JERRIE COBB

space program cancelled plans to include women, Cobb prayed.
She reevaluated her thirty years of life experience and realized her
love of flying could serve humanity in another direction than outer
space.
The introspective Cobb was born on March 5, 1931, in Norman,
Oklahoma, to William Harvey and Helena Stone Cobb. The Cobbs'
first daughter, Carolyn, loved tea parties and dolls; Geraldyn,
called Jerrie, ran through fields, played soldier, rode horses, and
sat in trees.
Cobb's father, a colonel in the reserves, sparked her imagination
when he purchased a Waco bi-plane because he needed air hours to
qualify for a pilot's license so he could serve overseas during World
War II. Jerrie wanted to fly, but had difficulty convincing her
parents; finally they relented on her twelfth birthday. Pillows
elevated her so she could see over the rim of the rear cockpit of the
Waco which soared to ninety-two miles an hour. Later, when they
walked to the hangar, a lieutenant friend of her father gave Jerrie
a blue memo book with the pages divided into columns. The two
men joked about her "pilot's log," but she planned to fill up the
little book. Cobb recorded the hours spent sitting behind her
father.'
When she entered Classen High School in Oklahoma City, she
took on a new flying instructor, Coach J.H. Conger. In March,
1947, a barely sixteen-year-old Cobb flew Conger's Aeronca solo.
Her fledgling, but expensive, hobby consumed most of her
thoughts. When not in school, Cobb worked a variety of odd jobs to
earn an hour or more flying time on the weekend at a grass field
airport in Moore where Conger kept his plane. She rode an Okla-
homa City bus to a gas station in Moore where she purchased five
gallons of regular gasoline, then walked three-fourths of a mile to
the grass field where the Aeronca waited. After she logged her
flight time, she walked back to the gas station, left the gas con-
tainer, and caught a bus back to the city. Finally, on her seven-
teenth birthday, March 5, 1948, she received her pilot's license.2
Cobb struggled with the relevance of English, history, and math
in comparison to the beckoning blue sky. The only high school
activity which held her interest was softball. Cobb decided that the
semi-professional Sooner Queen softball team might be her ticket
to more air hours toward a commercial license.
The Sooner Queens chose Cobb as their first baseman. When
she took the news of her plan to her parents, her mother said she

373