilots as Astronaut John Glenn and X-15 Pilot Scott Crossfield were there before me, and the bicycle ride is anything but funny.

In the four previous days, I had inhaled, exhaled, tilted, dunked, listened, talked, looked, walked, run, and had been filled and emptied before a changing audience of physicians, researchers, and technicians. I was established as being female, unmarried, blonde, blue-eyed, almost 29, 5 ft. 7 in. tall, 124 lbs. on the scales, and in extremely good health. The wonder of it was that I still felt good despite four days of the most rigorous physical examinations I had ever been through.

For the last day of the seventy-five tests, I needed every muscle in my body.

You’re going to work hard today, Miss Cobb. You can have a light breakfast—juice and toast, say—and a candy bar.

All three courses greedily consumed, I was led to a brightly-lighted room in the physiology department.

In it stood what seemed to be an exercise bicycle quite over-loaded with gadgets and thingnobbles.

Hey, I thought to myself, you’re going to take a bike ride. A bicycle ride to space!

White-coated staff members were busy all about the room. There was a battery of sensitive machinery to record body reactions. A big green bag was being attached to the frame over the front end of the bicycle. This, I guessed, would hold the air I breathed. Many space tests involved intricate measurement of oxygen intake and carbon dioxide respiration.

Dr. Ulrich Luft, head of the Lovelace physiology department—speaking with a gruff Teutonic accent that could hide neither his gentleness nor humor—had a little preliminary talk with me. Miss Cobb, this test is to see how your body reacts to hard physical work. It is part of our special dynamic examinations here to measure body efficiency.

Just what do I do, Dr. Luft? Pedal as fast as possible, as if I were racing?

A faint smile played over his face. Obviously, this was another one of those stress tests that would be less effective if the subject knew what to expect.

When we tell you to start, Miss Cobb, keep time with the metronome. Just keep pedaling, to its beat, until I tell you to stop.

I climbed aboard.

I knew that the Mercury Astronaut candidates had taken this test, as well as the examinations that had preceded it. I knew that my achievement or lack of achievement would be measured against the men’s, since no other standards for my sex had been established. The results of this test alone could be the decisive factor in determining whether to test other women after me as possible space flight trainees. Here was my last chance to prove my physical stuff.

A swarm of intent technicians came at me...whipped a blood pressure cuff around my left arm...applied head and torso sensors to pick up heartbeat, pulse, and respiration...attached nose clamps...inserted the oxygen breathing device in my mouth, and fitted the connecting tube to the bag.

Now? Ready? asked Dr. Luft.

I nodded my head as best I could.

Go!

I started pedaling, sensing that behind me some attachment was being shifted so that as I pumped away to the steady tock-tock-tock of the metronome, I was pulling an increasing load. It was like keeping the pace cycling up an ever-steeper hill, when the more tired you get the harder it is to pedal. Later I learned that as I maintained the unfaltering pedaling, my heart worked up to 180 beats per minute, twice the normal rate and considered to be the physical exhaustion point.

Brett Roorbach, the departmental assistant, adjusted something, probably a fastening tape, above the clamps on my nose. To my left I could hear quiet talk as Dr. Luft directed the staff members who monitored the recording equipment. Perspiration began to drip into my eyes and trickle down my back.

If I could last through this, without my legs giving out or a blackout occurring; if my breathing, heartbeat and blood-pressure would return to normal in a measured period, then a most vital part of the testing would be accomplished. How much push is left after the exhaustion point is reached is the crucial section of the bicycle ergometer testing.

My eyes burned in puddles of sweat, my legs ached with effort. I could feel my lungs trying to gulp the one deep breath there was no time to take.

To my left, the grizzled gray head of Dr. Luft nodded encouragement. I had to go on—that I knew. If riding a bicycle would get me into space, then ride I would.

I talked to myself and prayed, Help me not to falter, Lord, give me strength to make it all the way. I fought the urge to stop.

I bit down hard on the mouthpiece. Come on, girl, hang on by your teeth.

The metronome was a relentless master. Well, then, Jerrie, make use of it before it overpowers you. It’s only counting rhythm, not minutes. Listen—one, two, three, four, five...fifteen times is easy, and it’s halfway to thirty. If I make thirty, I know good and well I can make forty-five. Then—six, seven, eight, nine...why not go for sixty?

And start all over with one, two, three...so!

My thumping heart and the metronome rhythm and my mental count all merged into a noisy force driving my legs.

You okay? a voice asked, Um. I nodded.

On the wall in my line of sight was a picture of snow-capped mountains. Maybe some male space aspirant, sitting there sweating and pedaling, had been helped by that cool, remote sight. I suddenly felt a surge of new strength. Exultantly, I knew then and surely that I wasn’t going to collapse, that I could go the distance. New push—or call it second wind—had been granted me.

Pedal, pedal, pedal—tock, tock, tock.

All right, Jerrie, you can stop. The metronome ceased its clacking. The green wall was a discernible but watery blur.

Just sit there and relax. Sit there? I’d hate to have been told to move. I was tired. Really tired.

You don’t just hop off the bicycle (when you’re finally able) and get the word. The charts must be read, the oxygen consumption determined, and the statistics from body check-points correlated. Then these data in turn are applied to results of other physical tests already taken, for still further findings. The word would come next day.

There was nothing more I could do. I had literally given my all, and the matter was in stronger Hands than mine.

Do you want to go shower before your next appointment? A tap on my arm as I hunched over the handlebars. I nodded. Letting my right foot slide to the floor, I took tight hold of the bicycle seat as I hoisted my left leg up and over in slow motion.

With both feet on the floor, I felt strange, and took a couple of steps in the tentative manner of a newly-walking baby. Thanks, I think I mumbled, and turned down the corridor toward the showers. Listlessly dismissing a reluctance to leave the scene without some indication of success or failure, I wandered on to the washroom.

I sank to a bench in the dressing alcove. Reaching down to take off my steamy moccasins and wet socks, I leaned my face and shoulder against the wall. It was cool and pleasantly abrasive to my clammy skin. Turning so my back was right angled to the wall, I pulled my legs and feet up on the bench and languidly flipped off the footgear. Then I rubbed my shoulders against the supporting surface.

My head dropped forward, my muscles went limp. As I drowsed in my sweat-warmed clothes, my mind projected bits and pieces as I wondered where and how now had all begun.

A bicycle ride to space! Oh well, didn’t the Wright brothers start with a bicycle shop? Maybe the first lunar landing should plant a second flag—a bike rampant on a galaxy of stars...

I used to spend hours in the treetops watching birds fly. Was I looking to the future or did I just like trees? I found out when I soloed...

Never thought anything would be a hard physical test after flying PBY’s, but come to think of it, that merely took both hands and both feet...

It wasn’t just happenstance that put the old Waco and me in the same place at the same time....

The first time I set an altitude record, I made 30,361 feet. That’s just short of six miles. I remember it didn’t seem far enough...

Guess I’ve been on a lifelong search for space.

Taking me back quite a while, really...

2—SPEAK UP, DEAR

OKLAHOMA, 1931...The country was so far down that there was no place to go but up. The depression had settled on our land like the familiar summer coating of dust.

But in March of 1931, Mr. and Mrs. William Harvey Cobb, residents of Norman, Oklahoma, did not share the dark national mood. I had been born on March 5—their second child; and now, three weeks later, the family was about to begin the long journey by railroad coach to Washington, D.C., where my mother’s father, Ulysses Stevens Stone, was serving as a Congressman.

No wonder you like to travel, my mother tells me. For the first fifteen years of your life you did nothing but! Then she reflects for a moment. In those days we didn’t have soft reclining seats or air-conditioned cabins. Mostly it was uncomfortable and inconvenient to travel. I should think that once this family stopped moving, we’d have stayed stopped.

If we had stayed stopped, it would have been in the quiet town where my parents had met and shared the campus limelight. Dad, older than most of his classmates at the University of Oklahoma, was a track star, a good student and a part-time automobile salesman; he had quit high school and run away from home to enlist in the Navy shortly before the end of World War I, and now he was back, determined to get his degree and make up for lost time. Mother, one of the belles of Gamma Phi Beta, was training to be a teacher. They married and moved into a two-family house (a duplex) in Norman. My sister Carolyn was born two-and-a-half years before me, during the last days of the booming Twenties.

In that happy-go-lucky time of paper profits and easy spending, the automobile business was exciting and remunerative. But when the market collapsed, when jobs faded and men sat at home staring into emptiness every day, the sale of even the snappiest of cars was a surprising feat. Harvey Cobb seemed to achieve that feat more often than most; the family always paid its own way; yet in his restless anxiety to improve our position, we moved frequently. Back from Washington to Okmulgee, Oklahoma; then again to Norman; then to Oklahoma City.

On my second birthday, Franklin D. Roosevelt, completing his first full day as President, closed the banks. Unemployment and bankruptcies were at a peak. For most families, during the grim years, fun had to be taken where it could be found. A highlight of the year for me, for example, came when our family made its annual trip to the National Rifle Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio. Since his college days my father had been a National Guardsman. A member of the famous 45th Division, he was commander of Company C, Engineers, and one of the unit’s champion marksmen; and his rifle team was almost monotonously the winner of the state championships.

The guardsmen would travel to the Camp Perry matches in Army vehicles, while their wives and children followed in crowded family cars. The men would live in pup-tents at the camp; their wives and children stayed in a squaw camp nearby. The entire trip would be an exciting week of life under the sun and the stars.

I was happiest in that atmosphere. The sound of rifle fire didn’t dismay me; by the time I was four, I had learned how to pick the ejected cartridges from the ground and put them in a slot for refilling with powder and bullet.

Carolyn Cobb, at six, played house. She dressed her Shirley Temple doll, and combed its fluffy curls. She served tea in tiny cups. She chattered engagingly. She had many six-year-old friends.

Geraldyn Cobb, not yet four, flopped on her belly on the ground, and pretended to be shooting a rifle. She ran, just for the sake of running. She climbed and swung and leaped. She was fascinated when she could watch her father and his friends train a hunting dog, and alone with her own dog she repeated their gestures and commands. Her friends were the grown-ups who tolerated her when she purposefully, silently tagged along behind them.

For Carolyn, speech was bubbling and easy. For Geraldyn, it was anguish.

I was somewhat tongue-tied as a child. Words formed clearly in my mind, but they came out wrong: blurred, twisted, thick, slurred. Outside the home my efforts to communicate ended too often in embarrassment. Children sometimes laughed, sometimes mimicked. Adults might grow impatient or ill-at-ease, or humor me transparently.

I found that the easiest way to avoid the despair or derision was to remain as silent as possible. Or as alone as possible.

But sometimes neither was possible.

On my first day in kindergarten, each child had to stand in turn and tell his name and address. I hesitated when my turn came.

And what is your name? smiled the teacher. You, the pretty little girl with the long blonde hair.

The teacher didn’t seem to understand my reply.

Speak a little louder please, dear, she said. And clearer.

The second effort was somewhat more distorted. A few children tittered. The teacher’s frown was severe; her rap for attention was angry.

There will be no laughing, she ordered. Never mind, dear, you can tell me where you live later. Sit down for now.

I sat down, biting my lip. And I didn’t cry. But at home that afternoon I made it clear that I would never, never return to school.

My parents decided that an operation could no longer be postponed. And so we went to the doctor’s office.

The operation is a simple one, requiring neither hospitalization nor anesthesia. The child opens his mouth wide, the physician quickly clips, and the job is done. Our doctor swabbed my mouth with an acid-tasting liquid, and then reached for one of his gleaming, forbidding instruments. I twisted out of the chair and ran.

Three times we went back to that office, and three times my mouth was swabbed and bravely opened—and then either clamped shut or opened even wider in a shriek of fright.

The fourth time the doctor was ready for me with an anesthetic.

After the operation my speech improved. But by then my five-year-old mind had made a number of important decisions. School is no good. Talking can be distressing. Sometimes the best fun is to be alone.

3—HORSE POWER

IF YOU’VE EVER galloped across a field on a spirited horse, then you’ve tasted the exhilaration of piloting a plane.

When you ride, the horse seems to be an extension of your own body. When you fly, the plane is part of you.

In the sky there are no fences. In a field there are no roads, no paths, no limits on you and your horse. You move as you wish—to the side, ahead, in a circle, cantering or trotting or galloping in a clattering burst of speed.

In either case you are moving—deciding which way to move, and controlling the movement. And whether you control the power of one horse or the harnessed power of 1000 horses is only a matter of degree.

Until I flew, my one joy above all others was to ride.

We had a birthday tradition in our home: we could choose for ourselves how to celebrate the event. My choice was always the same—horseback riding.

In 1937, for my sixth birthday, my father went with me to the stables in Will Rogers Park in Oklahoma City. For all his love of the outdoors, Dad had rarely ridden, and had little interest in the sport. He sensed, though, that I would no longer be content to be led ploddingly around a ring on a bored pony by an indifferent groom. He was prepared to let me ride on a pony without a handler, and he was even resigned to my riding on the bridle path, not in the confines of a ring. But I had other plans.

Give the little lady a pony, Dad told the attendant. And a horse for me. Now that my daughter’s six, we’re going to ride the path together.

I shook my head. "Not a pony, Dad. A horse."

No, said he. A pony it will be.

"But it’s my birthday. I can choose. It’s not fair."

Tears and sobs on a birthday did not seem fitting to my father. Two