Jacqueline Cochran’s Career As Flyer

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29715, 8 January 1962, Page 2

Jacqueline Cochran’s Career As Flyer

(By

SUSAN VAUGHAN}

America’s most famous airwoman, Jacqueline Cochran, recently broke her own eight-year-old women’s world speed record by 130 miles an hour.

Taking off from an American Air Force base in California, she flew at more than 784 miles an hour. Now 52, she has apparently lost none of her nerve or ability.

“Net bad for in old lady,” ■he commented after she landed. "I think my record U sate for a little while now.” I ritould My her record is safe for a tong time. The number of people who aspire to become the world’s fastest woman must be very small Indeed.

Jacqueline Cochran herself haidly seems a likely candidate for the title. She is no speed mad heiress bored with the humdrum tempo of her life. On the contrary, she is an orphan brouri* up in the deep South by poor foster parents. Her first job was in a mill when she was only nine. From there she went to a beauty shop, and then to New York. First Flight

In 1982 she saved enough for her first flying lesson and got her licence three weeks later.

Since then she has won more then 300 trophies. She is now director of a major commercial airline.

She has piloted all kinds of aircraft In the last war she ferried a bomber from America to London for the RAF. A few years ago she

flew the Atlantic aolo. She was America’s first woman pilot to break the sound barTier. In 1950, as president of the International Aviation Federation, she presented the federation’s gold medal to the Soviet aircraft designer, Andre Tupolev. Her husband is a big American industrialist and financier, Floyd B. Oldum. They have no children of their own, but they pay for the education of 400 poor children all over the world.

Both the keen students of psychic phenomena and claim tp be able to know' each other’s movements and thoughts, even though they may be thousands of miles apart. Brown-eyed Jacqueline Cochran is a smartly dressed woman, wears the lateststyle shoes. But whenever she gets an excuse, she slips them off and changes into a pair of soft leather slippers. “I've had these slippers for 30 years," she said, “ever since I began to fly. “I wore them when I flew the bomber across the Atlantic. I wore them when I broke through the sound barrier. They’re my lucky slippers.”