Seven of the surviving FLATs at the launch of the space shuttle Discovery with Lt. Col. Eileen Collins in the pilot's seat, Cape Canaveral, 1995. From left. Gene Nora Jessen, Jerri Truhill, Jerrie Cobb, B Steadman, Sarah Ratley, Wally Funk, K Cagle.
1 he telegram brought the news that the women-in-space program was canceled. There was no explanation, and there was no apology. Just the slim piece of yellow paper that canceled their ambitions. It left the women bitterly disappointed. “The program is over, the program is canceled, goodbye, go home and forget you ever did it.” That is how Jerri recalls it, her voice acid with the memory. “The finality of that short telegram, with no
explanation, not a by-your-leave, not even a thank-you, like a slap of cold water right across the face. We were so enthused, we were all so into it, we were ready to go and gung ho, and you get a telegram that just says, Programs been canceled, forget it. The way it was done affected all of us and I don’t think we’ve ever gotten over it.”
Of course most of them, including Jerri herself, did get over it. The testing episode became an unusual little story told to their children when they watched the Apollo launches on television. They packed away their dreams of space with the telegram and the letters from Randy Lovelace.
Gene Nora Stumbough was left without a job that September weekend, but she sent off a barrage of letters and soon landed a gig flying for Beechcraft, where an astute marketing executive saw the public relations dividends in female pilots. In 1962, Gene Nora and two other pilots flew a forty-thousand-mile, three-month-long cross-country tour, when Beechcraft introduced its new Musketeer. “It was the best job ever, anywhere,” she says. “The kind of flying girls just didn’t get to do then.” In 1964 she married a fellow Beech pilot, Bob Jessen, and a few years later they moved to Boise, Idaho, to start a Beech dealership of their own. They had two children, and Gene Nora regularly flew to 99s meetings—in 1980 she was elected president of the organization. She and Bob started an FBO (fixed base operation), and soon the astronaut tests were, for her, just “a footnote in history.” Today she works with Bob at their Boise Air Service, and has begun a new career writing books about the early history of women in aviation. She flies the Bonanza to their cottage in Oregon most weekends.
Not long after the Pensacola telegram came, Rhea Hurrle quit flying altogether. In 1962, she got married to a fellow in the oil business. They opened an aircraft brokerage together. But in 1966, he died of cancer. “We were still newlyweds,” Rhea says. Her husband was an only child, and so after his death Rhea (still
the farm girl with the strong sense of duty) moved to Colorado Springs to care for his elderly widowed mother. She did a little teaching at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and towed glider students high up into the mountains, but it was hard to make a living in a town awash in ex-military pilots. In 1972, she married again, this time to a real estate developer named Len Woltman. He asked her to quit flying, and she did. “I loved flying, but I loved him more,” Rhea says with a shrug. “I missed it at first, but I made a deal, and he was worth it.” She trained instead as a professional parliamentarian, a job she still does today, running corporate and community meetings according to Roberts Rules of Order.
In 1961, K Cagle went back to teaching flying and, a few years later, became a licensed aircraft and engine mechanic—the only woman anybody had ever heard of doing the job. She went to work as a mechanic at Robbins Air Force Base, where she used to instruct. She made the acquaintance of a general while writing an aviation column for the Raleigh newspaper, and he invited her to Eglin Air Force Base to do a little jet flying. “It was like being in a submarine,” she says of her first trip at the controls of a jet- powered plane. “The air was fluid, and the clouds were like little bubbles. I could roll it left, roll it right, like through water.” She sighs happily at the memory. “That was one of the highlights of my life.” Today she lives in Lizella, Georgia, and still flies out at Robbins whenever she gets the yen.
Sarah Gorelick, who was also suddenly without a job in September 1961, went to work in her fathers store. She always had a plane of her own, and in the late sixties she took helicopter lessons. When the tight bunch of guys in the helicopter gang at the airfield gave her a hard time, she simply bought the helicopter. She married briefly in the 1970s and had a daughter, Paula (Sarah flew until the day before she went into labor). She became a chartered accountant and works today for the IRS; she still flies on weekends. People often think she is just a flaky
Epilogue
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old lady, she confides, and then gives a wicked little grin: “I just let ’em think it.”
In 1961, B Steadman went back to running her aviation business, and to racing—she won the International Womens Air Race in 1963, and the AWTAR in 1966. In 1968, she was elected president of the 99s, and went on to help build the International Womens Air and Space Museum in Dayton, Ohio. She and Bob adopted two boys. She had to give up flying after a brain injury in the 1970s, but she remains avidly interested in aviation. She lives today in Traverse City, Michigan; she and Bob bought a taxi company to occupy them in their retirement, and B does regular shifts driving. She also speaks about her career in aviation; she likes the grade-school groups the best. She encourages them to take an interest in the space program, and she tells them anything is possible.
After the astronaut episode, Jean Hixson went back to teaching math to fifth graders, and spending her summer vacations working with the air force reserves. She worked on space navigation research at zero gravity, and at the time of the Apollo moon program she headed projects looking at movement in lunar gravity. Later, she studied life support equipment and aeromedical requirements for female military pilots. In 1984, by then a colonel, she was presented with the Meritorious Service Medal for her work with the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson. Jean dated a bit and left the neighborhood kids agog when a gentleman came to pick her up by landing his helicopter at the end of her street. But she stayed single: “Although if I found someone who had his own Learjet, I might consider him . . .” she joked to friends. She died of ovarian cancer in 1984. The first line of her obituary in the Akron newspaper read, “Jean F. Hixson never realized her dream of becoming the country’s first female astronaut.”
Irene Leverton, too, had quit a job to go to Pensacola and found herself stuck that September. The news that the women
weren’t going into space training didn’t really surprise her: “I was so used to that kind of thing.” She got work instructing in California but quickly found herself in the same dissatisfying cycle of landing flying jobs she liked and running into bosses who, she says, didn’t want to give a woman decent work. She taught at Japan Airlines’ flight school, flew into the mountains for the forest service and even flew government scientists to secret mountain satellite stations listening to space. She waged a bitter but eventually victorious fight to have women admitted to the national pylon racing competitions, and in 1969 got the dozen women in the country with the top pilot rating together in the Women Airline Transport Pilots Association. Today she flies occasionally with the Civil Air Patrol and runs a small aviation consulting business in Prescott, Arizona. She is still fighting the perception of men who believe a woman—an old woman, now—shouldn’t be flying.
In 1964, the makers of a stunning innovation called Lycra deemed Jerri Sloan the country’s most active woman and sent her across the United States as an ambassador for their miracle fabric. Dupont made her a fancy pink flying suit, and her business partner Joe Truhill painted one of their P-5 Is a matching shade; in pink suit and pink plane, Jerri made a national tour. On New Year’s Eve in 1964, she married Joe. He had four kids of his own, so the Truhill household was suddenly “crowded,” Jerri says dryly. She welcomed the political changes of the sixties, and embraced the nascent women’s movement—not, she hastens to say, that she went around “with breasts all sagging, burning bras.” Her sense of outrage, ignited by the astronaut fiasco, was inflamed when she married Joe and suddenly found that as someone’s wife, she had no rights of her own any more. She had been a single mother, owner of a house and co-owner of a business, but suddenly she had to have Joe’s signature on everything. The same week that she did risky flying, testing an automatic navigation system out over the ocean for the military, a company
refused to sell her new carpet without her husband’s permission. “You think I wasn’t for the Equal Rights Amendment?” Jerri asks, still boiling at the memory. She lives today in Dallas, overseeing her brood of children, stepchildren and grandchildren. She is, she acknowledges acerbically, a little less tolerant of sexism with every passing year.
The astronaut episode propelled Janey Hart into a new type of political activity. In 1963, she had just finished reading a copy of Betty Friedan’s shocking new book, The Feminine Mystique, when the phone rang—it was Friedan herself, whom Janey had never met. “And she said, I’ve heard about [the congressional hearing] and I think this might be a good time for us to start an organization to make life more fair for women. And I wondered if you could come to New York for a meeting.” Janey flew to New York, and joined nine other women at a meeting at Friedan’s Upper West Side apartment. The National Organization for Women was born that evening. Janey was part of the founding board when NOW was formalized in 1966 and started chapters in both Michigan and Washington.
She had eight growing children to contend with, and she went back to school herself, earning a degree in anthropology from George Washington University (and zipping around campus on a little yellow Honda motorcycle). She gradually became more and more opposed to the Vietnam War; in 1968 she went to see firsthand what the Americans were doing there, and the experience soon had her out protesting with her children (including her three draft-age sons). Janey was arrested with 185 other protesters at an ecumenical antiwar service held at the Pentagon in November 1969. It was an election year, but Phil just shrugged off the inevitable barrage—“Senator’s wife arrested in protest.” She made headlines again when she helped set up a shelter for excommunicated priests who refused to follow the Vatican line on birth control. As the criticism poured in, members of Phil’s campaign staff asked Janey to “tone it down.”
That didn’t go over well: “I expect to tell the truth as I see it. The truth, as close as humans can come to it, is not a political disadvantage,” she later told a writer who asked about the tension. Janey resented the demands that politics put on her husband and resented the loss of her own privacy, but at the same time she clearly appreciated the platform it gave her. “You can be a Senate wife and do all those nice little social tea-type things or you can stand for something and use it and not just sit there. So I took every advantage I could of it.”
Phil died of cancer in 1976. Janey put her energy into sailing (including a transatlantic trip). She now spends her summers on Mackinac Island and her winters sailing her yacht, the Loon Feather, in the Caribbean. She gave up flying a while back. “It’s too expensive,” she says. But she, like all the others, is still a member of the 99s.
And Jackie Cochran? In 1971, she became the first living woman to be enshrined in the Aviation Hall of Fame. That same year, she and legendary French pilot Jacqueline Auriol were both made “honorary members” of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots; they were the first women allowed into the club, although the society would not give them full membership. In 1975, Jackie told The Washington Post, “I have never been discriminated against in my life. I think the women complaining they’ve been discriminated against are the ones who can’t do anything anyway. Baloney.” Jackie had a heart attack in the early 1970s and her health deteriorated; she had to stop flying and sold her Lodestar. Her husband, Floyd Odium, died at the age of eighty in 1977. Jackie stayed on the ranch, but Floyd’s son Bruce took over management of the estate. He did not have his father’s business sense, however, and was eventually so overwhelmed by the scope of the losses that he killed himself in the backyard. Jackie herself died, of another heart attack, in 1980—her obituaries in the
major newspapers, which repeated the orphan story, said vaguely that she was living on or near the ranch, but her unacknowledged family says that she had lost the property and had moved to a small condominium. She died without having made a spaceflight. It was just about the only time Jackie Cochran didn’t do something that she said she would.
Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, was appointed a representative for the soviet of Yaroslavl in 1967 and served on the council of the Supreme Soviet for the next seven years. She was named president of the Soviet Women’s Committee and was the Soviet representative to the UN conference for International Women’s Year in Mexico City in 1975. She was a hero of the international women’s movement. But she was never again a cosmonaut. In 1964 she told reporters in Cuba that Yuri Gagarin was planning to lead the next moon mission and that she would be part of it. She enrolled in the Zhukovsky Military Air Academy and graduated in 1969. For the next decade, she continued to say publicly that she hoped to soon make another flight in space—but her tone was increasingly wistful. In truth, while the Soviets heralded her flight as the propaganda victory that it was, they had no intention of flying another woman. Those who trained with her were dismissed, and no more women were recruited until the late 1970s.
The change at NASA took just as long. From the initial group of six female candidates in 1978, women were slowly incorporated into the astronaut corps. By 2000, 25 percent of NASA’s astronauts were women; one-third of the agency’s workforce was female, which included 16 percent of the scientists and engineers. Some of the old debates continue, however: in 2002, NASA scrapped plans to develop a smaller space suit, more suitable for female astronauts, saying it could not justify the $16 million expenditure when only 20 percent of the astronaut corps would use it (some women can comfortably wear the larger suits). Yvonne Brill, a retired engineer and former member of
NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, was among many critics who noted that the decision could keep more women out of the astronaut corps, since smaller astronaut candidates could not maneuver as well in the bulky suit in their qualifying tests. (In 2001, NASA spent millions on an extra-large suit, to fit bigger men.)
Eileen Collins set another milestone when she became the first woman to command a United States space mission in 1998. She is slated to do it again in late 2003 as commander of the Space Shuttle Endeavor, flying it to the International Space Station. Familiar arguments have been raised again in recent years, as scientists point out that smaller astronauts would use fewer resources living on the space station. However, in plans laid out to 2003, only one female astronaut is scheduled to live and work on the 1SS.
For everyone else, life went on. But for four of the Fovelace women, the idea that they might still get into space did not die with the telegram about Pensacola.
Fike Jerrie, Jan and Marion Dietrich kept up their campaign. Their surviving correspondence suggests that the twins were working with Jackie and that they believed for the next several years that they might still be made part of the space program. On January 10, 1964, a breathless Marion came in from an aviation writers’ conference where she had met a friend of Jackie Cochran’s and typed out a letter to her sister, who was then flying in Fos Angeles.
Dear Jan,
Repeat this information to NO ONE.
We may know this month. We might stay at our present locations for a while but possibly after salary.
Advise you to get the [airline] captain’s rating soonest, just
in case. ... I talked with Captain Walton who had seen Jackie Cochran quite a bit in Alaska. Jackie told him she talked to a congressional committee last summer and they “promised” her a woman (pilot type rather than scientist, I gather) would go into space in two to three years. She is very anxious to have a woman astronaut and has gone to doctor after doctor and is finally convinced she cannot go because G-loads would cause great stress on body parts already weakened by surgery. He said she is very opposed to Jerrie Cobb and very much for us—that she liked us and spoke well of us. He said since she could not go he felt she would like to sponsor someone so that she feels part of it or that she might back someone just to keep [Jerrie] from going.
Walton, a public relations officer in the air force, advised Marion to get their names in the paper—especially to make it public that Jan was then piloting the forty-passenger Convair 240. “You and I have avoided publicity,” Marion wrote (although in fact, she had been part of two of the three major pieces of publicity about the program),
. . . but I think it is very important to getting a womans program going, not just for us but a discreet and factual story about a woman flying a Convair be released in the next 10 days. They kept telling Jackie the women did not have the jet test piloting experience or any jet experience— it would be apparent if they could fly the Convair they could fly a jet. Your experience is the only answer we now have to this jet thing. At dinner I talked with Ralph Deighton, aviation and science writer for AP in LA and “happened” to mention what you were doing. An AP reporter should contact you very soon. Be sure to see him as quickly as possible and get this thing in. . . . If you
aren’t contacted soon, be sure to let me know. I can diplomatically write John Madigan, LA chief of UPI, saying there is some new consideration of a woman in space program, there is some question about experience, a short factual story would bring out experience and abilities.
Even a picture and caption would do it. The LA aviation and space writers’ association will have a program dealing with various types of aircraft. You will be invited as a special guest of Tom Self of the LA chapter, president.
Wear your prettiest dress and smile and meet as many people as you can.
Marion was a gifted publicist. The next year the twins ferried a Beech Queen Air to Bremen, Germany, and articles about their transatlantic journey—with irresistible pictures of the pretty twins clambering out of their plane in matching Jackie O—style suits—made newspapers across the country. But it made no difference to their campaign with NASA, and Jackie, NASA’s new consultant, was given the message to drop this issue of female astronauts.
While they waited, the twins had, of course, to work. Jan was the first woman in the country to receive an airline transport rating in a four-engine jet and she went to work as a first officer on a charter jet. But she could not break that last barrier and get an airline pilot’s job. In 1968 she filed a lawsuit against World Airways Inc. in a federal court in San Francisco, charging discrimination under the 1964 Equal Rights Act. She earned a grade of 98 percent in the company’s DC-6 training course but they turned down her job application. “It’s not that I was lacking ability, but I was told that the image of an airline captain was a tall, gray-haired man,” Jan said. The suit dragged through court and was costly; she eventually abandoned it. She never did get an airline job, but she flew a four-engine jet with the commuter carrier Golden Pacific Airlines. Marion kept writing. And as
years went by but no further word came from Jackie, the twins gradually gave up the idea that together they, or at least one of them, would be the country’s first woman in space.
Marion Dietrich died of cancer in 1974. Neither she nor Jan had children; they lived much of their adult lives within a few doors of each other. Jan scattered Marion’s ashes from her plane, flying over the bay above the Golden Gate Bridge. Today Jan lives in a nursing home, deaf and blind and suffering from dementia. She told a visitor in the late 1990s, though, before the last of her hearing went, “I was the best damn pilot there ever was.”
As Wally Funk tells the story, she read the telegram about the cancelation of the Pensacola testing, and she shrugged. “I wasn’t discouraged. I was young and I was happy. I just believed it would come. If not today then in a couple of months.” It seemed absurd that someone as eminently qualified, as enthusiastic as she was, would not get this opportunity.
She applied again to NASA’s second round of recruitment in 1962, for the Gemini missions, and was told, she says, that the same qualifications were still required—she had to be a jet test pilot and an engineer. She tried again in 1966, but still no women made that cut. Then she decided NASA was not going to be her ticket off the planet, and she would look elsewhere.
Wally had gone out to California in 1962 and eventually rose from instructing to a chief pilot’s position at an FBO. In 1971, she became the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Authority—she gave check rides, inspected schools, investigated complaints. Four years later she was made one of the first female accident investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board. She loved that job: she drove and flew and hiked and once even rode a burro up to an accident site, she had a big office right on the runway at the Los Angeles airport, and even though the
work was grim (body parts and personal effects scattered around the charred wreckage of a plane), she relished the authority. She retired from the organization in the early 1980s under circumstances that are not clear, but she parlayed her knowledge of safety into the “Wally Funk Safety Slide Presentation,” a monologue of accidents and what could have prevented them, and travels around the country speaking to student and amateur pilot groups. And always, she kept a roof overhead with instructing. By the early 1990s, she estimated that she had soloed more than seven hundred students.
Wally also pursued her space ambitions on her own. For one thing, she was determined to “finish” the astronaut tests. In 1963, she talked her way into taking three additional tests similar to those she would have done at Pensacola. She used connections through a student to take the high-altitude chamber test and the Martin-Baker Seat Ejection test (for which she was strapped in a chair, shot upward and summarily dropped) at El Toro Marine Base. It was the first time that the scientists there had ever done the tests on a woman, she says. At the University of Southern California, Wally rode a human centrifuge to measure her tolerance of increased gravitational pull. Military personnel who took the test were equipped with pressure suits. Wally, a civilian, didn’t get one—and so, she says, she borrowed her mother’s tightest Merry Widow. When she felt “the gray curtain” of unconsciousness starting, she clenched up and the girdle helped to keep her functioning; she never told the doctors her secret. In 1991, she flew a trainer like the MASTIF Jerrie had spun on so many years earlier as part of her second phase of testing.
Wally also continued her hunt for some other route into space. “When I wasn’t selected to go with NASA, I was disappointed but I was never bitter,” she says firmly. “I was brought up that when things don’t work out, you go to your alternative.” In the mid-1990s she made a large investment, a down payment with a
company called Space Adventures in Arlington, Virginia—a commercial venture that says it will take paying passengers on suborbital flights within a couple of years. Their craft, not yet built, will take passengers sixty-two miles above earth, where the curvature is clearly visible, and they will be briefly weightless. The flight is currently proposed to cost about $100,000.
In 2000, she made a six-day trip to “space camp” near Moscow. Wally refers to this as having “trained with the cosmonauts,” although in fact it is simply an extension of the space tourism policy with which the Russians are funding their ailing space program. The typical cost for the trip is $15,000; Wally says she paid for some of it, she declines to say how much, but “they paid the rest because they wanted my name and publicity from having me.” She was with five men—four Americans and one Saudi—and one British woman. They were given medical tests, rode the centrifuge to 5 G’s, tried to “dock” a mock-up of a Soyuz capsule with a model space station, and those who were trained as scuba divers (Wally isn’t, although she plans to be) splashed around in the 1.3-million-gallon “neutral buoyancy facility.” The trip highlight came when an Ilyushin 76 took them up to 35,000 feet and into a parabolic dive that produced thirty seconds of weightlessness. “Zero G’s at last!” Wally caroled. Untroubled by even a moment of nausea, she sailed the length of the plane, arms and legs out, “like Superman!”
In March 2002, Wally made headlines all over the world with an announcement that she was going to pay $2 million (raised by sponsors whose identity she would not reveal) for a flight with a California company called InterOrbital Systems, launched from the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tonga. The $2 million will pay for sixty days of training and a first flight of five hours—although InterOrbital says eventually its passengers will stay in space for a week for the same price. Four crew members and two astronaut-pilots will make these trips. InterOrbital said
it hoped to train Wally to serve as a pilot for its flights. But officials with the Space Transportation Association immediately dismissed the company’s plans, saying that, for one thing, $8 million would never pay for a week in space.
Wally has a book, The First of Them All, a collection of brief descriptions of the first women to achieve a whole variety of things—the first woman to be a playwright, the first to appear on television. When she gets the book out to show a visitor, Wally turns quickly to the aviation section. She knows the entries almost by heart. The first woman to fly coast to coast, the first woman to fly commercial, the first woman to deliver airmail. By the time Wally started flying, other women had all these “firsts.” The Atlantic was flown, the world had been circumnavigated, the sound barrier had been shattered, all by women. But at twenty-one, Wally had a first of epic proportions dangled in front of her. She could be the first female astronaut. “I just fell in love with the idea of being the first woman into space, or perhaps even to the moon,” she told a reporter in 1963.
Wally, of course, has plenty of firsts of her own. Her name appears in the book—as one of the United States’ first female astronaut candidates. But not, of course, as an astronaut. And that’s the title she wants.
Since 1961, Wally has defined herself by her plan to get into space on her own. The role of astronaut is now a crucial part of her identity. While she once hoped to travel as a pilot or an engineer, she says she will now settle for the role of passenger; all that matters is to cross that new frontier. Finishing the Mercury tests brought her one step closer; the visit to the Russian space camp was another step. The passenger trip, with InterOrbital or one of the other space tourism ventures, will finally end the quest. “Don’t forget I’m going,” she corrects quickly, if anyone speaks of the women’s space bid in the past tense.
Wally is much in demand as a speaker, to aviation groups, women’s organizations, colleges, any audience requiring an
inspiring and motivational guest, and she is adept at generating media coverage. In every speech and interview, she delivers the same points in her winning, toothy manner. But many of the stories she tells are in fact a wistfully reshaped version of the truth.
Wally says, for example, that she was the only woman other than Jerrie to complete all three phases of the astronaut tests. She has, privately, managed to do many of those that Jerrie did at Pensacola—but she has done them piecemeal over thirty years and never under any sort of organized program, a detail she typically omits. She frequently makes presentations wearing the distinctive navy blue uniform of an airline captain, with four gold bars on the sleeves, although she has never held this job. (And this rankles many female pilots, for the handful of women who fly for major airlines are the most respected in the world of women fliers.) Sometimes, Wally poses in an astronaut’s training jumpsuit—the kind that can be purchased in the gift shop at Cape Canaveral. She talks about '‘training with the cosmonauts,” although in fact she bought her way into the vacation romp at the Russian space center. “I did it in one week’s time but it was so crammed in, it was really three years’ time for a regular astronaut or cosmonaut,” she said on-screen in a documentary produced about her called Wally Funk, Astronaut Candidate. In articles about the Russian trip, she has said that she was “invited” (which she was, after the $15,000 fee was paid), that no one but cosmonauts or officials had been allowed in before her group (in fact, a dozen space tourists had visited on similar programs previously). “I beat John Glenn on the stress test, bicycle analysis tests and lung power tests. I beat Wally Schirra on vertigo and set a record in the bicycle endurance and isolation tests,” Wally has told numerous reporters including Final Frontier magazine in 1990. But none of the women other than Jerrie was ever given competitive rankings, and the Mercury men never made theirs public; asked how she knows she beat them, Wally says vaguely that she was “told at the time” by medical staff. She tells interview-
ers that thirteen of twenty-five women passed the Mercury tests, but only seven of the thirty men. In truth, of course, thirty of the thirty-one men passed—NASA simply chose the best seven. Wally remains competitive with Jerrie Cobb, the only other one of the group who still has active ambitions to get into space. Wally points out, for example, that she reads aerospace magazines, including European editions. “These are the little things that put me just kind of an edge over—I don’t think Jerrie Cobb would pick up something like this or even know it existed.”
Her exaggerations and competitive statements exasperate the other women. They say she is an embarrassment (especially when she does public engagements in her jumpsuit). She says they are simply jealous because she is finally going to make the trip they all wanted, because she persevered when they gave up. Wally’s audiences, be they college classes, reporters or young filmmakers, eat up her stories, and she works the image with undeniable savvy. The crowds love her go-to-your-alternative, nobody-owes- me-a-ride attitude and they don’t question the details.
Wally’s relentless promotion of herself as one-time astronaut candidate and future astronaut is in truth quite moving. “I felt as though I was in space and I belonged there,” she says about her zero-gravity plane trip in Russia. She still lectures on safety and teaches flying today, but how she will get to space—and how she will present and publicize the accomplishment—are her chief preoccupations. Once Wally was almost too young to take the astronaut tests; today she fights against the clock to get that trip to space any way she can. She cannot rewrite the pages in her book that give the first spaceflight to Valentina Tereshkova, the title of first American woman to Sally Ride. But she can get into space, and make it true: “Wally Funk, astronaut.”
And what became of the self-appointed leader of this band of women? When Jerrie Cobb ran away in 1965, she fled to the
jungle—to the area known as Amazonas, which encompasses parts of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and Peru. Most of it is dense rain forest; it was then almost entirely unserviced by roads, and a small plane was the only way to cover it. The region Jerrie adopted as her home is as big as the United States. “I chose the Amazon because it’s the most isolated,” she explained. “You can fly for hundreds and thousands of miles and not see a mission or road. It’s the largest isolated place in the world, except maybe Antarctica. But in Antarctica, there are no people needing services as in the Amazon.”
Her father helped her get a loan and she bought a 1962 Aero Commander 500A that the indigenous people she worked with soon christened la parajita , The Bird. The consulting that first drew her to Latin America quickly turned into more missionary work, and friends at home began to send Jerrie old tennis shoes (protection from snakebites) and blankets for the indigenous people. Members of the 99s collected seeds and shoes and money at their regional meetings. Jerrie was a project. Gene Nora Jessens parish raised the Lenten collection for her; Jerri Truhill and B Steadmans kids told their school classes about her work. Her supporters formed a charitable organization, the Jerrie Cobb Foundation, to channel donations to her. The 99s featured ads and photo essays on her work in the jungle in their newsletter and organized national fundraising efforts.
Soon Jerrie defined her life there as that of nondenomina- tional jungle missionary, flying food and medicine and doctors for anyone who needed it; she said she did aerial surveys or aviation consulting only when she and The Bird ran out of money. Once shy about talking of her faith, Jerrie became more and more comfortable discussing the hand of God she felt in everything she did. She was, she wrote home, “His co-pilot.”
In her letters, she sounded devout, cheerful (“what joy there is in this work,” she wrote again and again) and stirred by an immense need. She told of fighting epidemics of yellow fever,
flying Indians almost dead from malnutrition to clinics and introducing a nutritious new “winged bean” to tribes who survived on subsistence agriculture. It was rough work—she wrote that she slept in her hammock in the Indian longhouses and ate roasted ants, that she and her plane had become a kidnapping target for leftist guerrillas—but her letters brimmed with her earnest desire to help. “Every penny, dime and dollar contributed to our work here goes directly for the Amazonas Indians,” she wrote in May 1974. “In fact I would feel very guilty using any for myself, after seeing how desperately they need this help.” Six years later an Oklahoma congressman nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1983, when she heard that NASA had finally launched Sally Ride, Jerrie wrote, “Sure, I wish it were me—but I really wouldn’t change the last 20 years for anything—or trade places with anyone. Being God’s servant here in Amazonas helping these primitive peoples is the most exciting, fulfilling, worthwhile, useful life I can imagine.”
Through it all, she never sounded lonely; every letter spoke of “we.” She had friends among the Indians and, most important, her plane, to which she was fiercely devoted. In January 1976, the Commander had to be replaced with a smaller, cheaper plane requiring less maintenance. She wrote, “I would rather cut off my right arm, or sell my own child, but there is no other way. I have talked it over with The Bird, and although she hates to leave, she understands.” Jerrie bought and rebuilt a twin-engine Islander, the new Bird.
Yet her letters home from those years also raise questions. Except for a couple of colorful passages in which she described how a young chief died of a “white man’s disease” in her arms, and one in which she detailed a long day of nursing the sick and ferrying supplies, the letters said very little about the culture or customs of the tribes she ostensibly lived with. Her accomplishments seem almost unreal: she discovered not just one but many
previously unknown tribes. She introduced rice, a difficult crop to grow, into the Amazon environment. She persuaded a tribe to abandon a historic practice of female infanticide. While disarmingly full of her faith, devoting half of each letter to “rejoicing” and thanking God, Jerrie seemed to be waging a rather extraordinary one-woman campaign.
Very few aspects of her activities in the jungle can be substantiated. In 1983, a reporter for The Miami Herald who was intrigued by the astronaut-turned-missionary story went to see Jerrie in the jungle. Meg Laughlin spent weeks there, but never saw Jerrie working with the Indians; instead she saw The Bird used to deliver crates of Coke and lumber. There were no winged beans, no starving Indians; Jerrie didn’t speak any Indian dialects (let alone the dozens she claimed), and Laughlin learned from an anthropologist that Jerrie had never actually spoken to the tribe whose female infanticide she allegedly stopped. Laughlin also found that contrary to the descriptions of a shoestring operation, several companies and individuals gave Jerrie large financial donations. Dan Doyle, a linguist and missionary who had worked with Jerrie for years in the jungle, told the reporter, “I pity Jerrie Cobb more than anyone else in the world.” She has plenty to be proud of in what she does do, Doyle said, but she can’t stop exaggerating. “She can make a tremendous story out of nothing.”
When Laughlin went back to Jerrie for answers, the missionary pilot insisted she had saved the female babies, that she did not get any donations larger than $1,300, that she had brought winged beans to the Amazon. Laughlin, in the end, was apologetic. Jerrie, she said, was dealing with a public “which looks for superheroes in ordinary humans, as I did in my search for a jungle queen. I demanded one, and Jerrie did her best to oblige.”
Gene Nora Jessen, like many of the 99s who raised money for Jerrie, was troubled by the allegations, by the idea that Jerrie had made up her jungle life, and she puzzled for years over her motives. Like everyone Laughlin talked to who once knew Jerrie,
Gene Nora came back to the same point. “She just never got over it. Over not getting that chance.”
And indeed, Jerrie has kept her failed bid for spaceflight as an integral part of her identity—a picture of her wired to testing equipment at Lovelace adorned the brochure for her charitable foundation, while another of her holding a flight helmet appeared on many of her letters from the jungle. She was a popular cause for the 99s, the injustice of the opportunity she was denied always a part of the story.
Then in 1998, NASA administrator Daniel Goldin announced that the space agency would have a new mission specialist on a space shuttle trip: John Glenn. It was an open secret that the senator had campaigned heavily in Washington to make another spaceflight, and had enlisted the support of then president Bill Clinton in the effort. Goldin said Glenn, seventy- seven, would fly to provide information on the aging process (which, in the loss of bone density, is mimicked in many ways by spaceflight) and on how the elderly function in space.
The news shocked Jerrie—and immediately gave her new hope. Her dream of space travel, painfully relinquished as she got older and older, was not dead after all. If Glenn could be an astronaut at seventy-seven, so, surely, could she at sixty-seven. After all, she was still flying, while the senator hadn’t been at the controls in decades. If NASA was interested in research in geriatrics, who better than she to test? (She assumed this was a serious research effort. After all, in 1962 NASA said thirteen women were not enough, so surely now one man would not count as a test sample.) Friends started a grassroots campaign— Jerrie says that she initially found out about it on a trip home from the jungle to collect supplies—and she embraced the effort. A feminist pilot group produced “Send Jerrie” T-shirts, with a picture of a dimpled Jerrie in a 1962 flight suit superimposed on an American flag. The National Organization of Women circulated a petition demanding that NASA fly her. “Sexism was the
only thing that kept Jerrie Cobb out of space in the ’60s, and it cannot be allowed to stand in her way now,” said Patricia Ireland, then president of the organization. Friends of Jerries with political connections apprised First Lady Hillary Clinton about her dream. NASA received thousands of letters. There was considerable optimism in the Fly Jerrie camp, because a few years earlier NASA had been moved by a huge write-in campaign to restore civilian Barbara Morgan to the astronaut corps after dropping her following the 1987 Challenger disaster (Morgan was the backup to teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe).
But once again, NASA was not interested in the services of Jerrie Cobb. Goldin agreed to meet with her. “My hopes soared on that news,” Jerrie said. “I spent days and nights making notes.” At the time, she told reporters, “It feels so right. There’s some way to get this to come together. I’m going to get to go.” But after a brief conversation in his office in the gleaming glass Washington headquarters of NASA, Jerrie said the meeting was pointless, that Goldin gave no indication she would get the trip or how she could work for it. Through a spokesperson, Goldin praised Jerries achievements but said the agency had no plans at that time to fly another geriatric mission specialist. And Margaret Weitekamp, the historian who was then working from NASA’s history office in the headquarters, reports that the fly-Jerrie-Cobb issue was handled entirely on the level of public relations and never seriously considered at the administrative level. “It would be nice to be able to fly Jerrie Cobb as a consolation, but that’s not going to happen,” NASA spokesperson Jennifer McCarter said. The implication in her comment angered Jerrie. “I don’t want a joyride,” she said. “I have fifty-five years’ experience flying. I would be perfectly capable of handling any one of a number of jobs.”
The campaign came to nothing. Jerrie eventually realized that NASA had no more intention of allowing her to make this flight than it had in the 1960s.
Jerrie, more than any of the others, wanted to hear the promise implicit in Randy Lovelaces invitation. She believed as she excelled through his tests that she could achieve this as she had all the rest of her goals. But this time, she could not change the rules. She could not be first, or best. And it has cost her dearly.
Eileen Collins knows, as few other people can, what Jerrie missed. “Anyone who would do what these women did believed in the cause. They wanted to be a part of the mission.” But her voice grows a bit soft when she talks about Jerries ongoing struggle to “go up.”
“I wish I could speak to her,” Collins says. “Its probably not worth being desperate about. Its great to fly in space but I wouldn’t want anyone to fall on their sword, to cause themselves grief and anxiety over it.”
When two men from earth stepped onto the moon on July 12, 1969, Jerri Truhill was watching her television in Dallas, her husband, Joe, and the children all gathered around. She thought it was “fantabulous,” she confides, sitting at her kitchen table thirty years later and leafing through the yellowed press clippings she cut out the next day.
But as with every space mission, Jerri watched the moon landing with mixed feelings—just like the rest of the nation, she says, she was pulling for the men, and praying for them, hoping their mission would be safe and successful. And she was bitter.
Why?
She grows a little pensive at the question and leans back in her chair. Her pilot’s eyes, a little milky now, look off in the middle distance. She felt, Jerri says, as if she was the victim of something immensely unfair.
“I think all of us did,” she says. “If we had been given a chance and had failed, we could have accepted that. And I think that’s
the reason that Jerrie has—that we all have a resentment and a hurt and a bewilderment that we were not given the chance to compete on a level playing field. That’s all we asked for. We didn’t ask them to cut us any slack on anything. We didn’t ask them, because we were women, to grant us special privileges or grant us special favors—because we had children or were married or weren’t married. All we asked was a chance to prove we could compete on a level playing ground, in which case a lot of us would have made it. Some of us wouldn’t. But a lot of us would. I think that is the deep-seated root of the bitterness. That we weren’t given the chance to compete.”
These were strong, courageous women with enormous dedication to their country. They had a rare set of skills, and at the moment their country needed those skills (in small, tough bodies), they all stepped forward with an unhesitating willingness to serve. There is no way to know what they might have brought to the Mercury program or subsequent space exploration—no way to calculate what the United States lost by not including them.
Sooner or later, over cups of tea in their kitchens, in Michigan and Kansas and Arizona, the FLATs all come around to one point. Some of them are wry, and some still speak the words with rancor.
We were too good, they say. We were too good, too soon.