Coachella Valley resident Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran (1906-1980), one of the most prominent aviators during the 1940s and ’50s, is said to hold more speed, altitude and distance records than any other pilot, male or female.
The enterprising and daring business executive, who made her home in Indio, was a pioneer in women’s aviation, setting numerous records and becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier, on May 18, 1953.
Cochran was also the wartime head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots in 1943 and 1944, which employed about 1,000 civilian American women. She was later a sponsor of the Mercury 13 women-astronaut program.
She was born as Bessie Pittman in Florida in 1906, the youngest of five children. The family, including 7-year-old Bessie, worked long hours in Columbus, Ga., cotton mills. The youngster helped baby-sit families, learning to cook and change diapers. (Cochran often claimed she was adopted and lived in a foster home, but that is not the case.)
She left home at about the age of 11 to live with and provide odd jobs for a family of six children, The mother owned three beauty parlors, and Bessie picked up the trade while working around the place.
In her posthumously published autobiography, she said she changed her last name to Cochran after searching a phone book and concluding that “it had the right ring to it.” However, other sources say that in 1920, when she was around 14 years old, she married a man named Robert Cochran; she soon gave birth to a son, Robert, who died in 1925. She divorced Cochran—but kept the name, and also started using Jackie/Jacqueline as her first name.
Determined and hardworking, she moved to New York City, where, using her natural charm and inexorable persuasion, she snagged a prestigious job as a beautician at Antoine’s exclusive salon at Saks Fifth Avenue. She alternately spent the winter seasons working at the Antoine’s salon in Miami.
In Miami, in 1932, she met a thin, clean-cut, freckle-faced blond man who took an interest in her. He was Floyd Bostwick Odlum, founder of Atlas Corp. and chief executive officer of RKO Studios (prior to Howard Hughes). At the time, he was reputed to be one of the 10 wealthiest men in the world. Two months later, he called her, and they began seeing each other.
By then, Jackie had developed a line of cosmetics, establishing her own company, Jacqueline Cochran Incorporated. She confided to Floyd that she had been thinking about leaving Antoine’s to go on the road to sell her cosmetics. He suggested that she get a pilot’s license to cover the territory she would need to cover, especially in the economic climate of the Great Depression. Cochran took flying lessons—and discovered her life’s passion, making her first solo flight only three weeks later. Within two years, she obtained her commercial pilot’s license, and later bought her own plane.
Odlum was an astute marketer who recognized the value of publicity. Calling her line of cosmetics Wings to Beauty, Cochran, with Odlum’s guidance, flew her own plane around the country promoting her products. By the 1940s, her products were being sold in department stores across the United States. She also became the American distributor for several upscale French products.
Odlum also took an interest in Jacqueline’s flying and provided financial and logistical support for her entry in numerous air-racing events. Jackie later said, “Every orphan dreams of marrying a millionaire, but I had no idea at first that Floyd Odlum was worth so much money.”
Jackie Cochran and Floyd Odlum married in 1936 after his divorce. Although in private life she was Mrs. Floyd Odlum, she continued to use her maiden name.
Cochran fell in love with California—especially the desert. She said: “It can be so beautiful. And so peaceful. Under the sun’s glare, deep colors shrink into pastel, and the limitless white of the sands merges into the grays, greens and purples of the sage, the desert holly, the yucca and the ocotillo, the mesquite and smoke trees. … I lost no time buying 20 acres.”
She picked the biggest hill in Indio and started building. “Eventually Floyd purchased close to 900 acres, and we called our property Cochran-Odlum Ranches,” she said.
The couple entertained numerous noted guests there. Its grounds were visited by many celebrities and famous friends, including Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon Baines Johnson; Eisenhower reportedly finished his memoirs while staying at the ranch. An especially close friend was Amelia Earhart, who reportedly spent several days relaxing at Cochran’s ranch prior to her ill-fated flight around the world in 1937.
The ranch is now home to Indian Palms Country Club & Resort on Monroe St. in Indio. The ranch house became the present location of the golf shop and banquet room. Cochran admitted, “God, there was a lot of my own sweat and blood in that ranch house.” It was a place where the over-achiever pilot and her over-achiever financier husband found they could relax the best.
Jackie Cochran’s prowess in the air was unmatched. Cochran was the first woman to land and take off from an aircraft carrier; the first woman to pilot a bomber across the North Atlantic (in 1941) and to fly a jet aircraft on a trans-Atlantic flight; the first woman to make a blind (instrument) landing; the first woman to become the president of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (in 1958); the first woman to fly a fixed-wing jet aircraft across the Atlantic; the first pilot to fly above 20,000 feet with an oxygen mask; and the first woman to enter the Bendix Transcontinental Race.
In 1948, Cochran joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant colonel. She was promoted to colonel in 1969 and retired in 1970; she received three awards of the Distinguished Flying Cross for various achievements from 1947 to 1964.
Cochran regularly utilized the airport in Thermal, which was established in 1942 as part of the Desert Training Center, which had been renamed Desert Resorts Regional, was again renamed in her honor in 2004 by Riverside County and is now the Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport.
On May 9, 1996, the United States Postal Service issued the 50 cent Jacqueline Cochran stamp, complete with a picture of her and the words: “Jacqueline Cochran Pioneer Pilot.”
Close friend Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, said about Cochran: “She was a remarkable person, and she was a competitor. You’ve got to be aggressive, and you’ve got to have guts to go out and get exactly what you want. Jackie got what she wanted. … Sometimes even she couldn’t believe what she had accomplished.”
Jackie Cochran died on Aug. 9, 1980, at their beloved ranch home in Indio that she had shared with her husband until his death four years earlier.
Sources for this article include Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography by Jacqueline Cochran and Maryann Bucknum Brinley (Bantam, 1987); Jacqueline Cochran: Biography of a Pioneer Aviator by Rhonda Smith-Daugherty (McFarland and Company, 2012); and Palm Springs Air Museum and National Air and Space Museum archives.